A Creature of Habit

I have never had a convincing answer to the question of what I want to be. The question assumes a person is moving toward a final form, and that a life can be understood as the successful completion of that form. I have mostly moved by finding something interesting, learning enough to make it useful, and then finding the next difficult thing hidden inside it.

This is less romantic than purpose and more durable. I like making things. I like the point where an idea stops being private and has to survive contact with another person. Almost everything else I believe about education, technology, freedom, and work begins there.

The useful accident

I studied banking and finance at JKUAT because I did not know what to choose. This is probably a more common reason for choosing a degree than people admit. At the age when a student is expected to select a profession, most students have had almost no meaningful contact with professional life. The decision is presented as an expression of identity when it is often a mixture of available grades, family advice, familiar job titles, and guesswork.

Finance was not a deception. Markets are one of the systems through which societies decide what gets built, which risks are tolerated, and who is trusted with resources. Money is abstract, but its consequences are physical: a factory opens, a farm expands, a medicine is tested, or none of these things happens. Learning to read that machinery was useful.

But I did not discover myself inside a balance sheet. The degree gave me a vocabulary and a way of thinking about incentives. It did not give me a vocation. I found that elsewhere, slowly, by doing work that felt less like preparing to begin and more like beginning.

What the machine makes possible

Software drew me in because it answers back. An idea can be made concrete with very little permission. At first it is only a thought; then it runs, fails, reveals what was vague in the thought, and asks for another attempt. The distance between imagination and evidence becomes unusually short.

I love technology for this reason. Not because every new technology is progress, and not because technical people are wiser than everyone else. Technology is valuable because it can change the range of actions available to an ordinary person. A spreadsheet lets one person examine a business. A phone lets someone publish without owning a printing press. A piece of software can give a small team abilities that once belonged only to large institutions.

The word can matters. Technology also centralizes, distracts, watches, and controls. It can narrow choices while presenting another menu. The interesting question is never whether a technology is advanced. It is who becomes more capable after it arrives, who becomes dependent, and whether the new arrangement can be refused.

Building software made this question personal. A builder is not merely delivering functions. He is deciding which actions are easy, which are difficult, what the user is allowed to understand, and what the system insists on doing for them. Every product contains a small theory of how another person should behave.

After the syllabus

I am skeptical of college because it is an extremely expensive and inefficient way to discover what a person can do. It places years of life before the beginning of real work, then treats the credential as proof that the beginning may be permitted. Too much of the system rewards the ability to satisfy the system itself.

This does not make knowledge useless or teachers unnecessary. It means that education and college are not synonyms. A serious education can happen in a laboratory, a workshop, a library, a company, an argument, or during the hundredth attempt to fix something that continues to break. College can contain these experiences, but it does not own them.

There are professions in which formal training protects everyone: medicine, engineering, scientific research, and other work where ignorance can be difficult to detect before it becomes dangerous. Institutions also provide time, equipment, peers, and access that would otherwise be hard to assemble. The mistake is turning one useful institution into the universal entrance to adult competence.

The most important part of learning begins when the syllabus loses authority. You decide what you do not understand, follow it farther than an examination requires, and make something that can fail in public. The feedback is less orderly and much more honest.

The right to be heard

Governance becomes real at the point where disagreement appears. It is easy for an institution to describe itself as representative while most people agree with it, remain quiet, or can be ignored. A protest tests a more difficult proposition: whether people who reject a decision can still be treated as members of the public rather than as a problem outside it.

This does not make every protest correct. Crowds can be mistaken, manipulated, violent, or divided. Governments cannot abandon every decision when opposition becomes loud, and order is itself a public good. But neutrality does not require pretending that power is evenly distributed. The state has law, money, information, and force. A citizen often has a voice, a body, and the decision to stand beside other citizens.

A healthy institution does more than tolerate agreement. It creates legitimate ways for refusal to matter before desperation becomes the only remaining instrument. Elections are part of that process, but agency cannot be compressed into one choice every few years. Courts, journalism, public records, local government, unions, civic groups, and peaceful assembly all increase the odds that a person can be heard without first becoming powerful.

I am less interested in the claim that a system is free than in the ordinary experience of trying to disagree with it. The quality of the exit, the appeal, and the objection tells us what the institution actually believes about the people inside it.

The stranger at the shelf

There is a particular joy in making something that a stranger chooses. Imagine an object on a shelf. Someone you will never meet picks it up, considers it, and takes it home. They do not know the arguments, revisions, failed prototypes, or ordinary afternoons behind it. They only know whether the thing works and whether it deserves a place in their life.

Software rarely sits on a shelf now, but the transaction is the same. A person opens it without obligation. If it is good, it becomes part of a task, a company, a farm, a conversation, or a day. The builder may never see this. The absence of recognition does not reduce the satisfaction. In some ways it purifies it.

Products are one of the gentlest ways of affecting strangers because the useful ones can be offered rather than imposed. The builder says: here is a thing I thought might help. The user is allowed to answer by choosing it, ignoring it, modifying it, or leaving. Value has to cross the distance between them without authority.

This is also why making things in Kenya matters to me. Building here is not a charitable variation of building elsewhere. It is ordinary creation under a particular set of conditions: different constraints, overlooked knowledge, difficult infrastructure, real customers, and problems that are often described by people too far away from them. The aim is not to perform ingenuity under hardship. It is to make products good enough to be chosen.

The work that remains

I call myself a creature of habit because the pattern is clearer than the destination. I become interested. I read. I make a crude version. I discover that the crude version contains a harder problem. I work on that. The subjects change, but the motion remains.

This may be a purpose, although I distrust the pressure placed on that word. A life does not need a single sentence capable of explaining every year of it. Purpose can become another institution that demands loyalty long after it has stopped being useful. People should be allowed to revise themselves.

What I want is simpler. I want the freedom to keep learning, the means to build, and enough independence to choose problems because they matter rather than because someone has made every alternative impossible. I want to work with people who retain the same freedom and stay because the work remains worth doing.

And I want to put things into the world that increase someone else's range of action. The person may be far away. I may never know their name. For a moment, something that began in one mind becomes useful in another life. I have not found an end goal more convincing than doing that again.