
I have found serious inspiration in the song, “I Can’t Kill Myself” by Timaya. Why so? Because, it resonates with my principle never to put self-inflicted stress on myself, running faster than my shadow.
If we look at our lifestyles today, many of us are simply living a life that is discordant with our incomes.
First of all, consider a man whose salary is below 50,000. He rents a two-bedroom flat of 200,000, puts his children in a private school of 30000 per term or more and he probably has 2 or more kids. Pray, na wetin he dey find? No be palaver?
A young man and woman decide to get married after dating for a while. They are both salary earners with probably less than 200,000 between them as combined incomes. Now, the lady has probably served as chief bridesmaid to some of her friends in previous lavish weddings and decides hers must best all the ones she has attended. What happens? She puts pressure on her intending husband and they go soliciting and spending all they would have used to stabilise their home in a one-day event.
Consider parents whose incomes are fluid, especially as the business environment is very unstable or whose salaries are not regular, putting their children in high status private schools and universities which probably after the first year, they cannot sustain and from which those children would sadly have to be withdrawn to start a trip to the land of depression and frustration.
That’s not all. Why do we have so much desperation to grab even what we don’t need in this country? It’s because we have designed a life pattern for ourselves that was not based on a realistic assessment of our incomes and now, we can not retrace our footsteps as a result of pride and what people will say, so we continue sinking into needless debts until we conk out with a coronary.
We go abroad and are content to live in cubicles called houses, take the bus to work and generally work more than two or three jobs to pay our bills. But in Nigeria, a low income earner working just one job wants to drive to work and live in a flat, an average income earner wants a Jeep, live in a duplex and put his children in the most expensive schools in town while the so-called rich man wants to keep ten cars in his garage gathering dust, school his children abroad and keep a string of mistresses all demanding his financial attention.
So, at the end of the day, everyone is in a rat race, hysterically trying to meet devil bills, contending with rampaging wrinkles of stress and anger and living a life devoid of peace and contentment.
I am all goggled up looking into my crystal ball to fish out this week’s mischief makers. Happy Sunday to you all my friends.
HU🇳🇬