Something happened recently that made me think about a topic that might be worth discussing on your podcast. This is a message somebody sent me last week, and I'm going to continue reading it now. I was at my fashion academy when someone asked if I had served. I said yes. When they asked when I graduated, I told them twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1:A few people immediately responded with, oh, you are old. They probably meant it jokingly, but it got me thinking about how casually we make assumptions about people's lives based on their age. I'm 26 in Nigeria. Many people unconsciously attach certain expectations to women by that age, having a stable job, being financially established, being married, or at least appearing to have everything figured out. When someone doesn't fit that timeline, they are often seen as behind.
Speaker 1:What many people don't consider is that everyone's journey is different. Some people face delays in school due to accreditation issues, some struggle with unemployment despite being qualified, some change careers, and others are still building themselves, life is rarely as straightforward as society makes it seem. I think this speaks to a broader issue of emotional intelligence and empathy. We often comment on people's age, relationship status, careers, or finances without understanding their story. A harmless joke to one person may reinforce insecurities or societal pressures for another.
Speaker 1:I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, and I think it could make for a meaningful podcast conversation about age expectations about age expectations, especially for women, and the importance of being mindful about the assumptions we make about people's lives. What a magnificent peace. Hey guys, I know you're enjoying this episode so if you're not following check the app you're listening on and make sure to follow. Okay bye. The moment she sent this and I finished reading it, the first thing that came to my mind was, how am I supposed to follow this?
Speaker 1:What am I supposed to say after? Because it makes the point so so excellently, so perfectly delivered. You may think this is just her experience, but you know, at some point in your own life, you felt it. They've called you old in one context or the other, or you've seen something or somebody and just felt like, ah, you should be ahead, you should be doing more. And this is especially as adults too.
Speaker 1:When it is true that life gets more and more variable as you grow older, the notion that at age two, you should be in creche or nursery one is not far fetched. Almost every two year old is in nursery one. In fact, almost every 10 year old is either in GS1 or primary five or six. You see how as you get older, it becomes a bit more variable. Now you cannot just specifically pinpoint it.
Speaker 1:And then before you know, at 18, you are supposed to be finishing secondary school, but some people finish at 16 or 17, and some 19, they finish secondary school. And at that 19, some people are already in year one or year two. And then as you grow older, it becomes variable. And one of the major destabilizers is uni graduation. I believe one in every three or four people did not graduate with their mates, myself included.
Speaker 1:And there's so many reasons why things like this could happen, but it is essentially for the fact that the older you grow and the much more independent you are, the more exposed you are to the variables of the environment that can affect your timeline, whether it's the one you have in your head or the one society has imposed upon you. And in those ten years from 20 to 30, so much radical change happens that it is impossible to predict where somebody should be at that point in time. There are some of your mates you heard were getting married, you couldn't believe it to your leg, are they not too young? And now five, six years later, others are still getting married and it's just about right. Five years from now, either you or somebody again, you know, be getting married and it's just gonna be normal.
Speaker 1:In every society, within every civilization at a given point in time, is a there's an aspirational lifestyle. There is a thing that everybody thinks should be the thing to have, the lifestyle to have, the theme to fit into. And those themes are reinforced by the things in our environment, the churches, the education, you know, they reinforce those themes and those expectations. The institutions here just express the expectation, then they will half ass the support and the amount of pressure for you to deliver. A perfect example of how our society reinforces this life is Nollywood.
Speaker 1:Take it back to old Nollywood. There's a specific pattern. I know that Igbo culture had a lot of influence in the early Nollywood. And so there's always this part of the movie where Chikozye leaves the village and travels to Lagos and after a short while he comes back and his mother asks him, is this your car? And he says, yes, it's one of my toys.
Speaker 1:That in itself shows you that if we are not telling you that this is what your life should be like, we are telling you that these are what other people are already doing. Either way, it makes you feel like that is what you should be doing. It automatically made it unacceptable for somebody to leave the village, go to the city and come back to the village around the same economic level or tax bracket. We did not hold a meeting to agree it but somehow inside us it was reinforced and that is just what everybody expects now. Ignoring all the possible variables.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is somebody's life we are talking about here with challenges and everything. But yet, all of us know, you know you have that expectation of somebody that leaves your place out. Imagine any Nigerian you know that Japa, he went to Europe, he stayed five years. If he comes back and he's not a big boy, you too, you people know he has fuck up now. Well, specifically in her case, talked about how society has the expectations of women and at certain ages, you should have accomplished certain things.
Speaker 1:And from the perspective of a woman, they may feel these expectations upon them in a certain way. They feel it in the air in society a certain way. May I feel it in the air in society a certain way too, from my own perspective as a man? Because tell me why most times when I meet a young lady, in whatever context, sometimes it doesn't occur to me. Other times, I just kind of notice just by some features that I track if she must have crossed 30 or not.
Speaker 1:It just occurs to me, you know. Now, why do I care? Me, even with this awareness, I understand that society has indoctrinated something within me that makes me feel like we may run out of time. Like, if there's one I see and, you know, I can tell definitely she has crossed 30, which I will still not be sure of, but I'll be thinking, okay, I hope she's married. Is she married?
Speaker 1:You know, those questions come to me. What's my business? I'm not supposed to care. It's not supposed to affect anything, but it kind of does. And it is because it is ingrained because of some of these things that reinforce it.
Speaker 1:Movies, church, school. I know this is unfair on women because I hardly can tell when a man has crossed 30. A lot of the time when my friends hit their thirtieth, I was not even aware. Like, on the birthday, they were like, they're 30. I'm like, oh, you uh-uh.
Speaker 1:Really? Oh, I'm not keeping track of that one. If if a man says at 30, he doesn't you ask him why he's normal, he say he still find money. He still find money. You almost always leave him alone.
Speaker 1:If your woman is 30 and you ask her why she's normal and she says that, you don't it's not the same response we give them. And so there is pressure there. And when you mix that with the fact that it's actually a biological clock they are running on, you know the amount of pressure you're mounting on them is insane and at the end of the day life isn't even supposed to be that serious. For somebody, even if it's your daughter or your sister, for somebody that you want them to get married, do you not think that they want that, if they want to get married, don't you think that they want to get married themselves more than you want them to get married? You're putting pressure on somebody who's who the thing is like, it's not entirely up to me to find a husband.
Speaker 1:Why are you calling me about it every week? And now this pressure drives us both men and women into rushed decisions, rushed marriages, even rushed jobs, you know. A lot of people don't find fulfillment in the place that they are working. But because career is so, it's kind of like a linear thing, you feel like don't want to have a break in your career trajectory. So you endure these years of bad energy and lack of satisfaction thereby reducing your quality of life because you know if you lose that job, what kind of twenty eighteen woman doesn't have a house of her own?
Speaker 1:And I guarantee you, nobody except your mama will give a damn while you're in that position. They won't even care that you had a job or a house before. And so this is the craziness of that expectation. They even expect consistency in the delivery. When individual, as a collective society expects that and that is the guiding mood hovering over us.
Speaker 1:But individually, we are all failing occasionally at our expectations. The concept of feeling behind suggests that one is in a race and it's easy to feel like that because of that standard aspirational theme that everybody is trying to fit into. At this age, you should have this, at this point, you should have this, that standard average aspirational theme that we're all trying to fit into. If you are not ticking all those boxes, there is a tendency for that feeling of being behind. That is one.
Speaker 1:It could also be personal competition in the group that you're in, within your family, your extended family. Where are others in comparison to you? That's also something that makes people feel left behind and that's even the one that hits closer to home. But sure you know there's no point in beating yourself up over being behind because there are so many factors beyond our control. Think of something like an uncle that promises three of his nephews and nieces that once they finish university, he will sponsor their masters in The UK.
Speaker 1:Many families in Nigeria, they are like this now. But if two of those cousins are in a public school and one is in a private school, Assu strike would have delayed the ones in public school. The one in private school will graduate first and get the ticket to The UK. Before these ones will finish, the uncle may have died and then they are in Nigeria with you, they could have had a totally different life. Is it their fault?
Speaker 1:The government under which you operate does its job to educate you or provide school for you to go to an NA degree. Or does it provide adequate jobs for you to meet the theme that it is hovering over everybody's head? It is not. You have to extra try. Is that one your fault that you are a certain age and you finished school for three years and you don't have a proper job?
Speaker 1:Did you fail in school? No. Are you qualified to handle tasks like this and get paid a serious amount of money? Yes. But there was no structure to ensure that that timeline is followed in your favor.
Speaker 1:All of these things in different forms that I've not even mentioned can happen to anybody, even health. None of these are personal failures. Also, if you want to consider somebody as being left behind or too old for where they are or a failure, ask yourself if by that you are referring to their character or their circumstances, both of which you probably don't know enough about. And for somebody feeling behind, you know we are the ones who reinforce that expectation by constantly judging ourselves internally by where we are. It wasn't a fool that said comparison is the thief of joy.
Speaker 1:The fact that you are ashamed of being left behind doesn't necessarily mean you are actually behind. You probably feel behind because of selective information. You're focusing on the wrong things to judge yourself by. If you look close enough, there are areas in your life where you're probably ahead of a lot of your peers, but you don't see it because it's not the traditional one. So in the event that you master yourself and within yourself, you already know what your timeline is, what you are doing with your life, and you have that strong sense of internal personality, where you know your direction.
Speaker 1:You can emotionally detach from the expectations of society. Yeah, so even if you detach, the comments will still keep coming. They will keep asking you where is the man you are marrying or is that your boyfriend not serious? But the thing is, even we borrow timeline from a generation that had a different country and that's what we are using to judge ourselves. So like the previous timeline, the current generation is always judged by the expectation of the previous timeline and that's how it overlaps and that is why nobody is ever satisfied.
Speaker 1:The societal judgment and expectation is an automated feature. Replace it with your personal expectations of yourself and use those achievements to build confidence and satisfaction and far more importantly at all times, make sure you do not propagate this behavior by judging other people too. If anything, be curious, not judgmental.