Hi guys, hope we're having a great day
So I just started my journey in UI/UX and I designed the interface for an hypothetical learning app.
Reviews are welcome
#OAUTwitter#uidesign@futureacademyaf
Thanks to FAA for their product design launchpad program.
Today, Children's Day.
A mother is somewhere wailing, and waiting for the return of her kid. An eight year old is wondering why his sister hasn't been home in days and why there's chaos in the family. A 2 year old is out there starving, suffering in the wild.
1...
Anything that takes God’s place in our hearts will quietly take over our lives. It will ask for more, cost more, and still never be enough.
Only God satisfies without taking from us what He didn’t first give.
Choose Him, again and again❤️
Coming to Jesus for money is as evil as coming to Jesus for supernatural powers. And they're as bad as coming to Jesus for better mental health.
All the above are false conversions. Prosperity gospel, power gospel and mental health gospel are all false gospels. Mental health gospel is just Gen-Z Prosperity gospel.
There is only one gospel and it is this: That the perfect beautiful God made creatures good and they became His enemies by choice. Though He ought to condemn and destroy them, He loved them so much that He chose to fix them instead.
So He came by Himself to remove what made us His enemies, which is sin and our wickedness. He took on the judgement we deserve so that we could live to be loved and not die. Then He fixed our hearts so that we could love Him and what is good.
And now we want to live for Him in riches or poverty, powefulness or not, mental health or not. We want to be well pleasing unto Him in all situations as we await His return when He will remove every poverty, mental illness and grant us immortality.
Before then, He grants relief in lack by providing. He heals and gives meaning in illnesses. He does miracles in and through us. But even when He doesn't, nothing changes because those are not why we came to Jesus.
We didn't come for the gifts. We came for the giver. We love Him with all our hearts and souls and minds and strengths. And we love nothing else. Nothing else can save but Him.
The true gospel leads us to value eternity over the temporal, union with God over this world, becoming like God over being comfortable. When you believe the true gospel, you will realise that anything temporal that is used to assure our eternity is a blessing to us even when it's uncomfortable or painful.
Babe, I know the other girl looks glamorous and she’s “everything” you aspire to be. But if you’re constantly looking up to her, it only means you’re always looking down on you.
Take a moment to turn that awe and admiration on yourself. You have your talents too, gemstones that glimmer. Sure, they could do with some more polishing, but just because they don’t shine like hers doesn’t mean they’re any less bright. With a little more tender loving, appreciation and attention, you’ll come to see just how much of a star you too are❤️
Personally, I think we should be okay with having a great conversation with a stranger and leaving it at that. Exchanging contacts isn’t always necessary. One of the beautiful things in life is being able to remember a good conversation with a random person and move on.
Let’s break it down:
They say, “If you earn ₦2.5 million a year, you should pay ₦250,000 in tax yearly.” But ₦2.5 million annually is barely ₦200,000 per month.
₦200k is not big money in Nigeria. Not in 2025, you’re poor.
Not with the current economy.
Now imagine you have two kids. Or let’s calculate for you alone sef
Out of that ₦200k:
•Feeding: Eating decently is at least ₦3,000/day → ₦90,000/month
•Transport: ₦1,500/day → ₦45,000/month
•Light (NEPA + service charges + prepaid): ₦15,000/month
•Fuel (just to survive through the darkness): ₦15,000/month
•Miscellaneous (medicine, emergencies, small school needs, data, repairs): minimum ₦30,000/month
That’s already ₦195,000 — and we haven’t even touched school fees.
We haven’t touched house rent.
We haven’t touched clothing.
We haven’t touched savings.
We haven’t touched unexpected sickness.
Data is extremely expensive!!
We haven’t touched supporting parents (because in Nigeria, your parents will still call you).
And those same parents? Their children, the ones they are calling, are also paying tax from their own small income.
So tell me:
Out of this same ₦200k salary, where exactly is the “extra” that should be taxed at this rate?
How do you train two children in a country where school fees are now touching the skies?
How do you survive when the cost of living keeps rising but payment structure is till terrible?
How do people “progress” when even breathing feels taxed?
The salary structure in Nigeria is not just broken, it is confused.
Earnings in this country are like adadabidi, unstable, unpredictable, nothing to write home about, yet the government wants to collect organized tax like the average Nigerian is swimming in abundance.
Instead of stabilizing the country…
Instead of improving the minimum wage… Instead of reducing the cost of food, transportation, and electricity…
Instead of fixing healthcare and education…
They jump straight to taxation.
Tax from where?
From the same people who are barely surviving?
Nigeria has never lacked resources, it has only lacked prioritization.
Before you tax people aggressively, create a country where people can actually live decently.
Do the bare minimum.
Make life livable.
Let people breathe first.
Because right now, nothing about this makes sense.
We are in hell
You know that sick feeling when your phone lights up and instead of “oh, someone thought of me” your whole body goes “run.”
It starts stupidly small. A friend texts “how are you?” You see it instantly. You think, cool, I will answer properly in a minute, I want to give them a real reply. Then work pulls you, or a tab, or a random thought. Ten minutes pass. Now it feels weird to just send a quick “good, you?” because you told yourself you wanted to be thoughtful. So you wait until later when you have “more energy.”
Later never comes.
Now it is three hours. Then a day. Then the message sits there like a glowing accusation. Every time you open your phone, your chest tightens for half a second when you see their name. You click into other apps around it. You answer emails. You comment on some stupid meme. You absolutely have the capacity to type. You just cannot make your thumbs move on that specific thread. Your brain turns one blue bubble into a live wire.
This is the part that nobody sees when they call you flaky.
From the outside it looks simple. “Just text back.” From the inside it feels like trying to walk through an invisible force field. The longer you leave it, the thicker it gets. At some point you are not avoiding the person anymore, you are avoiding the shame you feel about not answering them. You tell yourself they are mad. They hate you. They are talking about how unreliable you are. You rehearse apologies in your head like speeches. The more anxious you get, the more impossible it feels to just send “hey, I am alive, my brain is doing that thing again.”
So you do nothing. And the nothing eats your life.
Here is the part you do not have to be ashamed of: this is a very real pattern of anxiety and executive dysfunction. Your brain has tagged “respond to people I care about” as a high difficulty task. It stacks perfectionism on top of fear on top of guilt. It tells you that if you cannot answer perfectly, you should not answer at all. It turns kindness into an exam you keep failing.
You are not bad at loving people. You are stuck in a loop.
The loop goes like this:
see message - want to respond “properly” - postpone until later - time passes - shame grows - message becomes symbol of failure - avoidance increases - relationship feels threatened - anxiety spikes - more avoidance.
You do not break that loop with more self hate. You break it by making the smallest possible move that insults your own perfectionism.
You do not owe anyone a novel. Start practicing replies that are ugly and honest and short. Stuff like:
“Hey, my brain has been really jammed and I have been weird about messages. I care about you. How are you?”
Or even:
“I saw this and could not get my brain to answer. That is on me, not you. I am here now.”
That looks terrifying in your head. On the other side it reads as relief.
You can even pre-empt it with the people you trust. On a good day, when your nervous system is a little calmer, say something like: “Sometimes I disappear in texts not because I do not care, but because my brain freezes up and then I get scared to come back. If I go quiet, please know it is anxiety, not disinterest.” It feels vulnerable to say that once. It makes it a thousand times easier to send a tiny “thinking of you” later instead of ghosting out of shame.
Also, you are allowed to lower the bar for what “counts” as a response.
A heart reaction can be a response. A “listening, will reply more later” text can be a response. A 20 second voice note from the kitchen can be a response. You do not have to sit down at a metaphorical wooden desk with a candle and craft a letter every time someone asks how you are.
Right now your brain has rigged the game so that anything less than the perfect, fully present reply is failure. You have to actively disrespect that rule.
Try this as a tiny experiment: pick one person, one message. Set a timer for 2 minutes. In those 2 minutes you are not allowed to think about how late you are👇
You did not throw those years away.
You survived them in the only way you could at the time.
Fear and depression are not hobbies. They are full time jobs that never clock out. Most of the work they force you to do is invisible. Nobody claps when you get out of bed on year three of feeling numb. Nobody gives you a medal for “did not completely fall apart today.”
From the outside it just looks like “lost time.” Inside it was you hanging on by your teeth.
That embarrassment you feel now is actually a good sign. It means your head is finally above water enough to look back and judge the shoreline. When you are really in the worst of it there is no embarrassment, just fog.
A few things that might help you carry this without letting it crush you
Name what those years taught you, brutally specifically
Not the inspirational version. The real one.
Stuff like:
“I now know what ignoring my own anxiety looks like.”
“I know how far I can drift if I say ‘later’ for too long.”
“I learned which people vanished when I went quiet.”
This turns that time from “trash” into “very expensive data.”
Decide how many more years you are willing to give to fear
Could be “zero”, could be “ok, I allow myself one slow year to rebuild.”
Put a number on it. Out loud. Your brain takes numbers more seriously than vibes.
Even something like: “I am not giving my thirties to autopilot” is already a line in the sand.
Make one rule that prevents another blur of years
Not a whole new life. One rule. For example:
“Every day I must do one thing my anxious brain does not want to do that takes < 10 minutes.”
or
“Every month I must do one thing that moves my life one step forward on paper: send a message, book an appointment, apply, ask.”
This is how you rebuild trust with yourself. Tiny, boring, repeatable.
Treat depression like a broken bone, not a character flaw
If you really think depression was involved, that is not a moral failure, that is a condition. Broken legs heal slower if you hate them. Same for brains.
Talking to a therapist or doctor is not dramatic. It is maintenance. You already know that hiding it and hoping does not work.
Let the humiliation move through, not root in
When the thought comes up “I wasted years,” do not argue with it. Answer it.
“Yes, I lost time. And I am the one who gets to decide what happens with the rest.”
Shame freezes you. Honest regret can be fuel if you let it burn clean.
simple little script you can steal for yourself tonight:
“I lost time. It hurts. I am allowed to be sad about it.
I am also not done.
Tomorrow I will do one thing my old self was too scared or too tired to do.”
And then tomorrow, do something laughably small that fits that line.
Send the email. Open the document. Go for the walk. Book the call.
You did not miss your life. You hit a long, ugly pause.
The play button is still under your thumb.
You hit this realization in the most unglamorous moments.
Not at some dramatic breakup, not at a funeral, not in a movie scene where rain is perfectly timed. It happens when you are sick on a Tuesday and still have to answer three emails. When you are carrying groceries up the stairs and your arms start shaking and you think, for half a second, wow, if I dropped dead right here, these bags would still be heavy. The world would still be loud. The neighbor’s TV would still be on. Someone would still be double parked outside.
Adulthood is learning that your pain does not pause anything.
You can be falling apart inside and the calendar will not soften. The rent does not care. The job does not care. Your group chat does not care in the way you secretly want it to, which is that deep, attentive, “I can tell something is wrong, sit down, I’m here” care. People will care in the way they are able to. A heart reaction. “Omg are you okay?” A “let me know if you need anything.” Then they go back to their own life because they have their own stove left on, their own bills, their own private panic.
And that is the part that lands like betrayal.
When you are younger you have this hidden belief that there is a net. Teachers. Parents. Coaches. Someone with authority watching the field. Even if they do not understand you, you feel like your existence is registered. You can disappear for a day and somebody will ask where you were. You can show up quiet and someone will poke you and say “what’s wrong.”
Then you become an adult and you realize you can be visibly miserable for months and people will just assume you are busy.
It is not even cruelty. It is bandwidth. Everyone is running their own life like a leaking boat. They can throw you a towel. They cannot climb into your water with you. So you end up standing there holding your own bucket, bailing and bailing, and the ocean does not care that you are tired.
The show must go on is not a motivational phrase. It is a threat.
It means you are expected to be functional even when you are not okay. It means the version of you who is “responsible” gets rewarded, while the version of you who is honest gets quietly punished. It means you learn to smile in meetings while your chest feels like wet cement. It means you crack jokes at dinner while you are thinking about how lonely you feel. It means you become so good at acting normal that people stop imagining you could be struggling.
Then they say “I had no idea” when you finally break.
The most adult thing is realizing that people’s love is often passive. They love you, but they will not notice you slipping unless you make noise. They will miss you, but they will not chase you. They will assume you are fine because you have always looked fine. They do not check the corners of your eyes to see if you have been sleeping. They do not read your tone like they used to when you were teenagers and everything was shared and dramatic and intense.
Your sadness becomes invisible because you learn to hide it.
And once you realize no one is coming to save you, a different kind of grief shows up.
You start mourning the fantasy that someone will burst into your life at the exact moment you need them and say “I can tell. I’ve got you.” Sometimes that happens. Usually it does not. Usually you have to be the one who texts first. You have to be the one who says “I’m not okay.” You have to be the one who makes the appointment, fills the prescription, changes the habit, sets the boundary, leaves the relationship, stops the spiral.
Not because you are strong.
Because you are the only person who is there for every single second of your life.
There is a harsh freedom in that.
You stop waiting for permission. You stop hoping someone will read your mind. You stop building your life around being noticed. You learn to do things for yourself in a quiet way. You eat something real. You go for a walk even when you do not want to.
does anyone else get that sudden panic that you’re wasting your life ? like you want to build something for yourself financially but you literally have no idea where to even start. it’s such an ugly feeling.
Don't pray for protocols to be broken for you.
Don't pray for more lawlessness in our nation.
Pray that God will give us just protocols for the good every man. Pray that God will give us just officials to execute the protocols for the good of every man.
Stop praying for God to increase the chaos of our state. Stop praying for more iniquity in scales.
Pray that God will make us a more competent people. Pray that God will make us a nation where the most competent handle the most delicate things.
Pray for justice. Stop praying for evil. God doesn't answer it anyways.
If protocols of justice were undermined for you in our society, it was not God that answered your prayer. It was the broken system that happened and God is allowing you and the rest of us to endure the judgement for our evil desires.
The more protocols are broken for people like you, the more Nigeria will suffer and never progress to enjoy its allotment of common grace.