How will you fare?
How will you fare?
How will I fare?
Have you ever explored the 'Download your Facebook data' option?
You will be shocked what you'll find.
Apart from the obvious contents you see daily [friends, messages, stories], you can see every request you ever got or sent, every like, comment, photo upload, tags, pokes, videos, responses, ads viewed. You can even see every search you ever conducted.
How does that make you feel?
Think about it. How much data you've released, posted to the world. Is it all joy and goodness?
Data rules our world. It is lucrative business. Every company worth its salt is going after data like a pack of hungry hyenas. For simple reason - to sell better, they must understand the demography and character of their prospective buyers. What better place to find out this information than the internet? Websites install cookies on your phone - track your buying habits, your preferred shoe colour, your dress style, your favourite movie characters - and soon, ads tailored to those exact topics are pushed your way.
Recruiters now turn to private investigation before reaching employment decisions. Companies have been known to thwart recruitment based on what they find. Like being haunted down by the ghosts of your past, posts of yesteryears can be dug up and used against you. 'The internet never forgets' they say. Celebrities have lost awards, suffered humiliation, passed through humiliation, based on seemingly harmless posts they made before.
Now imagine life generally.
If it's true [and we know it is] that every thoughtless deed, idle word, abuse, secret action, you ever did is stored somewhere, and may someday be used to determine your future...
...how will you fare? How do we survive it?
If there were some delete option possible for our acts of the past, most of us would frequent it. But is there?
READ: Matthew 12. 36-37; Luke 8.17
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Muffled cries
Muffled cries, pillow tears and secret pains.
How often do we cry when nobody watches?
Once heard the story of a man, Ben, who had nothing but one fish - Luke. Not poor, he had a good job but lived alone. Ben had lost everyone he ever called friend or family.
So every day, Ben got something for Luke on his way from work. On getting home, he would spend hours at the aquarium just watching Luke eat, jump and run around his little aquatic paradise. Used to fill him with so much joy. It would calm his nerves, relieve his pain, drain his thoughts. Sometimes Ben even talked to, sang to him…for as long as possible. He would report a colleague, share an idea he had, or just vent. Sometimes it looked like Luke could hear, cos he would stay in one spot only jiggling here and there. Other times, he really didn't care.
Ben loved him anyway, whether he was in the mood to listen or not.
One day, Luke didn't come up to play - at first. Looked like he was fixated on something at the floor of his abode, until Ben, in worry, shook the aquarium. Then he came up, only briefly, before returning to his business.
'Wonder what I did' the man thought, as he retired to bed that night. 'Did I say something, feed him too late?' 'I must have him looked at tomorrow.'
At midnight, the whole neighbourhood woke up to the sound of blazing alarms. There had been a power surge, which had, in turn, triggered power cuts here and there. In some places, the current went too low, in others, too high. As Ben returned to his apartment, silently grateful for the surge protector he had installed only last week, suddenly he remembered! He hadn't connected the aquarium. He had sent it for cleaning at the time and had made a mental note to connect when the aquarium was returned. But he never remembered, until now.
He rushed back in, and straight to Luke's corner…only to find the worst sight he'd ever see, maybe in his lifetime. There, floating lifelessly, was Luke, the one calamity of the power surge. You would think Luke lost a child…or did he? His cries attracted the neighbours, who rushed over to see what the matter was.
It was a painful sight. Everyone knew what Luke meant to Ben. You couldn't spend an hour with Ben without knowing all about his single most important possession in the world. Amid pats, gasps, encouraging chatter, and company, Ben just stared blankly.
Hours later, still crouched in one corner, all the mourners returned to their houses, as dusk gave way to dawn, all Ben could say was:
"Wonder if Luke cried out as the surge squeezed the life out of him." "Did if he shout aloud and I was too human to make out his cry." "Wonder if he knew and stayed close to the aquarium bed as the only SOS sign he knew."
Muffled cries, pillow tears and secret pains.
Soundless screams.
Silent agonies.
Bedtime sorrows.
How many of us walk around smiling but crumbling inside? How many have the appearance that we've got it figured out, but we are scared shitless within? How many of us are crying out desperately for help, yet none can hear us?
During those silent moments, scary times, dark nights, rainy days and sad periods, when the world is oblivious to our pain, who can hear us?
You know, if we had a way of letting out the harmful, murderous pus, we would.
But, mostly, we struggle for years, nursing the burning, hurting sensation as it travels through our veins, causing havoc, killing us one day at a time.
Wonder if Luke screamed at the top of his voice, yet nobody heard him. Not even Ben, whose attention mattered the most to him.
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Is the [Nigerian] Legal Industry stunted in growth?
The Nigerian legal industry is not growing.
What do you do about a child who looks and acts 12, but whose birth certificate says 40? How do you manage a situation where appearance and reality are stark opposites?
Medically, although the Stunted Growth condition is global in nature, it has a disturbing widespread presence in Africa. Could Nigeria's Legal Industry be suffering so much stagnancy and stunted growth because we think too much like lawyers? Sometimes we don’t follow the science. We follow the sentiment and buzz. We flock.
Stay with me.
There are job descriptions today that didn't exist 10 years ago. For instance, you couldn't be employed as a Social Media Manager, a Data Scientist, an SEO Specialist, a Coder, a FrontEnd Developer, a BackEnd developer, Full Stack Engineer, an Uber driver, or even a Legal Tech Advisor.
But we live in a different world today than we did in 2009.
When the #10yearChallenge hit the waves of social media many weeks back, I took some time to consider just what kind of time-capsuled pictures Technology would share if it joined the Challenge as a poster. Today, your iPhone is millions of times faster than the Apollo Computer onboard Apollo [the spaceflight that enabled the first men to land on the moon]. In a new world of the blockchain technology, geocoding, geotagging and data analytics, it's only a matter of time before our Salomon vs Salomon, Labinjoh vs Abake, Diamond vs Chakrabarty memories give way for current realities.
Still, our learning models, justice systems, legislative processes, electoral patterns, work habits bear 1980 tags - back there in the days of floppy disks, turntables and car-size TVs.
The Nigerian legal industry is not growing.
Perhaps we are hyped in our minds about the future and all its prospects, yet dogmatic with our laws, practice styles, job titles and work ethics. Maybe we are scared to take a step into the river for fear that we may drown. Are we stunted in our approaches, unwelcoming of newer ideas and suggestions for fear that we may soon become irrelevant?
And that is the danger of it all.
For, how do we handle a future we're unprepared for? How do we regulate an industry that's globally moved a thousand miles while we're still circling through streets of the Past, shuffling mountains of papers, battling hours of avoidable commuting, labouring daily to choose between having a life and a career?
The stunted growth condition is a medical anomaly by which the body continues to grow old, but stops growing up. It can plague an industry and can haunt a nation. It is like being stuck in the mud of an eternal present, while time mindlessly ticks away. Like swimming around in stagnant waters while rapping incessantly about what glory the future holds.
This post first appeared here on March 28, 2019.
Read some more of my writing here.
What makes Nigeria such a prayerful, religious nation, yet the World's Poverty Capital?
What makes us such a prayerful, religious nation, yet the world's Poverty Capital?
Please don't say SIN. Agreed, there's a peculiarity to the African brand of craziness, that you cannot find anywhere else. In fact, there's a Nigerian type of "mad" that we just own. But sin is not racist. It's not tribalistic. It is genderless, ageless. Everywhere else in the world, sin is deeply entrenched, widespread. In fact, sin is a definition of what one religion calls it or not. In the dictionary of faiths, sin has different spellings. It has been rebranded, redesigned, slim-fitted, force-fed, pumped up, trimmed down, refaced, reworded, fattened.
The point is, everywhere you go, there's a semblance of morality, a definition of rights and wrongs, a system of law and order…and those who flout them.
Don't also say "BLACKNESS". There are black communities thriving all around us. Countries moving from greatness to glory, jumping in billions of dollars, enjoying economic explosions and prosperity.
Do we have terrible work ethics?
Is it something with our culture?
Can we somehow link it to bad leadership?
What makes us such a prayerful, religious nation, yet the world's Poverty Capital?
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Living well is all that matters.
Living well is underrated.
Compared to the ancients who lived up to 969, 950, 930 years, our time here is pretty short.
Not considering recent drastic drops in life expectancy, somehow we've all informally settled the number 70 in our minds.
And if you take a moment to count your progress in 10's of years, it'll amuse you how many 10's you have left. This needn't scare you.
No. On the contrary, it needs to inspire you.
How are they looking?
Have you hurt someone?
Have they hurt you?Only one thing matters now - living well!