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- #136. Doom and bloom
#136. Doom and bloom
Shem Opolot
August 29, 2025
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 After years of users complaining about an algorithm that can take you from Tupac’s “Hit ‘Em Up” to Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” Spotify heard the complaints…
…and introduced Spotify DMs.
But, besides offering another place to get rejected, this is huge for those of you who used to end your high school letters with song dedications. For that crowd, you are SO back.
LIFE.
Doom and bloom.
Source: Getty Images
T’was 2016.
Drake thought he could make music with Rihanna without catching feelings, Mike Posner Took a Pill in Ibiza, Justin Bieber was unapologetic in Sorry, and I was at the peak of my powers.
Uganda was a good time for many, but it was a great time for “summers” because they could microdose it and leave just before reality bit. A young man with $5,000 in his pocket, well-fitting clothes, basic hygiene, a decent command of the English language, and some novelty on the local social scene could summit Kampala’s seven hills.
I was such a young man in Summer 2016.
But then my student visa got canceled.
My sweet holiday soured as questions from my friends and family about my future plans climbed under my skin, and then threatened to burst out of me in the form of stress pimples. The questions were as annoying as someone asking you where you last saw your keys when you can’t find them.
I missed an entire semester and battled mild depression, spending several days indoors, placated by illegally downloaded TV shows.
But then an acquaintance of mine wrote a book, and I reached out to get a copy because I was amazed someone my age had written a book.
I later attended the book launch, dated the author, and married her. And a year into our marriage, the author published another book titled “Never Too Late to Bloom.”
***
This week my serene evening walks in Kampala’s marquee neighborhood have been rudely—in the most severe sense—interrupted by loud music, a thousand monochromatically clad strangers, and roads, sidewalks, and slack electricity wires bestrewn with yellow posters. All in celebration of Uganda’s main economic activity: elections.
Walking through the filthy aftermath and trying to sleep through the loud nights, it’s hard not to feel sorry for my country. To feel like we’re beyond saving. To feel like we’re not gonna make it.
But we will.
In early post-colonial Africa, the same people who colonized the continent turned around and wielded pens to write Africa off. In justification, they cited wars and rumors of wars here and there. Famine, poverty, and disease here and there.
But they were wrong. And shortly after the colonizers’ quack premonitions, Africa went on a generational run of growth.
I see the same dejection and despair fill the hearts and pour from the mouths of my American friends as Trump has his way. Several radical tweets and think pieces spell doom for the oldest democracy, with some gamblers predicting the collapse of the empire on its 250-year birthday (next year).
But America will be fine.
I think negativity can be alluring. And easy. It makes you feel smart for diagnosing the problem. But it also allows you to be intellectually lazy—to stop thinking about your role in making things better. You convince yourself your efforts are meaningless, and therefore you embrace self-pity and mediocrity.
Hope and despair are powerful force multipliers, like starved flames seeking dry grass and an open field to roam. But there’s an oversupply of despair because it’s easy and life is hard.
Two things can be true at the same time: times may be bad, but we’re still in the game. And as long as we’re still in the game, we can turn things around.
It’s never too late to bloom.
THINGS.
A quote.
[T]he crisis of attention is not ancillary to the genocide in Gaza. It is one of its conditions. What enables mass death is not only the West’s impunity and the enabling structures of empire. It is also the slow hollowing out of the foundations of moral and political engagement: the ability to remember clearly, to assess soberly, to commit over time, and to act with care. These do not disappear because people stop caring. Many care deeply—urgently, viscerally—but the conditions of digital life scatter that care, fracture it across a thousand stimuli, and make it difficult to carry anything through.
A picture.
I attended a workshop showcasing some applications of AI in health in Uganda, and it was riveting. And I learned a lot. But I was also really glad for the opportunity to wear these wide-leg pants I got that my friends absolutely roasted me for 😅.
WORK.
Let’s link up.
This site will let you convert a link (URL) from a website to pretty much anything: a PDF, an image, plain text, anything.
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ If you’re in the market for a new house…
✅ 27 thoughts on getting older
✅ See if you can find the fake pictures
✅ Learn about your health through your poop
✅ What actors can teach you about making meaningful connections
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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