KPI Doesn't Care It's Flooding.
It's Monday morning. It's 7:13am and it is raining in Lagos the way Lagos rain has no business raining; especially because of the kinds of atrocities you guys are committing in this city. The sky has a personal grievance with us all and has waited specifically for today, for this commute, for the exact moment you stepped outside. Your shoe is already slightly wet. You haven't even gotten to work yet and something has already been taken from you.
Then you're in the car, in thick traffic on 3rd mainland bridge, and your brain has already started doing the thing it does every Monday - calculation. Rent. Electricity bill. Internet. Fuel. Food. The thing your mom mentioned last week. The goal you set in January that looked possible but the chances are getting bleaker by the day. You're doing math you didn't sign up to do early in the morning, in someone else's car, in the rain.
There's a version of adulthood that was sold to us. Go to school, get a degree, get a good job, build a life. A linear deal that made sense, right?
And in theory, it worked. Or our parents made it work. They told us it worked and we believed them because we were children and that's what children do.
But somewhere between then and now, the deal changed without a press release. We just started living this life and the numbers didn't add up. Everything has repriced itself into a different tax bracket while the salaries remained stagnant. Your parents owned a home at your age and you're calculating if you can afford to move out of theirs. People in their late 20s and early 30s; people who are educated, employed, capable, not lazy, not reckless are genuinely asking themselves: is this all there is?
And the honest answer is: we don't know yet.
The grind is real, but demoralizing. Getting up when you're tired, showing up when you're running on fumes, doing the work even when the work doesn't feel like it's leading anywhere specific. Just forward, just forward, just forward.
We were told that if you grind hard enough, the life you want shows up eventually. And maybe that's true. But nobody mentioned that the grind lives in the body and it sits behind your eyes at the end of a long week. Nobody mentioned that you can be doing everything right and still feel like you're running in circles. That the game can be rigged even when you're playing by the rules.
And still. We wake up. We order the Bolt ride. We go.
Because here's the thing about our generation that I think gets missed in all the discourse about us: we are still here, still moving, trying, laughing, building and finding reasons to show up. In a country that is not easy and in an economy that is not kind. We are not okay in the full sense of the word. But we are not done either.
We make it work with the group chats that keep us sane, the friends that split bills without making it awkward, the colleagues that make a difficult job a little less impossible. We grieve the version of life we thought we'd have by now, and then we get up anyway.
The machine doesn't care that it's raining. It never has. But we look out for each other in the rain, and somehow, that counts for something. If the math isn't mathing, I see you. If you've sat down to think "what is the point of all this?" - I see you, and it's more common than people admit, and you're not weak for thinking it.
May your coffee be strong, your Wi-Fi be stable, your account balance stand gallantly, and survive every unexpected debit until payday arrives.
Toodlesđź’•