When Did Being Young Become a Productivity Project?

There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with being in your 20s in Kenya.

You are expected to have a plan.

You should be looking for a good job, building your career, starting a side hustle, saving money, investing, maybe thinking about buying land. If you are lucky enough to have a decent salary, someone will remind you that you should not be wasting it. If you are not earning much, you are reminded that you need to work harder.

And somehow, everyone seems to know exactly what you should be doing with your life.

Your friends are posting their new cars. Someone you went to university with has started a business. Another has moved abroad. Someone else is getting married and having kids. Your cousin is talking about buying a plot. LinkedIn tells you somebody your age has just become a manager.

And you start wondering:

Am I behind?

So you make “I’ll enjoy myself when I’m financially secure” the rule, making you spend your entire 20s waiting for a finish line that keeps moving.

Maybe being young means allowing yourself some things that don’t have a measurable return.

Take the trip.

Go out with your friends.

Fall in love.

Learn something because you enjoy it, not because it will improve your CV.

Spend an afternoon doing absolutely nothing.

Visit your grandmother.

Go to the beach even though the money could technically go into your savings.

You can be ambitious without being consumed by ambition. You can support your family without making your entire identity “the responsible one.” You can save without refusing yourself every experience. You can want a better life while still recognising that the life you’re living now is also your life.

Because eventually, the future you were working so hard for becomes the present.

And you don’t want to arrive there having become financially successful but emotionally unfamiliar with the person you were before all the hustling began.

Here’s some books and there questions they help us answer…

We Need New Names — NoViolet Bulawayo

It could help you ask: Why are we always imagining that the real version of our lives exists somewhere ahead of us?

The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born — Ayi Kwei Armah

What happens when society measures a person's worth primarily by what they have acquired?.

Nervous Conditions — Tsitsi Dangarembga

What if the very things we believe will liberate us—education, success, money, status—can also become the things that distance us from ourselves?.

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