Kitu unataka si utry
— Nyashinski
Many people die at the age of 25 and are buried at 75.
This phrase has stayed with me for years. How can the depth of such truth be summarised in so few words?
Marinating at the back of my mind, the reason started to take form. Now I think I know why. This is a different kind of death. It’s not where the heart flatlines on the telemetry. This death involves ambitions and dreams.
When chasing dreams, any barrier that stalls momentum creates a version of death. Sometimes, the death is not intentional or immediate, as we see in medical drama series. This is the kind of death that’s insidious in its onset. It’s not even death by a thousand cuts, as that has a sharp edge to it. This one strangles your heart’s vessels slowly, narrowing the vessel’s aperture imperceptibly.
This type of death has a single cause — debt. Let me explain.
Debt
Debt, however you look at it, and as popularized by economics, can be a good or a bad thing. Say you want to start a business. Your calculations project future profits. After a few years, you’d have serviced it and have built your business to continue serving you. That’s good debt.
From a statistical point of view, reality follows a different script. It’s never always as it’s projected in our minds, the most complex organ in our known universe. Or from our calculations, using math, the universal language. Failure to repay your loan on time incurs charges. Auctioneers. Debt recovery bureaus. Fallout with friends and family.
Low moments in life, such as these, can have anyone give up. The world was ready to squash you, but you placed your bet on yourself. And now that you’re neck deep in debt, the easiest thing to do is give up. The will to fight has been shackled to the ground. You can’t throw punches. The forceful impact of your fall did not generate enough energy to bounce you back. In fact, it cracked open your rock bottom, creating a new rock bottom to your previous rock bottom.
That’s the awful side of debt.
The flipside is you cannot get a chance to be extremely rich without leverage. Debt is one outcome of financial leverage. The other is a complete overhaul of your life.
David Graeber has discussed the origins of money, which all have their roots in debt. Money serves as a promissory note, telling the one you hand it to that you owe them. They believe that the person who owes you will pay their debt. The circulation of money relies on trust. This kind of debt is widely distributed. The primary distributors of these notes are usually not to blame, and so trust is circulated. Trust builds and preserves economies. Dwindling trust destroys economies.
Consider when the stock of a major company starts to plummet. Owners will begin to lose faith and trust in the company. The instinctive action is to sell your stock before it becomes worthless. A vicious cycle. And this is the lesson in debt — vicious cycles.
When your anticipated outcome contrasts negatively with reality, you may begin to lose trust in yourself. When all hope seems lost, you are closer to giving up than dusting yourself to try again. This is the situation that people find themselves in when in debt, now not the financial kind, but with respect to your dreams.
Suppose you wanted to become a pilot. Despite having the brains to achieve this feat, you don’t have the capital to take you to flight school. Every year, you watch as your dream gets more distant. Responsibilities continue to pile up. They get more attention than your dream. It should be you flying, but your dream is the one that flies further from you every day. The greater the distance between you and your dream, the greater the debt. This is expressly what I call living in debt.
Life feels hollow.
After getting a job, routine work feels like a hungry crow, stripping flesh from your body. Your job pays your bills. But you have no sense of purpose. No project to call your own. No drive. The reason is that you’re living in debt.
Debt is the distance between your original goal and reality. Anyone who actively services this debt is purposely trying to create a manageable dream-reality balance. That is, they are trying to infuse their dreams into reality, deliberately.
Then there are those who feel like work is a drag. Whenever you feel as much, you try to create a balance between work and your life after work. Thus, the idea of work-life balance was formed.
Anyone who doesn’t feel work is draining would never think of their work as a balance with their life. Work becomes their life. Dr. Dre can count the number of days he has not stepped into the studio before and after he started making hits. Pharrell Williams understands this kind of passion because he relates — he is living it. These are two icons who are not living in debt. Their work operates like a flywheel. Hours at work fuel hours outside work, which, if well planned, fuels hours at work. The momentum builds to such a high that when one releases a project, the energy packed into it is felt immediately. The ones who operate on these dimensions feel alive.
Those who don’t feel dead.
Why? Debt.
Consider a phenomenon such as audience capture. A young adult may feel that they can influence massive crowds on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok. They begin to make videos. Mukbang videos, for instance. One of them goes viral. They use the metrics and feedback to curate something similar. However, they discover that by making more of these, they are not tapping into who exactly they believe they are. What the audience gets is a fake version of them.
Stuck in the vicious cycle, breaking away would mean losing your audience. Audience capture 101. In this distraction and attention era, for influencers, that is the most visible signal of debt.
In The Boys, the “superheroes” are so fearful of Homelander that they are willing to do anything to please his ego. Fear drives their actions. Living perpetually in fear is synonymous with living in debt. They don’t know when they will be the next target of the mercurial Homelander. So the versions they project are distanced from their honest versions. Debt. They had died long before their actual death.
The example from my profession is evident every time I talk to my colleagues. They feel like medicine is a scam. Someone cheated them. They slave inside a hospital and get paid peanuts. Worse, when they see how much politicians are paid, they wonder what they did to deserve this harsh reality. Much as they would have you believe, unless one really — REALLY — wishes to save lives, becoming a doctor is not a calling.
As they try to break away, they get hit with comments asking them why they would quit a course they have sacrificed close to a decade for. So rather than break away, which is what they could have done, they pursue their masters in the same profession. Debt slowly begins to creep into their lives.
Today, completing your graduate training in medicine or surgery is not a guarantee that you will get a job. Worse, the pay you will be given may be at odds with what you feel you deserve. Now this is debt taking a voraciously active form, throwing jabs at your plans, steadily mounting into frustration at its worst.
The urge to please and chasing extrinsic motivators may begin to nurture a necrotic centre inside you. The further you deviate from chasing your dreams, especially when those close to you don’t see its merit, the more debt you create. This is how those who are in their mid-twenties begin to die a slow death.
And misery loves company. Those living in debt take comfort in the fact that others are also doing it. Evolution teaches us that social proof is reliable proof. There must be value in doing what every other person is doing, even if it does not sit right with you. Once inside this rabbit hole, it becomes difficult to leave. It’s like Dane’s prisoners’ pit, where Batman struggled to escape multiple times in futility. It summons all your courage to exit it.
So Nyashinski urges:
Kabla tudie,
Kitu unataka si useme
Kitu unataka si upewe
Kitu unataka si utry
The clue lies in discovering that it’s a form of balance one tries to create.
The cell, the basic structural and functional unit of life, always tries to create a balance for it to continue surviving in its niche. It serves you better to ditch the work-life balance and start focusing on the dream-reality balance. Even if you don’t achieve this reality, you would die while chasing it. What’s more, you wouldn’t feel dead inside, which is the result of the debt most people continue to pile inside them.
Those who service this debt by focusing on their dream-reality balance can even factor their current work as motivation to chase their goals. Like the transformers, it has to align with your core and spark you to act, to literally transform yourself.
What usually stings is that there will always be crowds waiting for you to fail. Recall that misery loves company. They will pinpoint the moment when you started failing, as if they had the roadmap. Logically, it means they could have helped you avoid this point if they wished. The conclusion? They don’t have a roadmap or blueprint. They don’t know how it will go because life, like our world, is complexly adapting.
Hindsight and root-cause analyses are usually the biggest blind spots to complex systems, and yet they are the most readily embraced factors. But this in itself should not discourage anyone from getting into this debt I have described. It should encourage. It means whoever creates reasons why you may have failed in your endeavour will more likely be wrong. That should absolve you from listening to anyone who thinks your goals are not worth pursuing.
True, some goals can be crazy. The only thing I can say you should consider is the laws of physics. If they don’t defy the laws of physics, then your goals should be attainable.
George Mack calls it high agency. I call it servicing your debt.
A rapper like Nyashinski knows what it’s like to chase your dream. He chases legacy. The strong urge to become legendary. So when he says, “Ambition pekee ndo najua,” he means that as his dream takes form, a dream that is always evolving, he has to service that debt. Money comes, sometimes, but it’s not the primary goal. He reiterates this in several songs. Notably, in this particular song, Tunnel Vision, when he raps:
Si kitu nafanyia doh
Kaa ingekua hii math haingekua inamake sense to me
When it comes to money, servicing your debt can be painful. In contrast, when it applies to chasing your dreams, servicing your debt thrills you. What tends to dampen this fire is reality’s demands, like bills and responsibilities. These are the kind of people who are not merely alive; they are living. They are living in debt by servicing it. Pleasantly so.
I mean, where, pray tell, will you find a chance to service a debt that you control? A debt that you enjoy servicing?
What I’m trying to say is…
When you continue to accrue debt by delaying your ambitions, you deny yourself and the world of your creative ideas. The graveyard is considered the richest land because it hosts many unrealized dreams, but I prefer looking at it as the most debt-riddled land.
You can actively work to reduce this debt or let it accrue and sink you into a death-like abyss, while you’re still alive. Nobody is coming to save you. Debts are paid individually. Kabla tudie, let’s go debt-free to the other side.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube