AWWL

We’ve lost something important. Our society no longer raises people to think about solutions or care for the community. We’ve become more focused on quick, personal escapes. We chase fast, limited versions of freedom instead of lasting change. Selfishness has taken root so deeply that our dreams have shrunk to making money and stepping on others, especially the poor and vulnerable. What many fail to realize is this: when we ignore the dreams and needs of the poor, they don’t just disappear. They’ll find their own way out of poverty, and it may not be moral or lawful, because we refused to fight for systems that include them. We talk like victims, but look around. Walk through your city. Count how many clubs you see compared to libraries or safe spaces for kids. Scroll online—notice how much content is about luxury, while so many children grow up in poverty. There’s more noise than nurturing, more distractions than development. What are we really offering the next generation? Kids aren’t even allowed to be kids anymore. Poverty shames them into growing up too fast. They feel pressure to make money just to survive, and the world around them teaches one clear message: just have money. We’ve all, even children, become slaves to money. They witness contradictions—educated adults struggling while unprincipled opportunists thrive, they question the value of patience, education, or ethics. They see teachers working two jobs while influencers flaunt wealth built on corruptions, loots, scams or luck. So why bother with school? Why grind for a degree when the “successful” adults they know are either broke graduates or shady influencers? They fear growing into adults who are invisible because they’re broke. Their role models have become those who make money by any means necessary. So they give up on school, on reading, on dreaming big in the right direction. Society teaches them early: money comes first, and with it, you can get away with anything. This mindset has become a pandemic. Young people feel they must prove their worth with wealth before they even understand their own value. Something has changed. Something dangerous. We’re celebrating surface-level success and starving our souls. If we don’t realign—if we don’t rebuild—we won’t just lose our future. We’ll lose our humanity.

Seems the human memory isn’t all that great after all…

I have read a lot of player tribune articles. And I think I pitched Victor on writing his own. The writer did a good job, but there's no way for him to know what's really like over here. To describe from the heart what that moment when your life changes feels like for a kid with a football dream in Lagos. No way for him to know what the option was. No way for him to see the pain of "Amokachi" my senior egbon in my area growing who was good enough to play pro but never made it. And what became of his life. Or my friend Femi who was picked but his forster aunt who is now dead refused to sign for him to travel to Villarreal and the pain he wakes up with every day knowing he almost had it. Now he reposts my WhatsApp statuses hoping to make a commission from a car. No way for him to understand that it's not just about becoming a pro footballer. It's about the option. What became of the millions who never made it. And why Victor and every Nigerian who got a pro contract while playing in Nigeria is a literal miracle. And not a miracle in the sense of "my life changed." A miracle in the sense of this was the difference between having a life and being just another dot in the world. Whose life never meant anything. The opportunity cost is what makes the difference not the dream itself. The writer did a great job. But if I wrote it, at the end, everyone will be crying not relieved. Because Victor could have literally been replaced with a million other kids in this story and they'll be in his place and he in theirs. It'll be a tribune to the million other kids who could be but never was.

@Mrpossidez 😊 thank you.

@AskWhyWithLola Poignant. Well said

You can’t think your way to awakening. At some point, the mind has to bow. To transcend your mind, you have to betray the voice that always thinks it’s right.

@Mrpossidez Exactly. It’s no less suffering because it not collectively recognized or endorsed.

Some might say this thing that is eating me up and has in fact eaten me up “is just in my head,” as if that makes it less real. Maybe they’re right. But what’s more real than the place where reality is processed?

@Mrpossidez So, we assume the opposite of light is darkness. If there’s light at the end then it must be dark in the tunnel. Maybe the tunnel is more about you and your reflection.

We speak of “light at the end of the tunnel,” forgetting that the tunnel wasn’t darkness. It was you, moving through it.

@tyewoolove Ìjì is storm

@tyewoolove Wind Is Atẹ́gùn Breeze is Afẹ́fẹ́

“Our Yorùbá intellectuals Rain is Òjò Sun is Oòrùn Moon is Òṣùpà Star is Ìràwọ̀ Thunder is Àrá Wind is Afẹ́fẹ́ Then what is rainbow……?”

I’ve been thinking about ecosystems lately. Not the biological kind, but the human ones we create around ambition, success, fulfillment. There are people who will lock themselves in a room for weeks, metaphorically or literally, if it means getting what they want. Hungry people. The kind who bet their time, their comfort, sometimes their sanity on outcomes that might never arrive. They optimize for maximum gain, even when the probability is unclear and the cost is steep. Then there are people who prefer peace. Stability. The known rhythm of a life that doesn’t demand constant uncertainty. They might have ran the math differently: the upside of the big bet doesn’t justify the downside of the sleepless nights, the months of uncertainty, the possibility of collapse. Neither is wrong. They’re different risk profiles with different definitions of a fulfilled life. The person who locks themselves in the room isn’t braver. They’re just optimizing for a different variable. Maybe it’s legacy, or wealth, or the feeling of having squeezed everything possible out of their time here. Maybe it’s the inability to sit still. The person who chooses stability isn’t settling. They’re optimizing too, for presence, for balance, for the kind of wealth that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet but compounds quietly in relationships, health, peace of mind. What interests me is how rarely we examine which game we’re actually playing. Most people never take the big bets, not because they lack courage, but because they’re optimizing for the wrong thing. They’re trying to avoid losses instead of maximizing gains. You end up playing defense in a game that rewards offense. You spend your life protecting a goal when no one is on the other team. But here’s the part that complicates it: what you can afford to be wrong about varies person to person. So does what changes everything when you’re right. If you have dependents, if you’re holding space for others who rely on your consistency, the calculation shifts. The locked room might not be noble, it might be selfish. If you’re young, unattached, and the only person who suffers from your bet is you, then defense might actually be the coward’s position. But what if stability isn’t playing it safe? What if, for some people, the locked room is the default, the addiction, the compulsion, the place they retreat to avoid the harder work of showing up for others, for relationships, for the slow unglamorous building of a life that doesn’t make for good stories? There are people who chose the room. Some of them built empires. Some of them lost years to obsession and have nothing to show for it but the lessons. I know people who chose peace. Some of them have lives so rich with meaning that calling it “stable” feels like an insult. Some of them wake up at fifty wondering what they were so afraid of. The game is finding bets where you can afford to be wrong, but being right changes everything. The trick is knowing what “afford” means for you, and what “everything” actually is. For me, it’s not about risk tolerance. It’s about what you’re willing to be wrong about in service of what matters. Some people can afford to be wrong about money but not about relationships. Others can survive a failed business but not a failed marriage. Some can lose years to a project, others need the daily assurance that their time isn’t being wasted. The real question isn’t whether you should lock yourself in the room. It’s whether you know what room you’re in, what you’re actually betting on, and whether the cost of being wrong is one you’re willing to pay, not because you’re brave or afraid, but because you’ve looked clearly at what you’re building and decided it’s worth it. I leave you with these questions, as I ask it of myself;  What are you optimizing for without admitting it ? What are you defending that no one is trying to take ?

That time when you can hear and watch has your thoughts flow like river, you become the silent witness to your mind. You smile to the silly ones and whisper quiet soliloquies to those that catch your interest. Then comes the silence, as you realize how precious this moment is. It feels peaceful, deeply you’re untouched by the lower frequencies of the world. You gaze into the void and wish this could last forever, because it so priceless, so achingly beautiful in its stillness. But it passes, leaving only a question: Can one live here?(Lola)

When confronted with environments like Africa, IQ maximalists expose their deepest bias almost immediately. I once asked an idiot in my mentions whether IQ is “highly” predictive of financial success in, say Nigeria, and the response was an instant but predictable retreat to population averages. Even instinctively, they seem unable to accommodate the possibility of a genuinely high-IQ individual whose intelligence has little correlation with the success that environment structurally permits. Despite insisting on paper that they are speaking about averages, the implication quietly becomes universal. The variance is only acknowledged linguistically but it has been conveniently erased cognitively. Rather than grapple with the delta between individual capacity and environmental affordance, they insist on general categories. “Average” is really just a proxy for essence if you listen to many of them carefully enough. Conveniently, they do not subject their own environments to the same scrutiny; the averages that flatter them are left uninterrogated. But of course, people who live truthfully and congruently with the world as imperfect as it is, know that a person can be exceptionally capable and still unable to convert that capacity into outcomes because the environment limits the conversion function. IQ does not override borders, sanctions, or immigration regimes if you’re unlucky to be born in a war torn country. It does not compensate for weak institutions, absent markets, or political instability. Yet instead of conceding that the relationship between IQ and success is deeply contingent and therefore not remotely universal they prefer to argue about why a nation is “the way it is,” as though that salvages the predictive claim. This is why one must never assume that the presence of statistical language guarantees fidelity to truth. Fidelity to truth is an ethical quality, not a function of empiricism. People who benefit from a distinction rarely have incentives to interrogate it honestly. Humans are remarkably adept at masturbating information into narratives that serve them. Humans, as Nietzsche put it, are all too human. This is also why it is dangerous if not arguably evil to discuss people ad nauseam as data. What usually begins as a supposedly neutral data point almost always becomes a totalizing signal. A person labeled 130 IQ (prolly even self labeled as these idiots can be so solipsistic) listening to someone labeled 100 IQ is no longer listening to understand; they are listening to interpret, retrofit and confirm what they already believe. The interaction collapses into a loop. Very little of value is produced for society as a whole. For this reason, I am perpetually distrustful of people fixated on temporal classifications of any kind unless within environments of honest research and learning. People tend to replace understanding with interpretation and these conversations are rarely about honest inquiry and truth.

Tell me.. after exploring selfishness, how you remember selflessness. I know, the distance between them was a story.

@OtitoNosike Thing*

@OtitoNosike Language doing its things… this’s kind of funny, but can you tell me what being whole means to you?

There is a quiet violence in telling people they must first be whole before they are loved. As if love were a reward for completion rather than a force that helps assemble us. Nobody arrives finished. We are shaped in proximity, not in isolation. The myth of self-sufficiency is just loneliness with better branding.

I hope we can find our point of neutrality within the world’s stimulations and accept our human condition. Yes, maybe unfair and uncertain, so much lies beyond our control. I hope we can learn to accept that and stop giving it our energy . There’re other things that moves only with our permissions, whether consciously or unconsciously… things that remain within our control, and we must take charge of them. Ignoring that responsibility can be dangerous to humanity.

Schedule your own solitudes so life doesn’t force you into isolation.

You know this already, but always hold it close that we’re are already born, and we will all die. Try to do something you respect in-between. Something life-changing, if you can. Something beautiful, if you dare. It’s your choice to make. Let no one take that from you.

This comment section is quite interesting. It’s funny how many people struggle to make space for ideas differ from the norms. Firstly, why do we assume talking everyday is a requirement? At a point, we were single individuals with our own lives, so why does a relationship suddenly means to merge our lives entirely? Does love require us to abandon the personal space we’ve cultivated, or parts of who we are? I mean a lot is putting our nervous systems constantly on survival mode, having a quiet time to yourself isn’t crazy, I believe. For people who love that way, that’s probably fine. But there are people who don’t, and I don’t think they love less or need to change.

That person is me. There’s nobody I want to talk to every day. And every time I’m in a position to do that, no matter how much I like the person, I feel choked/overwhelmed. Probably a red flag for many but to each his own.