In partnership with
Hi! Welcome to The Friday Fix! You’re reading this because you probably stumbled upon this post somewhere on the internet instead of where it should be—in your inbox. But no worries; we can fix that.
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.
Why should you subscribe?
I have over ten years of work experience in healthcare, program management, and data analytics on two continents. So, I know a little about helping you work smarter
I comb through tonnes of self-improvement content so you don’t have to, and I distill the content into bite-sized wisdom for you
I’ll occasionally make you laugh
If this sounds good, click the subscribe button below, add your email, read my welcome email (check your spam folder or “Promotion” tabs), and follow ALL the instructions. This is important so you don’t miss future posts.
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:
You can also skim the past posts here.
Otherwise, grab a seat 🪑.
HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 I’m running a summer fellowship for a group of college students where we explore faith, global health, and U.S. foreign policy. While grading papers, I realized—particularly with the AI-fueled proliferation of the em-dash (—), which I’m a fan of, as you might’ve noticed—we must distinguish the hyphen, the en-dash, and the em-dash.
Hyphen (-): sometimes used to create compound words. For example, AI-fueled, mother-in-law.
En-dash (–): slightly longer than the hyphen; used to denote a range. For example, 2001–2003, Kampala–London.
Em-dash (—): longer than the en-dash and hyphen; used for dramatic effect in sentences or to add background context sometimes accomplished with parentheses or commas. For example: I love to write—but AI ruined the em dash. Or this: The fool—unsurprisingly—raised his hand.
I’m increasingly proud and ashamed of my command of the colonizer’s language.
TOGETHER WITH PROTON
Free email without sacrificing your privacy
Gmail is free, but you pay with your data. Proton Mail is different.
We don’t scan your messages. We don’t sell your behavior. We don’t follow you across the internet.
Proton Mail gives you full-featured, private email without surveillance or creepy profiling. It’s email that respects your time, your attention, and your boundaries.
Email doesn’t have to cost your privacy.
LIFE
Faith-full
Someone on Twitter said that as a matter of urgency for the future of Africa, we must start raising “critically thinking” children, not “god-fearing” children.
While I understand where they were coming from—as you know, Africa has a complicated history with Christianity and Islam—I disagree. In fact, the history is hardly complicated. Christianity and Islam were either spread by the gun or the gab.
I think we can and should do both. I think we can raise “faith-full” critical thinkers.
***
After 18 years of involuntary Christian indoctrination, I moved to America for college by myself. I still remember that British Airways flight—struggling to fasten my seatbelt, misunderstanding the flight attendants’ accents, worrying that breathing the wrong way would get me deplaned—like it was yesterday. Once my jitters faded, a solitary thought surfaced, like a singular light at the end of a dark hallway:
“I’m going to be by myself. Mummy and Daddy are not here. My friends are not here. I can start fresh. I can be whoever I want to be.”
I didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of what would be over a decade of unpacking and reconstituting my relationship with God.
***
While waiting for our train recently, a new friend and I chatted on the platform. Religion came up, and they shared their aversion to it because of all the negative experiences they associated with it. They talked about how the worst people they’d encountered in their lives were Christians. Listening imperfectly, I snuck in my negative experience attending an all-boys’ Catholic boarding school to relate. They were also listening imperfectly. Consumed by the momentum of their thoughts and emotions, they ignored me.
They talked about how, similar to Africans, African Americans also have a complicated history with Christianity. Slave masters used the Bible—completely and conveniently ignoring Jesus’ disruptive commission—to justify slavery. At the same time, they also used the Bible to entrench the slave mindset. This backfired, of course, as the enslaved people later used the scriptures in that same Bible to channel the language and the actions of rebellion and, eventually, freedom.
God ordained them to be slaves. God demanded they submit to their masters’ authority. God wanted them to live full lives. God set them free. It was complicated.
At the end of my new friend’s rant, around the time the platform lights blinked to announce the train’s imminent arrival, they mentioned they were still in the process of unpacking and resolving their position on Christianity.
I made it about myself again, saying the “unpacking” must be intentional, lest you remain lukewarm for years, forced to blow cold or hot only by tragedy. I continued, as we filed into our seats in the train car, saying that I had to read the Bible again, along with lots of theology, to get to a point where I was comfortable calling myself Christian again. I’m still not comfortable evangelizing, for example. I had to figure out where my faith began and where it ended.
I haven’t established this faith boundary, nor do I think I ever will. On some days, I’m not the most confident Christian. It’s complicated. But in the meantime, I’ve found the reason for my faith.
I read about the beginnings of the American state, and how a group of Christian immigrants who fled the long, unbending arms of the Catholic Church disenfranchised several Native Americans, established a base in the U.S., and tried to fashion a special land, a city on a hill, a sort of “new Israel.” These mixed political and spiritual ambitions contributed to the myth of American exceptionalism—what James Skillen calls a “civil religion” that persists today. This dual entitlement became entrenched in pulpits and pews, courts and schools, resulting many years later in a group of people who genuinely believe they are special. And love them or hate them, there’s nothing quite like America.
That’s how powerful myth can be.
Religion, as Nassim Taleb and Rupert Read argued, “via interdicts, allows the intergenerational transmission of survival heuristics and is effective in nudging people into some classes of behavior.”
Chateaubriand essentially asserted that religion combines mystery and sacrifice to self-replicate like dandelions begging you to blow kisses at them. He said, “Which religion in antiquity did not lose its moral influence by losing its priests and its sacrifices?”
While discussing the litany of reasons for the fertility crisis in most of Europe, Peter Sweden said, “There is no longer a compelling story for why we’re here, what we should build, or who we serve. In the absence of myth, life becomes a loop. And loops do not reproduce.”
Myth, faith, or simply things to believe in, are important for galvanizing our scattered insides toward a purpose. And since people are inclined toward community, those myths that galvanize our inner tensions can infect those around us. And once we achieve a critical mass of myth believers, a contagion of sorts, we can achieve a lot together.
So, at the risk of committing an accidental heresy, we may not be able to agree on which faith, but we need strong faith to conceptualize why we’re here and what we’re supposed to do.
TOGETHER WITH TLDR.TECH
Don't be the one behind at standup
Your team is already talking about the launch you missed. TLDR is the 5-minute daily brief that keeps you ahead, curated by ex-Google and Anthropic engineers. Free, and read by 7M+ subscribers.
THINGS
A quote
…boredom happens when a tired, cluttered person is trying to look for ‘optimal’ solutions while having unclear utility values, or win conditions. So even though there’s no shortage of things to see and do, it feels like there’s nothing. The closet is full and it feels like there’s nothing to wear. It’s not really about the clothes, it’s really about the internal state of the individual, who is in disarray with mixed intentions and no clear sense of what they really want, which is usually downstream of some kind of blockage, often a response to some other problem that needs resolving.
A picture
I noticed someone in D.C. has been adding little provocative phrases to street signs, and I want them to know someone has noticed the tree they’ve cut in the middle of the forest. I’m referring to the “THIS AIN’T NORMAL…” in black and yellow. I recognized the pattern when I saw another provocative phrase on another street sign in the same handwriting. I also like that some of the phrases—like this one—are open to interpretation. I often talk about how, living in a city like D.C., surrounded by so much excess and homelessness side by side, those of us who go about our business are the insane ones. This ain’t normal.
WORK
UPPER echelon
It’s Little-known Excel Functions Awareness Month (I made this up), so I’m spreading awareness.
Did you know the function UPPER can change your text to upper case? Seriously. Look:
After you’re done, ⌘ + D (on Mac) or Ctrl + D (on PC) will copy the formula down.
And yes, you guessed right. There are functions for lower case and capital case, too.
PRODUCTS
A course
A guide
FUN
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> The 40 most rage-inducing problems in tech
> Explore the ancient Aztec city of Tenochtitlan
> Where are humans actually from?
Have a great weekend,
— SO
