As we speak, I’m at peace, no longer scared to die.
That is the message that most of the Kenyan youth carried with them to the nationwide protest on June 25th. It marked a year after the country came together to reject a cruel financial bill, bent on stripping more from the common people.
I’m soaked up with emotions because we are supposed to be living in the best time in human history, but it doesn’t feel like it. Expectations are what Daniel Kahneman told us. They can dampen the effect of the outcome wherever the hammer of reality swings.
The more I read Jose Ortega’s book, the clearer it became. We are not set for progress. We still have decadence looming in the future. At this point, it’s not just my country. It’s the whole world.
A simple question for you: Who rules the world?
Pause.
I am certain that if I were to ask five people the same question, they would have different answers. Some will say Elon. Others will quickly say America. Russians and the Chinese will have different answers. Walk into the Vatican, and a completely different response is expected.
In contrast, 200–500 years ago, the answers would have been direct. Rome. Persia. Europe. Or its respective top leader.
Presently, there’s no sense of who is in control. Power has been diffused. Everyone is a master of their fate. Literally. Intentionally. Institutions have not been shaped to handle the numbers the world currently faces or its projections. So they will dump on you the spirit thick inside the heart of Nairobi — the hustle culture.
50 Cent will continue to rap about the concrete jungle, New York. If you can survive there, you can survive anywhere. The engines that built the city were not built to handle the massive floods of individuals who walk its streets.
In Kenya, students have boycotted seeking higher education because the returns have vanished. A degree is like a birth certificate. It only has your name and nothing else. It’s not a guarantee of employment. Meanwhile, you have an entire village on your back. How doesn’t a young man resort to cheap illicit to numb the pain?
Yet, as Bien sings, brighter days are yet to come. My intuition is telling me there’ll be better days.
I sit in silence and find whenever I meditate
My fears alleviate, my tears evaporate (mmm)
My faith don’t deviate, ideas don’t have a date
How will interactions evolve?
Aside from
and , I may be one of the most pessimistic people about AI. It sounds like a house of cards. Fancy from afar, but fleeting from weak support structures. One of my biggest issues with it is not so much about the promise its proponents crusade on and on about, but about its impact on human interaction.Airbnb already fragments communities. Landlords prefer their spaces rented out to business people willing to house different guests every day, provided the monthly rent is met. Their incentives align. Business booms. Human interactions become so fickle, so temporary, that nobody makes an effort to sustain them.
Ortega waxes lyrical about the spoiled nature of today’s mass man. We enjoy the fruits of civilization without knowing how to sustain it.
The clue lies in the word — state. A statesman represents their respective state. But state implies something static, an equilibrium. However, the state is suspended on engines that need regular and robust oiling. The cogs need to continue moving, or the state collapses. In contrast with its name, the state is dynamic. That’s why it can collapse.
Blindly, the residents of these states don’t recognize the Herculean task needed to preserve the peace or paradise that has never existed before in human history. The worry is made clear by the numbers that flood every space.
Hospitals are packed to the brim. Mama Lucy Hospital, for instance, has patients on its maternity wing sharing beds even after delivery. Roads have spaces packed with more personal cars than ever before, with the youth dreaming of having not just one but several cars, myself included. The air is thick with pollution, with hardly the right amount of filters to sustain healthy living in cities.
The idea should be clear by now. Maintenance demands active effort, but it is unlikely to be achieved with desired efficiency. Slums will continue to encroach on cities. The rate of respiratory infections may hardly decline any time soon; despite the heavy need for medical professionals, the burden will be heavy on the joints of the health care system.
Roads will continue facing more traffic. Online traffic is easily navigable, but heavy from one account to another. The internet will be rife with AI slop and sterile interactions. Automation will worsen our individually inclined lives.
The current youth haven’t taken an interest in the engines that sustain the present life they enjoy. A worryingly huge number want to be influencers. Eventually, the bow will break.
What’s jarring even more is that the perpetrators of this decadence are aware, but they don’t care. Let them eat cake is the song they play.
After fragmenting residential homes, the psychological tactics fragment attention. Social media is no longer social. Homes are no longer homely. Faces have turned into avatars. And everyone, in a rush to make money, passes the other in whatever little is remaining of human interaction.
I’m not a fan of AirPods. What is wrong with ambient sounds? Walks should be therapeutic. They spark ideas. But why should you shut yourself out while at it? You have gone outdoors, and still you lock yourself in. Companies will sell you noise-cancelling headphones. They have sold to the world that anything not audible from their devices is noise. And the world has been sold.
What happens to human interaction?
Let the pen glide:
But the only real change come from inside.
The real change does indeed come from inside. This becomes difficult if the ones who already sold to you noise-cancelling headphones are creating an artificial self of you that you’re unaware of.
A hollowness accompanies the constant doomscrolling and refreshing of pages. The hollowness deprives so much that it feels like there is nothing much to change inside. Isn’t that where the real change is supposed to come from?
Constant distraction prevents you from working on yourself. It prevents you from talking to someone else. It becomes burdensome to make friends. Better stalk them, go through their profile, and send a friend request, and forget about it. Is that what human interaction has decayed to?
I call it poison, you call it real, that’s how you feel?
It is a poison. The worst kind of poison is not like a bullet to the brain. That’s fast and painless. The worst kind is the insidious type, crawling into your mental real estate, converting your cells into a fatal fate, until it's too late. You know it’s too late when you know you could have acted on it.
You know you could have worked out rather than seeking the option of drugs to control your weight. Now you have to live with the side effects and dependency. Pain isn’t cheap.
Despite all this, my intuition is telling me there’ll be better days.
I’m not a fan of hope; I’m a fan of a good story
Hope is an admittance of previous failures.
Hope takes the locus of control away from us. It gives the power to something else, outside you, leaving you hanging by a frail thread. Hope is fickle. The thread can easily snap.
The alternative remedy is to inject some life into hope. Call it active hope. But that does not return the power to the individual.
No, I’m not a fan of hope.
I’m a card-carrying fan of a good story. Tell me a good story and I will listen. Participate in a story, and you would want to see it to the very end. Build a story, and you now have control.
A good story inspires courage among the weak. Who isn’t intrigued by the underdog who slays the beast? Or David, who defeats Goliath? Of Maximus Meridius Decimus when he defies the emperor? These stories remind us that when we’re down, we can sing:
I give up, I give in, I move back a little
I live up, I look up, now I’m back for more,
I still believe humanity is stronger than the forces geared to separate it. I am a witness to this strength. On the 25th of June, 2025, people from all over Nairobi marched into the heart of the city to defy an oppressive regime. The same year, on the 10th of August, the same nation united to see the defeat of the only African country to have reached the semi-finals in the World Cup, and two-time CHAN champions at Kasarani Stadium.
Human interaction can burst like the water from the stone after Moses struck it. Its potency is like the sting of a wasp; it lingers and pulsates. It makes you notice it when it flares.
I have even started a festival to foster human engagement, not the kind we see online. I’m referring to the type Orion Pax had with his friend, long before they parted ways, in Cybertron.
And thanks to outlets like
and Medium, I can voice my ideas without censure or red tape. Writing has become so regular that it immediately uplifts my mood even when I’ve had a foul day. It has evolved to become a drug and a weapon. Like Marcus Aurelius reminds us, the boxer should become one with the glove. I seem to have developed an attachment to the art.There is always something to write about. J. Cole raps:
Prodigal son, got a new gun, this one
Don’t run out of ammo, lately been working on my handles
And as long as I continue to read what others write and I write regardless of whether anybody reads, my intuition continues to tell me there’ll be better days.
By far, the greatest inspiration comes from my obsession with understanding life from an evolutionary lens. The story of an organism’s battle inside its universe continues to fascinate me.
This is the story of triumph in a universe that is almost dead. Almost. Regardless, life continues to persist in pockets that defy entropy, decline, disorder. This life has persisted for billions of years.
As much as decadence and separation are thick in the air, whenever I look at how the fungi survived with little water on land, on how plants created mergers with fungi to cross the damp oceanic barriers, how the viruses and spores lie dormant waiting the right time to spring to life, of the archaea that have been misunderstood in anoxic environments, of the blind naked mole rats as they create underground civilizations, of the bleaching ongoing in the ocean and the resolutely persistent coral reefs, and of the writers who have been empowered without conforming to ad-demands, then I know that there will be better days.
What I’m trying to say is…
I be a vessel for the truth until I’m barely breathing, I’m singing.
That is the message we get from life: from the microbes that rely on quorum sensing to begin their microbial parties, whether they wreak havoc or spark the formation of an organ inside the bobtail squid.
Switching up the institutions that led to our current state and preserving the wisdom of always improving these institutions will surely happen, because organisms don’t die easily. They put up a fight, from the feeble attempts to the heroic, legendary battles.
Clouds, when pierced by the straight, sharp sword of light rays, scatter. They don’t persist. And we need more stories. We need writers to write if not for others, then for themselves. They are not just writers, but readers. The writer is the first reader of their own work.
Movie producers write. Singers write. Historians write. Philosophers write. Kings and emperors like Marcus Aurelius write in our hearts and minds with the very words they once wrote when they were alive.
And as long as there will be writers, human writers, my intuition tells me there will be better days.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube