Doubt is unpleasant, but uncertainty is absurd.

Entering my twenties, the stakes are somehow both apocalyptic and completely meaningless. Every decision feels like it will permanently alter the trajectory of your very soul. You’re choosing a career path, and it feels like you’re choosing your entire identity. You have to decide if you’re a finance person or an IT person, as if the universe is keeping a tally and will assign you your future spouse, your church, and your funeral plan based on your answer. Meanwhile, your parent is quietly hoping you pick something that comes with a pension, because they didn’t pay school fees for all those years for you to become a “content creator.”

You have a safety net, sort of. You’re still at home, eating your mum’s food, using the family WiFi (when it’s not buffering every five minutes). But you’re also acutely aware that this safety net has an expiration date. Your parents are looking at you with increasing intensity every month. They don’t say it, but you know what they’re thinking: When are you going to start contributing to something? You’ve started buying your own perfumes and small stuff just to prove you’re responsible. It doesn’t work.

The Relationship Absurdity

Dating at this age in Kenya is a hall of mirrors where everyone is performing a version of a person who has their life together. You go on a date, if you can call it that, because you just “met up” at a cafe with a guy who says he’s “focused on his business.” His business, you eventually learn, is blowing his trust fund/allowance on shady entertainment business deals. You doubt yourself. Am I being too judgmental? Is he an entrepreneur? Or is he just a guy with enough money to blow and a safety net?

You have a situationship for eight months because neither of you wants to be the one to “define the relationship.” Why? Because defining it requires certainty. And certainty is terrifying. What if you define it and it’s wrong? What if you say “I love you” and they say “...okay”? Better to live in the absurd purgatory of tunaelewana than to step into the harsh light of commitment. Plus, you’d have to explain it to your mum, who has already started asking, “So, is this one serious?” You have no good answer. And the idea of being too young to think about marriage but also too old to date for “funsies”

The Achievement Spiral

Your Instagram feed is a highlight reel of people you went to high school with who are somehow already running empires. You see a former classmate who posted a photo of herself holding a giant cardboard check for her “youth empowerment initiative,” and you think, I spent my weekend watching YouTube videos on how to make money online and didn’t even make anything. I am a failure.

You doubt your own timeline. Should you have just gone abroad? Should you have taken that digital marketing short course ? Should you be posting less about your weekend clubbing adventures and more about your vision for the future? Your aunties at a family gathering are already asking, “So, what are you doing with your life?” with that specific head tilt that means they’re comparing you to your cousin who’s already a nurse in the UK. You smile and say, “I’m exploring opportunities.” It’s code for I don’t know, please stop asking.

But here’s the absurd punchline: Nobody knows what they’re doing.

The 45-year-old manager at the company you interned for? He’s three years into a separation, living in a one-bedroom, and spends his weekends at the pub avoiding going home. The professor who seemed so certain about microeconomics? He has a PhD and still panics every time he has to submit his research for publication. Your own parents, who look at you with a mixture of love and pity when you tell them you’re thinking about “going into agribusiness”? They have no idea how they’re going to pay for your younger sibling’s year 7 fees next year. They’re just better at hiding it.

Certainty is a costume. We’re all walking around in second-hand blazers from think twice, hoping nobody asks us to raise our arms because the seams are about to give.

The absurdity of being in your early twenties is that you are expected to be certain about a future that is, by definition, unknowable. You’re supposed to lock in your career path when you’ve only ever held three jobs: babysitting for your neighbour in your estate, the one-month attachment at your uncle’s office where you mostly fetched tea, and that one time you tried to sell lipgloss on tiktok and gave up because people kept asking for credit.

You’re supposed to know who you are when your frontal lobe isn’t even fully developed. Let me repeat that: The part of your brain responsible for decision-making and impulse control does not finish cooking until you are 25. For four years of university and a few years after, you are essentially a highly caffeinated, data-bundle-dependent toddler in a second-hand hoodie, being asked to make decisions that will compound interest for the rest of your life.

It’s hilarious.

So, yes. Doubt is unpleasant. Doubt feels like you’re standing in the middle of southern bypass during rush hour while everyone else seems to be zipping along in their lane. Doubt makes you wake up at 3:00 AM and ask your phone, “Is it too late to learn coding?” (Spoiler: it’s not. You’re 19-30. You have time.)

But uncertainty? Uncertainty is the good stuff. Uncertainty is the only honest response to being in your late teens and early twenties.

Embrace the absurdity. You don’t know if you want to move to a bedsitter or stay at home and save “rent” (which is code for buying your own milk and pretending that counts). You don’t know if you want to go back to school for that CPA or just commit to selling clothes on Instagram. You don’t know if you like that guy, or if you just like that he has a car and sometimes spoils you.

That’s not a crisis. That’s the plot.

The only people who are truly certain at this age are the ones you should worry about. They’re the ones who will have the midlife crisis at 35 and buy a loaned range and start a YouTube channel giving “financial advice.” You? You’re doing it now. You’re getting it out of the way. You’re sitting in the uncertainty, feeling how deeply absurd it is, and hopefully laughing about it over shots in the club with your friends that you definitely can’t afford on a regular basis, but it’s Friday.

Because if there’s one thing you can be certain of, it’s that your parents will never stop asking when you’re getting a job. And that’s okay. You’ll figure it out. Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.