Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label modern life

Every Life Has Invisible Expenses

One of the easiest things in the world is to mistake an outcome for a story. A beautiful home. A thriving business. A failed marriage. A child in an expensive school. A forty-year-old with no savings. Someone who seems to have it all. Someone who appears to have fallen behind. We see the destination and instinctively begin filling in the journey. Hardworking. Lazy. Disciplined. Irresponsible. Lucky. Entitled. Deserving. Wasteful. Perhaps the most dangerous thing about human beings is not that we judge one another. It is how quickly we become certain that our judgment is correct. Because every life has invisible expenses. Not just financial ones. The kind that never appear on a bank statement or a résumé. Some are chosen. Some are imposed. Some are wise. Some are costly mistakes. Most are a complicated mixture of both. One person reaches middle age with very little savings because they spent years paying school fees for younger siblings. Another because they repeatedly made poor financi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Defining Enough in a World Without Limits

There is something quietly fascinating about the human body that most of us rarely stop to notice. It knows how to stop. Drink water when you are thirsty, and at some point your body says “enough.” Not in words, but in feeling. You lose interest. The urge fades. Continuing becomes uncomfortable. Eat fruits or vegetables, and the same thing happens. There is a natural point of satisfaction. You do not need to negotiate with yourself. The body simply signals closure. Sleep works the same way. You cannot sleep indefinitely. At some point, you wake up rested or restless. Either way, the system resets itself. Even movement has limits. You can walk, run, or exercise—but fatigue eventually arrives. The body enforces balance without needing instruction. In many of the things that are good for us, there is a built-in stopping point. But modern life is not built the same way. Some of the most common experiences today do not naturally tell us when to stop. Scrolling does not end. Entert...
Post a Comment
Read more

Our Attention Is Finite

Our attention is finite, yet we spend it everywhere but where it matters. This is not a moral failure. It is a structural one. Attention economics is the idea that in a world overflowing with information, human attention becomes the scarce resource. Whoever captures it, holds power. Over time, this has reshaped not just markets, but inner lives. What we notice. What we ignore. What we can tolerate. What we can no longer sit with. For a long time, people warned that television would rot our brains. In hindsight, television looks almost generous. A show required you to stay for forty minutes. A film asked for two hours. A detective story invited you to notice details, to remember names, to hold multiple threads in your mind at once. You watched. You followed. You waited. Listening to music meant staying long enough to learn lyrics. Reading meant sitting with confusion until meaning arrived. Writing a poem meant wrestling with language, not skimming it. Even boredom had a purpose—it ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Kind of Basket Are We Carrying?

We are often told not to put all our eggs in one basket. The saying is usually offered as financial wisdom — diversify your income, your investments, your risks. But somewhere along the way, we did the opposite with our emotional lives. We consolidated. We placed our need for connection, understanding, intimacy, companionship, and belonging into fewer and fewer baskets, until in many cases, there was only one left. The romantic partner. The spouse. Sometimes the nuclear family. And everything else became secondary, suspect, or threatening. This did not happen accidentally. It happened as life became more fragmented. As communities dissolved. As adulthood became increasingly solitary. In the absence of inherited social structures, romantic relationships were asked to carry what entire villages, extended families, and friendships once held together. One basket began to do the work of many. At first, this felt efficient. Romantic love promised intensity, exclusivity, and meaning....
Post a Comment
Read more

The Disappearance of Normal Adult Companionship

There was a time when companionship did not need to be searched for. It was not something you worked at , scheduled weeks in advance, or justified with a reason. It existed quietly, built into the structure of life itself. In many Kenyan communities, companionship was inherited before it was chosen. People grew up among the same faces, attended the same ceremonies, worked the same land, worshipped in the same spaces. Marriage did not scatter people; it anchored them. Women married into homes where other women were already present—sisters-in-law, neighbors, age-mates—often navigating the same stages of life at the same time. Men remained near their childhood friends, their brothers, their cousins. Friendship was not curated; it was ambient. You did not have to explain why you were visiting. You did not have to perform usefulness. You did not have to be interesting. Presence was enough. Companionship was not a special category of relationship. It was simply life unfolding alongside...
Post a Comment
Read more

Impatience With Our Own Lives

Elif Shafak writes, “human beings exhibit a profound impatience with the milestones of their existence.” The words struck me immediately, not because they were new, but because they were painfully familiar. We live lives measured in moments we can’t wait to leave behind — rushing through what should be the very chapters that make us who we are. We rush past childhood longing to be grown. We rush past adolescence, eager to claim adulthood. We hurry through young adulthood, anxious to “settle down,” to earn, to succeed, to arrive. Even in the middle of life, we chase the next milestone: promotion, recognition, wealth, recognition again. And when we reach the later years, we wish away the in-between, mourning what we should have noticed along the way. Milestones are meant to be markers, not destinations. They are pauses in the flow of life, signposts meant to help us orient ourselves, not finish lines to sprint toward. Yet we have cultivated a culture in which patience is undervalu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Everything Feels Like Déjà Vu: On Novelty, Numbness, and the Speed of Modern Life

There are days when I wonder whether the writer of Ecclesiastes was onto something when he sighed that there is nothing new under the sun . At the time, it must have sounded like resignation. A philosophical shrug. But lately, it feels less like an ancient lament and more like a modern diagnosis. I keep finding myself suspended in a haze of déjà vu — not in the mystical, life-has-a-hidden-meaning way, but in the weary, haven’t I seen this before? way. Books that once thrilled me now feel like rewritten copies of each other. Music releases sound like echoes of echoes. Cinema has become a carousel of remakes, sequels, and universes. Even ordinary experiences — a restaurant, a holiday, a new trend — seem to come prepackaged in familiar shapes. It’s not that people have stopped creating. It’s that everything is arriving so quickly, and so often, that our senses no longer have time to recover. We are being fed variety in form but sameness in spirit. Modern life accelerates experience ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Truth Knows Where to Hide

Everyone says they want the truth — until it disagrees with them. Then suddenly it’s fake news, bad energy, or “a hater.” We love truth the way we love kale smoothies: in theory. It looks noble from a distance, but up close, it tastes like discomfort. The truth is elusive because it knows where to hide. It’s been studying us for centuries. It knows we get defensive, that we protect our pride like property, that we prefer a comforting lie to an inconvenient fact. So it hides in plain sight — right behind the thing we don’t want to hear. We live in an age where opinions travel faster than facts, where outrage is a national hobby, and where every WhatsApp group has at least one self-declared expert. The internet was supposed to make us wiser, but it just made our arguments louder. You can Google anything now — except humility. Truth has learned to adapt. It used to live in libraries and classrooms, but now it’s forced to rent space between conspiracy theories and motivational reels. It...
Post a Comment
Read more

Popular posts from this blog

The Great Kenyan Home Ownership Madness: Dreams vs. Reality

Owning a home is a big dream for many Kenyans, but somewhere along the way, practicality has been thrown out the window. Too many people, driven by childhood aspirations or societal expectations, are constructing massive houses only to end up living like misers within them. Let’s break down why this trend makes little sense and what smarter, more sustainable homeownership looks like. The Harsh Reality of Owning a Big House in Kenya Many Kenyans, especially those who grew up in humble backgrounds, grew up being told to “dream big.” Unfortunately, this has translated into building unnecessarily large houses, often with rooms that remain unused, multiple verandahs gathering dust, and massive balconies that no one actually sits on. These houses cost millions to build, yet within a few years, the owners are struggling to maintain them, regretting their choices as they pour more money into renovations. If you need proof, just look at how many old houses in Nairobi remain unsold. No one wants...
4 comments
Read more

Daniel Arap Moi — The Shadow and the Shepherd: A Deep Dive into Kenya’s Second President

If Jomo Kenyatta was the founding father, Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi was the long-reigning stepfather — sometimes protective, often punitive, and almost always enigmatic. He ruled Kenya for 24 years, the longest of any president to date. To some, he was the gentle teacher, Mwalimu , who kept the nation from tearing apart. To others, he was the architect of a surveillance state, a master of patronage and fear, the man who perfected repression through calm. This is a portrait of Daniel Arap Moi — not just as a ruler, but as a man shaped by modest beginnings, colonial violence, and the hunger for order in a chaotic time. Early Life: The Boy from Sacho Daniel Arap Moi was born on September 2, 1924, in Kurieng’wo, Baringo, in Kenya’s Rift Valley. He came from the Tugen sub-group of the Kalenjin community. His father died when he was just four. Raised by his uncle, Moi’s early life was marked by hardship, discipline, and deep Christian missionary influence. He trained as a teacher at Tambach ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Know Thyself: The Quiet Power of Naming Your Nature

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl Jung We live in a culture that equates good intentions with goodness, and ambition with ability. But very few people in Kenya—or anywhere—truly know what they are made of. We can name our qualifications and our dreams. But ask someone their vices or virtues, and they hesitate. Worse, they lie. The Danger of Self-Unawareness In Kenya today, many of us are wandering through life making choices—big, small, and irreversible—without truly understanding who we are. We end up in jobs we despise, relationships we shouldn’t be in, or positions of influence we aren’t emotionally or ethically equipped for. And at the root of this dysfunction is a simple truth: we don’t know ourselves. This is not a spiritual or abstract dilemma. It’s a deeply practical one. To know oneself is to understand your vices, your virtues, your weaknesses, and your strengths—not in a vague sense, but in detail. Let’s ge...
Post a Comment
Read more
🥤 Buy Me a Soda