17 July 2024, lots of thoughts!

17 July 2024, lots of thoughts!

This blog post is an attempt both to express my thoughts and to get them straight about a number of issues that have been on my mind and also a number of videos I have watched recently.

PS: I wanted to write the following PS about my previous post: In addition to what I wrote before, I think that my true dream for marriage and life in general is quite self-indulgent, but I feel quite unapologetic about that. In short, I want to enjoy myself. You know what, I was also thinking that actually I also want to live my own life and strive after my own dreams and working to my own potential rather than primarily being someone’s mother. But I definitely would love to get married though. So what my heart truly yearns for in marriage is having fun, spending time with my husband, having deep emotional intimacy and also having a cheerleader. Honestly, these days when I dream of my marriage, what I dream of is sitting together all dressed up in restaurants, talking and joking, laughing, eating. Not necessarily very expensive restaurants, I will never subscribe to the idea of spending money for the sake of spending money but I imagine us laughing, joking, teasing one another. I want to say tongue-in-cheek that I hope that he does not also have needs (because we will likely use up all the time taking care of my own needs) but of course the point of marriage is to cater to one another’s needs. Perhaps what would be useful would be if he and I had exactly the same needs. This is the kind of real talk that might be difficult for someone to admit because you don’t know how other people might take it, when you say “Actually I would quite like to live for myself!” but it is also the kind of thing that people need to be honest about before entering into a relationship. Honestly, I would love to find a husband who wants the same things. Here’s a thought though – even if I did find such a husband, and we embarked on such a marriage, it might happen one day that in the process of “cuddling” I might get pregnant. And then overnight you need to switch from the unapologetic self-interest of getting your needs fulfilled to the selflessness of motherhood. Or perhaps, God forbid, one day, something were to happen to your husband so that he is no longer in the place to fulfil your needs but you rather need to become his carer. So even the most unapologetically self-indulgent marriage needs to be built on a solid foundation of selflessness. And you need to make sure that you truly care for your spouse and you truly can sacrifice everything necessary for him – and vice versa. You need to regard him and the marriage not just as your longed-for soulmate from whom you will request all your needs, but also someone to whom you can give everything that he also needs, no matter how much of a sacrifice it might represent, potentially on a long-term basis. And that tension between getting your needs met v making big sacrifices is embedded into the very nature of marriage so it is something that you need to embrace right from the beginning. As I write this it occurs to me that many relationships fail because people have failed to embrace this tension. Many people enter into marriage for the sake of getting their needs met. This is not inherently bad, of course. But then difficulties arise when unexpected sacrifices are requested of them, perhaps when their spouse asks them to pull their own weight with the kids or perhaps something even weightier is required of them.

You know, I think that it is possible to love someone, to hold them in high regard, to respect them, to love spending time with them, all the same without being able to sacrifice for them. Being able to make big sacrifices is a specific skill and mindset, that actually, goes beyond character. A deeply sacrificial attitude is something that needs to be cultivated and practised, and committed to. It is all the harder because it is so countercultural in our days; society seems to glorify making the best choices for your self-interest, and “putting yourself first”. In fact, many YouTube videos now openly advocate for women to put themselves first, and learn to be selfish. No matter how many such videos I have watched, I have never been able or willing to embrace that mentality. I guess my Christian upbringing is just too strong. I think that learning to be selfish too is the wrong lesson to take from a selfish world. I think that we just need to be more careful about the people we allow ourselves to be selfless for, and to vet them for reciprocity. In an actual marriage, I think that it is necessary to regularly practise selflessness and a sacrificial attitude, even if we would both prefer to live a lighthearted, carefree life. I think that one such way to practise such an attitude would be by regularly volunteering together, regularly taking ourselves out of the ease and comfort of our lives to serve other people. This is all the more true if and hopefully when God has blessed us with financial abundance. I am completely committed to a life of simplicity and that is one of my criteria for my husband, that he should be equally committed to this too. Going out to eat at affordable restaurants and getting dressed up for it is the one way I envisage spending money. All the same I am working hard on business ideas. When these bear hopefully bear fruit, they will then afford a life of relative ease and comfort, even for a couple or family who are committed to living simply. For instance, being financially stable will free someone from the mental distress of having to constantly worry about money. That in itself is a luxury which would set someone apart from most other people. Volunteering, or otherwise rolling your sleeves up and getting your hands dirty, is a way to keep grounded and to keep in touch with the reality of what life is like for many people.

So anyway, all that was a post script to my previous post!

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Writing this all offline!
So! The last couple of weeks have been a little negatively “interesting” in my life. Nothing to worry about, it really is something small, in fact almost inconsequential.
A little backstory: A few years ago, I was living in Edinburgh, Scotland. I was living with flatmates, and for some reason we needed to take out a broadband package, or possibly change from our existing provider. And I put out a call on Facebook, just a quick post to garner opinions about what people thought about a certain provider. And someone used very strong language to communicate that he would never go near them ever again. His phrase was that he would rather “sh*t bricks” – so yeah, that was quite graphic, and that was enough to persuade me to avoid them. That provider was TalkTalk.

Well fast forward to today, or rather a week and a half ago. Now living in London with family, I practically live online, and I use the internet constantly. We were very happy with our internet service, until approx – it was the day after Labour won the election that the trouble started. We’ve got a huge smart TV which we never usually watch, but we decided to use it to watch the UK General Election coverage. That was fine, we watched it, celebrated, yes we are a Labour household! And I thought to myself “Well since there is a huge TV here, why don’t I ever use it?!” So the day after, I watched a cheesy rom-com. (It was called “You may kiss the Bridesmaid, in case anyone cares! It is such a cliché to call rom-coms cheesy, but it genuinely was cheesy. Prime Hallmark. These people know their market, and they know that that is what people love! Visually gorgeous scenes though.) So that was fine too. Until the next time I wanted to watch the TV, just a little while later. And it said that the internet was not working. Strange I thought, but it had always been intermittent before. I fiddled around with it a little, then gave up. After that we did manage to get it working a few more times. I forget the timing now but I also watched a documentary about US grannies who play basketball. That was deeply life-affirming and such a lesson about not writing anyone off, or jumping too quickly to conclusions about anyone. And then at one point I think that the TV seemed to stop working altogether. But because we never use it, I thought that was just the way it was.

And then, between us one of our laptops stopped connecting to the internet. I confess that I was not really that bothered because my own laptop was fine. I continued working away for perhaps a day or two, wondering what was wrong, but glad that my own laptop had escaped.
And then to my shock my own laptop also stopped connecting to the internet.

A day or two later we finally got around to calling our Internet Service Provider. Because we had never needed to call them before we had to do a little research regarding their number.
Turns out that our broadband contract had been sold… to TalkTalk. Firstly, it boggles the mind that your ISP can sell your contract to another company without your knowledge or consent. I am the kind of person that puts considerable research into broadband companies, because I need good reliable service. If I had known that they planned to sell us to TalkTalk, then I would at least have started looking for an alternative all the way back then. That said, the contract was not with me, there is not a small possibility that they did send notification but it was not noticed or read…

Secondly, even though it must now be well over a decade since I was considering TalkTalk back when I was in Edinburgh, their service is as bad as ever. That first day we finally got around to calling our ISP, we were transferred to TalkTalk. A very helpful customer service rep helped us with our query, and after being on the phone to her for over an hour, thankfully we we able to get the internet restarted on all our devices. Problem solved, I naively thought. Literally within an hour or two the internet connection had dropped, only to come back on shortly afterwards. And that is how it has been intermittent ever since. It will come on for a few minutes, then it will drop, then it will be back on for a few minutes. It seems to be more off than on, at a solid ratio of about 8:2 off versus on. I have just checked my phone history and that phone call was on the 10th July. Today is the 18th and that has now been over a week. Actually over the course of the phone call we were discussing whether to look for alternatives. Over the course of the week we have decided which alternative provider to go for so hopefully that will be sorted soon.

I honestly don’t understand how companies can consistently provide such poor service, and yet remain in business. I know that TalkTalk targets the budget end of the market. Is this what people have to put up with, just because they cannot afford anything more expensive?

I’m a little cross at myself because just a couple of days ago I renewed my mobile phone service. I had been planning to go for a large data package this month to tide us over until the new broadband service was installed (I have been tethering from my phone data a lot over the last couple of weeks when the TalkTalk broadband has been down.) Unfortunately, I need to renew my mobile package online and in the moment I was so focused on getting it done before the internet service dropped again that I completely forgot that I was planning to go for the bigger data package, and I instead got the same small package as always 🙁 That is a sermon in itself.

Reflecting on this whole experience, I considered that this is the way infrastructure works. Thankfully with a broadband package it is relatively easy to sign up to a different provider, at least in the UK, if you have the money. However there are some things that you simply cannot change very easily by yourself. If a piece of critical infrastructure breaks down in the local community, I do not have the resources or the capability to go and fix it by myself. My father is a chartered civil engineer, although he has never practised since being in the UK. “Engr”, short for “Engineer”, used to be a common, recognised prefix for names so we used to get letters in our home to “Engr Ojumu”. He would know what to do to fix broken bridges etc, but even he would not automatically have the resources to just go and fix something, even if he did know what to do. Additionally you need permits and authorisation etc etc so an enterprising individual could not just go and fix a problem, even if they did have the resources to do so. As an aside, my Dad’s area of specialisation is water engineering. He got his Masters in the UK which involved going to UK water treatment plants. He absolutely refused to believe me when I told him that UK water companies were pumping raw sewage into rivers and seas. According to him it is absolutely impossible for this to happen because they have different systems Tosin, Tosin you would not understand because you are not an engineer! According to my Dad, what an engineer means by “raw sewage” is not what a layperson would mean by raw sewage. What an engineer calls “raw sewage” would still have gone through sufficient levels of treatment before being released. I tried to tell him that the people making these reports are not chartered engineers like him, but rather laypeople like me. I also told him that people have taken video footage, showing actual solids, but no, he flatly refuses to believe it, “Tosin you should not believe every report you see! If that was true, by now lots of people would have died!” – and that was the end of that!

All of this attests to how implausible the situation is that we are currently in in the UK. Who would ever have believed that in a country as developed and as advanced as the UK, we would ever get into a situation where something so literally unbelievable would happen, and routinely too? That is one example of infrastructure that a single individual, even a group of individuals cannot necessarily change by themselves. And yet there are so many more. People are starting to say that the UK is turning into a third-world country. (For the US, many US citizens are saying that the US is already a third-world country, just “wearing a Gucci belt”.) And it is this kind of thing, this erosion of basic infrastructural expectations that makes the third world the third world, the kind of thing that individuals cannot change but have to live with, and have to be constrained by, no matter how educated, determined or hardworking they are. So, many educated, determined or hardworking individuals simply leave. People often think that Africa is underdeveloped because of lack of educational opportunities. But my parents are both highly educated individuals from Africa and there are many, many others like them, both within our country of Nigeria and across the whole of Africa. The UK is obviously also a highly educated country but that does not stop the fact that our infrastructure is crumbling around our ears. In a country we are all highly dependent on one another, and we are especially dependent on the people in power. What is truly killing the UK is what has long hindered or “killed” Africa: greed, corruption, cutting corners. Some people will unbelievably put their own interests above those of a whole population, even in such simple and basic matters as keeping our seas and rivers clean, and they will be allowed to get away with it!
How ironic that as many people like my parents have long migrated out of Nigeria and other developing countries, many people are now talking of leaving the UK now too. This is an example of a certain Bible verse in action: Proverbs 14v34: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” For a system to function reliably people need to act with integrity and reliably, consistently do the right thing in jobs both great and small. I have previously noted that many systems will tolerate a small amount of corruption, and still keep thriving. This is true of a human body if for example there is a wound, a tree if a branch is sawn off, a nation. However when there is a large amount of corruption, or when there is systemic corruption through the whole system, then the whole system will not truly thrive but will likely stagger along until it cannot do so any longer, when it will eventually collapse, or shut down, that is, die. Is this not what we are literally witnessing before our very eyes in the UK?

I can’t help noting that the collapse of the UK system coincides with a decline in faith. I am not advocating “religion” for its own sake. I myself have largely rejected what passes for “Church” in our days (although I currently do attend a small church). For the UK, I believe that a strong and sincere historical belief in God in the country was reflected in a general commitment to integrity which allowed the country to build robust infrastructure. Conversely, there is plenty of faith in Nigeria, but Nigerian Christians seem to focus more on being blessed than demonstrating genuine Christlike character. Because of this corruption flourishes unchecked in Nigeria, instigated often by the very people who claim to be Christians.

I’m sure that with a decline in faith most people would still subscribe to being a good person. But would they truly go above and beyond to insist on truth? Would they put their own necks on the line unless it is absolutely necessary? I know that with water companies there would always be people who are willing to stand up to do what is right, or blow whistles, regardless of faith. What, however, if it is something that is not quite so much a matter of life and death, where you have to perform a balancing act between doing what is right, and placating your conscienceless manager to keep your job. What would you do? What do you think the majority of people would do? Lack of integrity often allows people of poor character to rise to the top in the first place, where previously they would be shunned, as people start to value “what works” over “what is right”. I mean, look at Donald Trump. So over time, quality, reliability gets eroded across different services. People and companies just lie outright. Even reputable companies that you would have expected to act reputably. When you put all this together, this amounts to an “enshittification”, not just of broadband services, or literally of the seas and rivers, but also of several different things in daily life. People say that they have performed checks which they have not done, or they say that things have reached levels which they have not reached. All of this leads to poorer and poorer services for end customers.

Going back to my broadband struggles, having regular reliable internet allowed me to build projects online. That is what having regular reliable infrastructure does. It allows you to build services and offer them, plan for the future, reliably expect that things will work, confidently offer promises to your customers. In short you can build prosperity. However, in the absence of strong infrastructure many people would simply not bother. I have had to type this article out offline where ordinarily I prefer to type straight into my blog program. However, the fact that I am typing it out at all attests to the fact that I currently am not able to work on my internet projects which is what I would be doing as my first choice.

You know, as I have been writing this it occurs to me that having a well functioning country system must be the exception rather than the rule, considering human nature. We take it for granted in the West of our times, but throughout human history outside of small villages and collectives, in large cities it has probably been the case that the rich and powerful casually tread on the poor and defenceless. That is probably the default which every human system and society will default to if allowed to do so.

So my Dad came in as I was writing this and I told him that I was writing about him, and so we had that conversation all over again! Yep, he still does not believe me. I asked to take a video of him talking so that I could transcribe it accurately, but he declined…

“Remember to put it there that your Dad is a water services professional and he was trained in this country so he knows the rules!”
When I explained the overflow system to him as I understand it, when companies are allowed to release sewage straight into the sea in times of flooding to prevent it flooding back into people’s homes, he laughed. “Whoever wrote that and you believe it Tosin, was telling lies! [Their systems] only allow water to flow in one direction!” “But what if those systems fail?”They can’t fail!
Anybody who knows what it means to be a water engineer will be wondering why his daughter is writing this!”

While my Dad and I have disagreed on this one subject, I need to reiterate that by the grace of God he is an outstanding man and a genuine exemplar both of Christian sincerity, and Christlike character, and always has been over the course of my entire life. He is the one who set the bar so high for me in terms of what to expect from my husband. In case you think I am only being loyal, well, I cannot say this about everyone in my family. He is also a brilliant engineer, and if only all other Nigerians were like him, Nigeria would probably be the greatest country on earth.

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Other thoughts:
Not respecting does not amount to automatic disdain. Just because someone’s character has failed to win my respect, that does not mean that I automatically have to give them disdain. Character is just one aspect of someone’s humanity. Even if someone scores absolutely zero on character, like Trump, for instance, they are still human beings made in the image of God, deserving to be respected by virtue of that alone. What if I learned to treat everyone with kindness and consideration regardless of their character? What if I considered character simply as a measure of how close I can allow myself to get to someone, or how vulnerable I can allow myself to be to them, but I resolved to treat everyone with kindness regardless, never saying anything bad about them. You know, as a Christian this should be obvious. However, I have never previously worked this out. No-one has previously explained to me and furthermore, I have experienced very high levels of nonsense from other people which many other people have not experienced. So, many people cannot truly talk about these issues or I would not naturally listen to them because they have never really experienced these sorts of things to the sort of extent that I have done. So I essentially had to work this out for myself. So this is now my determination, and it is something that I need to practise until it becomes natural.

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Not using prayer to try to get people to do what you want: actually this is akin not to prayer but more to witchcraft.

You know, it recently occurred to me that prayer is not about trying to get people to do what you want. I’d like to make it clear that I have never to my recollection done that. The idea of using supernatural power to get what you want is actually closer to witchcraft, and worshipping the devil, through worshipping yourself and your own desires, than worshipping God.

True prayer to God is not about trying to get Him to do what you want. Rather it is about making yourself a vessel for Him to do what He wants to do. True prayer is about submitting our own desires to God and asking Him to grant us His desires and a desire to obey His desires.

So then, when we are truly praying in line with God’s will, rather than trying to assert our own will, we are trying to see His will come about. So when we are praying for other people in line with God’s will, then we should be praying for our friends to live in line with God’s will, to tell themselves the truth, to obey God. Even if someone truly does that, they might still legitimately choose not to do what you want – and that is OK, of course. In a romantic context, if for instance you are romantically interested in a man, and you are praying that God would grant you a relationship with him, I don’t think that it is wrong to pray to God that He would make it happen, as long as you truly remain open to what God actually says and does. However, when praying for the man specifically, then I think the most important thing is to pray for him to truly be holy and close to God, and to make decisions from that place of closeness to God. Even if a man chooses against you, if he truly is close to God and walking after truth, then hopefully you will still be able to talk and be kind to one another.

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If a man truly loved you…
I was recently watching a video on how to know that a man truly loves you, and actually, watching that video pretty much did my head in with all the exceptions and “Yes, but”s that occurred to me. So the video basically said that “If a man truly loves you, he will be very determined and enthusiastic in chasing you.” And I thought “Yes, but…”
He might truly want you or be attracted to you sexually, but that does not sincerely mean that he loves you, admires you, respects you or intends to marry you. Or he might sincerely want to marry you, but not because he loves you, respects you or is even sincerely attracted to you. It might rather be because you fit the profile of a woman he thinks that he can use, manipulate or control.
That is, it might be that he is looking for a woman to use, even in marriage. Or he might truly want you, love you and respect you, right to the point of marriage, but that does not necessarily mean that he is a good person, or the kind of person that you would want to be attached to for the rest of your life.

Storytime: let me tell you the story of a man I romantically evaluated a few years ago. Disclaimer: I always try not to reveal who I am talking about in my different unflattering accounts, but I am sure that the men in question can easily tell that I am talking about them. However, hopefully no-one else can.

So there was this man that I was evaluating. And to be candid, he was tall, dark and genuinely handsome. And deeply involved in his church. And I could not believe that he was single, and I was quite eager to find out why. This was also the era of the Big Work Crush which I wrote about here on the time, so I thought that if I could deflect feelings at the Christian guy instead, that would be great! Well, it so turned out that he was quite interested in me, that is, in extracting lots of value from me. I don’t mean sexually, and absolutely nothing romantic happened between us, other than we went on a few meetings which were not explicitly specified as dates but which would ordinarily have been understood as dates. In that church, it seemed that they saw dark-skinned women not as full human beings to be respected, but rather as resources of free labour to be exploited. Or perhaps it was because I showed such a deep level of commitment to the church that I made myself seem that way. Perhaps it is easy for me to sit here in judgement, but perhaps the issue is that I can’t fully understand the financial pressures that exist within a church, where there is never enough money coming in, which might coerce them into exploiting whomever seems to make themselves (herself) available for exploitation. So I believe that I fit that man’s profile because I was was already older and very single, and thereby presumably romantically desperate. And to extract full value from me, he had to feign romantic interest in me. Honestly, I believe that he would truly have married me, if I had allowed him to do so. Not out of sincere feeling or regard, and definitely not so that he could reciprocally serve me, but rather so that he would have had someone to control, manipulate and use for a lifetime, knowing that my Christian commitment would have made me reluctant to divorce him. Some people don’t necessarily need love the way others do. So for them, “love” then becomes a tool to use to take advantage of other people. They can afford to do this because they don’t seem to need the real thing so they have no qualms about embarking upon what is in truth a loveless marriage, it does not cost them anything. They pretend to love, of course, and it is in that that they aim to control their partner, by witholding their fake love or releasing it as punishment or reward. And yes, this man purported to be a Christian, and held significant positions within that church. And this was supposedly a good church, which made the whole thing all the more disappointing.

Thankfully I saw through him quite quickly and eventually left that church, and took all my free labour and financial offerings with me. And please believe me that I gave a lot of both. And come see how that man called and sent emails to try to get me back into the church. Once, he even went as far as to apologise! If a golden goose which laid golden eggs just upped and walked out of your life I’m sure most people would desperately try to get it back too. You know, I have often asked myself whether I may have judged him too harshly. But reflecting on various ways he behaved, and his general demeanour, no, no I didn’t. And behind a facade of righteousness and holiness his pastor was just as bad to me. In fact, if anything, it was because of the pastor that I left that church. So this is me not saying anything bad about anyone…unfortunately with this story I have no choice but to relate exactly what happened. This is not even a detailed explanation. Church people might say “Well we’re not perfect!” No, we know that no-one can be perfect. However as Christians we need to be actively striving after perfection, doing our best to treat other people with consideration, not making flimsy excuses for ourselves. Anyway, this is an example of how someone, a man, might genuinely want what you offer as a woman, and chase after you to get it, but that does not then mean that he intends to offer you anything of worth in return.

—Entitlement
This all then segues nicely into this topic: in that same church, before all the things happened, or rather while the man was busily showing me his character but I still thought highly of the church as a whole, this one time when they took up the weekly offering, I got this weird feeling that whatever else they might claim, as far as they were concerned, this was actually the most important part of the service. This pastor actually made a thing about not insisting on tithing, which was something to commend him for. However, many pastors do insist on tithing, or automatically giving 10% of your pre-tax income to your church as an ongoing financial commitment to your church, on top of other offerings which they request too. It occurred to me that there is a deep sense of entitlement with many pastors when it comes to a tithe. They act as if it already belongs to them, but it is merely sitting in your pocket, and they have to do whatever is necessary to persuade you to give them “their” money. (But then when you “turn around” and leave their church, well then your tithe immediately stops belonging to them, and they no longer have the slightest claim to your money at all…)

And the same thing is true when it comes to men and women’s labour. Many men act as if women’s labour already belongs to them for free, as if they have a right to demand it of you, as if women somehow owe it to society to give up our labour for free in the myriad ways that we historically have done. And if a woman fails to do that, well she is a bad woman, deficient, worthless. I can’t help thinking that this is why many men hate women who insist on being single, or childfree, or who otherwise refuse to play along with societal expectations or give their labour up for free. It is like we are depriving them of something which is their right to demand from us. For me I don’t mind giving up my labour, as I know that mutual investment of labour and sacrifice is what is needed to make a relationship, marriage and family thrive. However, I insist that it must be reciprocated and if not, I am out of that relationship as surely as I was out of that church.