The most annoying part of being a “grown-up” these days is how expensive mistakes are. The cost is your time, energy, effort, and even, gravely, your life. If you are like me, a Nigerian bred here, you probably whispered a silent God forbid to the ‘your life’ part.
The first time I realised how lonely adulting is was when I moved to Lagos on my own, with the hope that my life would change positively. How life laughed at my hopeful whimsy. I saw shege, the kind that pushed me into a place where I forced my nervous system to break because I just couldn’t ‘fail’. Moving was a hassle, there were warnings of potential hardship, but no one ever describes how hard the ship will be.
But I could fail, and get up a bit easier then than I can now because of how loud modern adulting has now become.
I suffered, but somehow I pulled through some of the darkest times of my life. I will write more about my Lagos experiences in subsequent articles to come. Back to the overstimulation part…
We are groomed in these parts to see the consequences of mistakes on the stakes of life and death. We are told there are no grey areas to adulting. They sing this anthem to you right from primary into secondary and even tertiary institutions, and how you have to make the right decision once you are an adult. But who really knows what is right all the time?
It is even harder now to make mistakes in the age where you have an audience, whether you like it or not – and now you are not just making mistakes, you are in front of a crowd of people who claim to know what right adulting looks like. And society is gradually forcing each and every adult into a complex web of comparison.
You now mirror life according to the standards set by unknowns behind a keyboard. You decide enough by how many likes you get. You smile at a photo only if it catches the eyes of hundreds and the likes of tens.
You are overstimulated, and you are over-comparing.
The dangers of comparison cannot be overemphasized in the age of unsolicited audience & communities, it is in the anxiety and silent panic attacks. Your nervous system is taking your hormones out of place, you then overwork yourself to meet up. …There is a pressure that defines your worth by how quietly you suffer and how loudly you succeed. No one is celebrating your process and attempt, everyone wants to align with how well you’ve done.
And that is the real overstimulation. The constant doubt on how you are living your life, if you are living according to a celebratory audience, whether you are doing adulthood correctly, to perform for an audience you didn’t invite and cannot see.
You are allowed to fail. You were always allowed to fail. Somewhere between Lagos and now, I forgot that a few times. Maybe you did too.
There is nothing wrong with making mistakes. There is something wrong with making them in front of a crowd that has already decided what “right” looks like — and calling that crowd’s noise your own conscience. Sometimes, the only way to reduce overstimulating your adulting is to define privacy in this loud internet era… and maybe you won’t have haunting mistakes that wake you up at 3am regretful.
Mistakes will show you shege, but how will you learn, ehn, adult!
