QUARTER LIFE CRISIS

Have you ever been asked about your net worth or value and musing over the question, you conduct a complete audit of yourself and realize you are in a financial bind. Then you feel like you are this morbid failure whose financial status is better off rendered insolvent or liquidated or in layman terms you are in an economic turmoil since you are operating on a deficit in relation to your financial spectrum that you envisaged would be earning interests as you make more for sustenance having invested in index funds in a tax haven country, say Belize, British Virgin Islands or Mauritius.

At my age, I feel like I have gone through a series of up and downs but having not achieved a well-defined financial path could just be the reason why this post has surfaced.

Allow me to say that I am a freelancer. This is a courteous word knowing full well that I am not attached to any company that can offer me a leeway to start a financial journey through offering my services because I have no income to rely on at the end of the month or day because of impulsive decisions that have caused this financial quagmire. As I write this, I am hopeful that this sojourn will be pro tempore. Failure of which I will lose respect in the eyes of society and even my current beau (feminine version). However, I am not worried, life is about going through those situations that help you in identifying a Mojo stance that will be unwavering in the long term. The folly of short-term ebullience that is characterized by petty triumph is that it is soon hobbled into redundancy if cogent contemplation is overlooked.

Indeed, I have learnt that easy come, easy go. That which comes without much sweat is like a lottery win. You have not adequately prepared for it, so you end up making decisions that are reckless and immaterial because the new found fortune knocked on the door that was at a limbo inside. Take for instance yours truly, I made one of the most fatal mistakes in life when I left my teaching job that even though was not well rewarding, but had the prospects of taking me to the next level. Am I regretting? Yes and No. Yes because probably, as at now, I would have been in paid employment and not having to be that guy who borrows money having exhausted all the savings I had made in my former job. And No because my former job exposed me to new skills and aura that is present in most workplaces where the employer feels entitled to treating you the way he likes because you are his employees. But I gained material knowledge of social media marketing, graphic design and copyrighting that may one day rake in some cash. Since such tools cannot aid in quashing my financial obscurity in the meantime, I have taken time off to concentrate on my studies. Luckily, I am buoyant that things will start sprucing up after plummeting for a while, sooner. Because the good thing about life is its unpredictability.

As a freelancer, there are many facets of life that usually give one the impetus over those who are tied to employment. You have plenty of free time that you can use to genuinely aid in making money or loafing around lolling in the milieu of your hodgepodge or in rare occasions use it to gain knowledge on how to be beneficial to the self or society through watching online tutorials or reading books or attending webinars or seminars that contribute to the same.

Ideally, I discovered this MOOC (massive open online course) instituted by scholarship giants Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) called edX. It has the ‘F’ word most people like and that is, it is Free of charge like oxygen. Yes, everything on edX is free apart from the fact that getting issued with a certificate requires a little payment at the end of the day. Indeed, learning has been liberalized. You get the best education from the best university at no cost and you can even land a scholarship to one of the Ivy League Institutions as the Mongolian wunderkind Battushig Myanganbayar. I saw him in a conference organized by World Bank where the institution was launching its maiden Open Learning Courses and realized how a global village the world has become. When you take up those courses, you need to program yourself to finish and have intrinsic motivation and discipline to complete. The setback is that MOOCs today are primarily serving the education haves, not disadvantaged learners. Why? You need internet which is far out of reach of many people especially those that could gain from MOOCs.

As such I can only imagine how MOOCs can be of help to the many hustlers who have a thirst for education but cannot find an avenue for gaining free education at the comfort of a click. If investors could realize that the future of a nation is incentivized through technology, they would ensure that more centres such as @ilabAfrica and @iHub are given more emphasis at the grassroots level so that more people can be able to gain an education in lieu of resorting to drug abuse and vices that destroy the moral fabric of the society. Sometimes when I look at the many hustlers who while away their time waiting for things to happen instead of making them happen, I usually empathize. Anyway, every other person knows what’s best for him or her. I am a firm believer that individual actions are sometimes within one's control. Except in incidences that are outside one's scope and as such they may be termed as macro influences. When I usually hear the stories of such individuals who I sometimes engage, I usually take an agnostic viewpoint.

Anyway back to my quarter life crisis, there are times when I usually feel like I made the worst decision to quit paid employment waiting for aggrandizement in the future in the event things go as planned, ceteris paribus. The folly of this is you never know when your bait will be ensnared and then these are there online jobs that are sometimes too good to be true. Of course there are those optimistically fabricated job ads that go viral on Whatsapp and any other group that has jobseekers will have such messages doing rounds on them. Sometimes the idle man in me dedicates time to go find out the authenticity of the job vacancies and the grim reality is that most of the jobs are cock-and-bull stories especially those that come clustered so you have an array of jobs to apply for. Methinks, most genuine jobs are those that are advertised on the mainstream media and a corroboration of the same is available on the company’s website or internal sources such as employees. Again, genuine employment agencies may help in efforts to verify the same. I doubt whether Brighter Monday is a better forum for searching for employment as they never have a contact and contract with the employer.

Looking for employment is tricky if you are not in one. You look desperate and can take anything most of the time. Just to make money. Then you come to realize that life is more than making money. And money is the root of all evil. If you live a life where you are not getting money from a reliable source like yours truly, then you cannot make plans bound by monetary decisions. The problem with money is that you usually spend it before you have it. Worse is if you are a low income earner. Being one means most of the time, you are left indebted and as such you cannot be able to invest in a substantial investment that can rake in more cash. You also have to work more hours or spend the same from and back home and this has a heavy toll on your mental and physical agility as you will find that most of the times you are exhausted to a point you cannot engage in an activity that will ameliorate your status. You subtly realize are subservient to your employer. He has the capital, which you need. Furthermore, if you have no pushers, you end up being frustrated by the bureaucratic systems you take up the easiest route. Which is the case mostly for a majority of the populace. Forget about those who went to study medicine finished and realized they loved acting. Those are extreme cases. They probably are sons and daughters whose fathers had an opening account for them at birth while you and I were born hohe hahe (with nothing). They make you think that you can pursue law and end up being a musician because you love music.

The reality is that, unless you become very cogent in your decision making and adopt a committed line of specialization, then you probably will remain that guy who wanted everything and got none. Why? There is a lot of dedication and sacrifices in each field. If you want to make a better musician, use education in any field as a backup so that you are not financially ruined. But the best education is that got through life experience. Not those that are certified at the end of the process. Those are just papers. Unless they secure you an avenue of having a big break or a small one, nobody ever knows you have them. They are like your groin nobody knows how it looks like until he sees it.

Life is about taking risks, the more risky it is the probability is that it can either result in a fatal loss to ultimately ruin you or a gain that will elevate your social status in the future. However the risk must be germane to what you aspire for in life. If it entails bending yourself into pretzel shapes to be able to get to the other side of the terrain, then do it. As long as it’s fun, and you have no other option, take up the challenge. Life is too short to live griping over that which you should have but you don’t in your current dispensation.

There are those times I usually contemplate of having a job seeker’s profile on LinkedIn. The amount I have to should spend is way above that which I can give a recruitment agency to write me an impressive resume and probably aid me in gaining an interview just to reassure myself that I am still competent and marketable in the job market. The amount though minimal is still not worthy of investing in such ventures. Furthermore, it delineates me from the process of finding a worthy employer as in the case of a recruitment agency. Like you promise to work for one month with a firm and someone else gets the proceeds all because they helped you get a job. But they say, ‘Hii ni Kenya, kila mtu lazima akule.’

One thing I realized is that there are so many employment opportunities available to people who user them as a conduit to make money or recruit cronies if the requirement of the duties and responsibilities are not very technical or specialized or not well defined. Like my old man told me of the infiltration of relatives of the seniors to positions they may qualify for or may not have qualified for thereby you hear of no vacancies in such organizations. The end result is that buggers like us take remnants in mediocre companies and if we work just fine, we can give such firms our best shot and this can form the foundation for success in the event we detach ourselves from the feeling of inferiority complex that you cannot work for a certain firm. Eventually such small firms perform best if you dedicate yourself and stick to the ideals if the owner never gives up. Chances are, you will reap big in future. This world is based on, ‘you never know’. Even a mustard seed is usually very tiny but its end result is unfathomable.

I also want to get there sometime in future. When I was young, I thought that life is about academics, passing exams and blah blah blah. Now my belvedere has been broadened. When I hear high-school graduates pondering on mainstream professions such as law, medicine and engineering in order to gain acceptance or reverence in the image of society, I usually feel like they are only after titles and the eventual benefits that come with such professions. Yet we have people who sell charcoal, lollypops (Like I saw one of my former pals in high school selling them on Thika road in the morning jam and imagined how others would have commiserated at his deplorable status. He passed in primary to join high school. You had to have scored 400 marks and above out of the possible 500. Then inwardly I concluded that the best hustle is that which you do with a passion. Who knows, if he becomes shrewd enough, he will be able to start a kiosk and we will eventually read about him on Business Daily’s Top 40 Under 40.)

Sometimes I wish I could also get the courage to go take up a job as a grease monkey in one of the many garages on Grogan and gain skills in the mechanical or electrical components of a car (I love cars). Or probably go to town, request whether I can push those carts for some pay at the end of the day just to get an experience with kanjo. Obviously there also those who sell smokies and eggs which is an easier job in comparison to the other two. These are the kinds of jobs that if you highly disciplined financially, you can be able to reap big because you are not tied to working for specific hours. You work based on the income you expect plus there no taxes since you have irregular income which is not steady.

Again, these are the kinds of jobs people associate with those they think are uneducated because they are done on the streets. However, nobody ever knows how polished those doing them are. Worse is people will start talking when you take them up and term you as a failure. Yes that is how our society is. While I am busy thinking of the fact that I am making myself a future without an elaborate income, some other person is taking advantage of the investment opportunity and smiling all the way to the bank of that which most people do not want to engage in.

However, our society is wired in such a way that no one will respect you when you are jobless and struggling to make ends meet. Guys will never tell you but the reality is that a jobless person is a pain in the ass. If you want to gain respect and acceptance in any society, make money and in colossal amounts. Our only idiocy is that we tend to regard highly those who fraudulently make the money and then remit pittances to us. All because we do not have an income to sustain ourselves or have to rely on them for monetary well-being.

  

As for yours truly, when I get a respite. It will be a beginning of another journey. One which should be on continuous progress till that time I will achieve self-actualization. In the meantime as I struggle with self-acceptance waiting for a rolla-coaster, allow me to sing Angela Chibalonza’s ‘Nataka nitoke chini.’

Hasta La Vista Baby.

[Picture Source: My Own]