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- #154. At what cost?
#154. At what cost?
Shem Opolot
January 16, 2026
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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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Hi! I'm Shem Opolot, and this is The Friday Fix, my weekly newsletter. If you've received it, you’re either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter (yes, I’m the kind of person who uses words like “latter”) camp and want to subscribe, then click on the shiny button below:
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 Wikipedia turned 25 yesterday, and the story of its enshittification (a real word) is illustrative of the fate of all online platforms today. Once called Nupedia, and only editable by subject matter experts, its founders—to expand the audience base—tweaked Wikipedia to allow anyone who peaked in high school to overstate their public record. Today, most of Wikipedia’s traffic is bots, scraping the platform to train AI models.
Separately, spare a thought for your Ugandan co-readers today. By the time this issue drops, most of them will be in the throes of an internet blackout instituted by the Ugandan government to control this week’s presidential elections.
LIFE.
At what cost?
“A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money.”
After overestimating my strength again and wiggling under a heavy barbell on a benchpress, like a heavy-set bug on its back, my friend Igor came to mind. After all, that’s how he and I met.
Igor found me—a gym novice then—struggling on the benchpress, and took me under his wing. We worked out together, shared meals together, and bonded over our identical taste in movies…and women. We were meant to be friends for a long time and fate was right.
Igor is the most loyal person I know. If you happened to be in Malta and told me you needed a place to stay, I could call Igor and he’d pick you from the airport and park you on his couch. Or his bed, if you’re pretty. No questions asked. If I decided to rob a bank, he’d buy the ski masks and ask me for the building schematics.
But for an atheist, Igor lives by lots of rules. For example, he abhors violence against women and children.
You see, when I met Igor, he had other friends, most of whom were from all over Europe. Those friends became my friends, and we got up to the kind of shenanigans you bring up at parties to serve as the evening’s entertainment.
But many years after college, Igor, who had nothing back home to return to, found himself in New York City, down on his luck and in need of money. I couldn’t help him; I didn’t have money either. In the beginning, his morals prevented him from doing certain jobs, but as he got desperate, he compromised.
Eventually, one of his old friends from college, who predated me, connected him with several shady opportunities that paid him well but extracted their share in guilt and risk. The old friend also offered him a spot on his couch indefinitely.
Igor worked as a bouncer outside some underground clubs in NYC, and as the muscle in the back of one of those restaurants gangsters meet in in the movies. You know, the ones you have to go through a false door in the kitchen to access. He drove large trucks across state lines with specific instructions not to check what was in the trucks and to pray he didn’t get stopped by the cops.
He did this for many months as his capacity for that kind of work shattered glass ceiling after glass ceiling.
Then one day, while laying on his old friend’s couch, Igor witnessed his old friend beating his girlfriend. He beat her until the bruises all over her body couldn’t be explained away easily.
That same day, Igor, fully aware of the weight of his decision, packed his bags, left the apartment and lost his old friend’s number. He returned to Malta a week later to start from scratch. Again.
The legendary advertising guru Bill Berndach said, “A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money.”
But I’d go further and say: is it really a principle until it costs you something or someone you hold dear? Or is it just a uniform you wear to control how you present in public? Or a badge to belong.
THINGS.
A quote.
The incomparable Khalil Gibran on the courage to weather love’s uncertainties.
But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
A video.
It has been roughly a week into my family’s annual 40-day fast, and I’m giving up social media in addition to the usual fasting obligations. I’m afraid to say I’ve already read so much more than I usually do. I’m trying to implement some of what this guy teaches in this video:
WORK.
SWITCH it up.
You have a dropdown of data:
You want a certain value to show up corresponding to the grade chosen from the dropdown like so:
To do that, you could use the famous IF function, but you can get that anywhere. You’re here, so we’re going to use the SWITCH function:
=SWITCH(expression, case1, value1, case2, value2,…)
expression — the cell of interest (B3 in this case).
case1 — a specific scenario (“Good,” “Better,” or “Best” in this case)
value1 — the value you want to return when the contents of cell B3 show up.
Like so:
Think of all the possibilities…or take my course to find them in one place.
FUN.
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Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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