A MUST READ FOR ALL NIGERIANS YOUTH- by HIDEE AFOLAYAN

Hello Naijaloadites,

Today, I seek to address a crucial issue that many youths in our
generation are beginning to take for granted. BE REAL. We live in an
age and time where gross attention is focused on public figure. An age
where life is largely driven on the basis of public interest.

An age where individual status on social media has become a basis for
judging progress and success. A time when business seminars place
branding and packaging above delivery and integrity. Never in the
history has makeup industry enjoyed such massive patronage like now.

I, therefore, put to us that we are beginning to neglect the needful
which is our realness:

Why do we make our business look so good on social media and yet,
consistently fail to deliver the elaborate promises we make?

Why do we give people an impression that we are rich and yet our
accounts are shedding terrible tears of blood?

Why do our ladies invest so much in trying to look what they are not?

 I understand that we live in a society mounts pressure on us to prove
that we are not failures. So, we are constantly trying to boost our
public figure at the expense of personal damage. However, we must
begin to strike a balance.  At what point did expensive gadgets become
a standard for judging class? Where did we learn this from?
Personally, I can be a lover of good things also understand that there
is a place of appropriate timing. I bought my first most expensive
phone few years ago because I could not afford to take blur videos for
editing. Before then, I wouldn’t imagine myself spending such on a
phone considering that I have a dream to chase. My worth is not in my
kind of gadget. If your expensive gadgets doesn’t aid at increasing
your value, you do not need it for now.

Who taught us that pre wedding shoot is prerequisite for marriage?

Do not get me wrong, there is nothing wrong in this because I myself
have great plans for this. However, the priority given to it and other
pre wedding activities is where the problem lies. It is, therefore,
not surprising that in our age more marriages have crashed and will
still crash because we spend so much time and energy investing in what
we want people to see, how we want people to feel and what we want
people to say; while very little or no time at all invested in
building the post wedding activities.

Folks, our society are core; we can’t afford to live base on public
interest. We can’t continue to struggle to speak with an American
accent just because we want our friends to see us as what I call “OMO
BUTTY”. You don’t have to avoid speaking in your local dialect just to
prove you are POSH, only to go back home and start blasting in your
native language. I once heard a man say “don’t just look rich”, be
rich. Our generation would rather prefer to be perceived as rich
instead of being rich. I believe we need to begin to focus on our
reality. By this, we are able to see who we really are. Then, we begin
to identify were our strength and weakness lie. The sincerity of our
reality helps us to identify things we need to develop and drop off
from our lives. The world will become a better place if we
consistently accept our reality and stop being fake.

Living fake will only attract fake people, lead you to fake places and
eventually destroy your life. So, ask yourself today WHO AM I?

 There is a Yoruba proverb which says:

                   “Alatise ni’n mo atise ara e” – English meaning
that “The discovery of one’s authentic self is the bedrock of all
success”.