Power Over What Can Be Controlled

Rain has been falling, and the weather has been weather-for-two kind of dark and cold. Airtel network decided to go on a break, so I tried borrowing data, and that's when Glo reminded me I owe them ₦497. I genuinely thought I was eligible for ₦3,000 — how did I borrow just ₦300 and ₦200 and now I can't borrow more? My fault, really, for not always remembering to subscribe to my Glo SIM before Airtel begins acting up (predictable at this point).

It's like when there's light and you need to iron your clothes for a presentation, but you were trusting NEPA, and NEPA had to prove to you, once again, why you shouldn't.

So basically: no sun, which means I have to save energy on the solar inverter for the night. No network, which means I'm typing this on my notepad, waiting for Airtel to resume operations so I can post it.

I genuinely didn't know what to write about today, but there's something I'd been thinking of sharing on my WhatsApp status a while back — it ended up being too long for a status. So I figured, why not share it here instead.

The Concept

It's about power over what can be controlled. The small things. The seconds. The beginnings. The obvious things. The tiny red flags. The attitude or small behavior we often overlook — the things that, left unchecked, grow into something uncontrollable, something we end up fighting or trying to beat back later.

I think it all comes down to self-awareness — being conscious of the things happening around us and within us. The ability to be mentally prepared, to live not just in the present, but with an awareness of both the positive and negative sides of the future.

Hunger as a Pattern

A lot of people end up poor because they never learned to control their hunger, or never stayed conscious of the path toward hunger they were already walking.

There are different stages of hunger. I could explain the biology of it — the nervous system, the stomach muscles, the slow build toward satiety — but you didn't pay me for a physiology lesson, so I'll spare you that.

What matters is this: at each stage of hunger, the body sends a message. As time passes and we ignore those messages, we grow weaker, until eventually we reach a point where we'll do anything to eat.

At that final stage, nutritional value doesn't matter anymore. Safety doesn't matter. Even the source of the food stops mattering. In a broad sense, a person at that stage might steal, or go into debt, just to get something — anything — into their stomach.

The Bigger Picture

I think you already see where I'm going with this.

Growing up, we move through stages, and each stage comes with responsibilities we're supposed to start taking on early. You're getting hungry, go to the market. Learn to cook. Go to work. Start looking for money. But too often, we wait until everyone else is already eating before we start scrambling, and by then, we're looking for shortcuts by any means necessary.

If you follow that pattern closely, you start to understand why people fall into crime, into debt, into decisions they swore they'd never make.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying all crime or debt comes from a lack of preparation or failure to think about the future. I'm simply pointing out a pattern — one version of how things can unfold when the early signals get ignored for too long.

The same pattern shows up in addiction. The best time to quit is always earlier than you think, back when the consciousness of it was still small, still manageable, still a choice and not yet a compulsion.

That's the whole point, really: power over what can be controlled starts at the small, easy-to-dismiss beginning — not at the overwhelming end.

My laptop, it's dying. Yesterday I realized how much storage node modules from old projects have been consuming. I've been struggling with storage, barely having 2GB free on this PC. So yesterday, I tried something different. I deleted old projects and node modules of important ones, saving myself over 30GB.

Today it was RAM. Chrome, Codex, VSCode, everything kept crashing. Even node modules were crashing. It was crazy trying to run a Next.js project and TurboPack. Well, I am no longer using Chrome, and now I only run two software programs at a time.

Now my internet isn't working until I connect a cord directly to my MiFi. I mean, everything is working to make me sad, so I will be sad tonight.

Please don't say I am ignoring the little signs the laptop is giving, well now I can control it and mentally ready for whatever will happen next.

Today was productive though.