KenyaOnAShoeString: Real Advice for Real Kenyans

We are obsessed with imagining what we would do if we were told we had only months to live. The bucket lists, the tearful confessions, the reckless adventures, the sudden confessions of love — they are everywhere in books, movies, and online articles. The message is clear: if death were imminent, our lives would transform in an instant. And yet, I have started to wonder: would they? I suspect that, for most people, life would continue much as it always has. Morning would come. Coffee would be poured. We would get dressed, commute, answer emails, check phones, scroll feeds, and repeat the familiar rituals of our days. Work would still demand attention. Laundry would still pile up. Small obligations would quietly persist, demanding their share of our attention. Even when faced with mortality, human life — mundane, ordinary, patterned — is astonishingly resilient. We have been told, so insistently, that our lives are miserable, boring, incomplete, that we are going about living “all wr...

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...

You are not as scattered as you think. You are living in a world that is deliberately designed to fracture your focus. From the moment you wake up to the moment you sleep, someone—or something—is trying to steal your attention. It’s not just on your phone. It’s in your workplace, your routines, even your efforts to rest or heal. This is not about personal failure. It’s about engineered distraction —systems built to keep us overstimulated, disconnected, and always wanting more. Let’s take a closer look at how this happens across different aspects of modern life—and what it really costs us. 1. The Internet: Where Attention Becomes Currency We often think of distraction online as a weakness—our fault for clicking too much, scrolling too long. But online spaces are designed to hijack your focus. The Architecture of Distraction Infinite scroll wasn’t invented for convenience—it was created to remove natural stopping points. Auto-play forces your hand before your brain has time...