I will rest in 2030.

Today, I read some essays on Substack, overthought my travel plans for Autumn again and drew a duck.

RT @JollyPaps1: I have two poems from my long prose poem sequence The Good Immigrant in the Ownership Issue of Magma. I was honoured to rea….

RT @DavidAlade__: “Life is lived in the arena. You only learn by doing. And if you’re not doing, then all the learning you’re picking up is….

RT @AMAZlNGNATURE: Wildlife photographer Sha Lu captures the perfect moment a small animal looks at the camera while being caught by a pred….

Been trying this for a week now. Stuck at the fingerprint capture. The app can’t seem to recognize my fingerprints 😣.

Is @adekunleGOLD Coco Money a play on words referencing the cocoa boom in Awolowo’s 1950s Southwest Nigeria, or am I overthinking it? 🙂‍↕️ Need to know nowww #Cocomoney.

RT @netflix: 9 years ago, the adventure began. Stranger Things 5. Teaser tomorrow.

RT @michaelinioluwa: Many people in Nigeria are fighting a losing battle with poverty. They are trying their best and working their hardest��.

RT @honeycaki3: i've not been getting as much as feedback as i want with this. today's a good day to help me change that. tell someone. 🫶🏾.

and you can’t make the money because all your time is gone. It’s a brutal circle, a trap designed to keep you running but never arriving. And somehow, you’re expected to stay hopeful, to keep pushing, to believe in a future that keeps slipping further out of reach.

It becomes a vicious cycle. You need time to make money. But you need money to buy back time. You’re stuck in a loop: to get your time back, you need money. But to make money, you need time. But you can’t get your time back without the money-.

You’re stuck in traffic after work, mentally and physically drained. So when do you apply? When do you update your CV or attend interviews? You need that new job to stop spending four hours in traffic, but you don’t have the time to pursue it because of the same traffic.

It is starving them of the possibility of a future that looks any different from the one they’re stuck in. Even if you decide to get a better job, maybe one with remote work or enough pay to afford Uber, you cannot.

Then, you wake up and do it all over again. This is not how the youth of any nation should live. This is not how financial freedom is built. Nigeria is not just wasting the time of its young people, it’s wasting their lives.

After enduring four hours in a sweaty danfo, crushed by bodies and heat, you finally get home, take a shower, and realise there’s no fan to cool you off. So you lie in bed, exhausted, scrolling through TikTok, watching the lives of better men, until you sleep off.

I will land in Lagos around the same time you get back home from work. Now consider this: you spend eight hours at work and nearly half of that time trying to get home. By the time you get in, there’s no electricity.

Four hours of your life gone, just to move from Lagos Island to Ogba. For context, London to Paris is two hours by train. London to Lagos by air is six hours. If I get on an Air Peace flight from London with just a two-hour head start-.

Many people in Nigeria are fighting a losing battle with poverty. They are trying their best and working their hardest in a country that feels intentionally designed to ruin them. You wake up early, work from 9am to 5pm, and then spend another four hours in traffic to get home.

Me taking a photocopy of my pure heart to the office at 4 PM

Because one day, you’ll find yourself doing exactly what you swore you never would; passing the weight of your loneliness to a child who didn’t ask for it.