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#80: Is this the end?
Shem Opolot
July 12, 2024
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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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I’ll occasionally make you laugh
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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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Otherwise, grab a seat 🪑.
Happy Friday 🎉 Welcome to the 80th issue of the Friday Fix! To celebrate, I plan to figure out why every time you try to plug in a USB, it’s always upside down.
The Good Library Book Club is officially happening. If you want to join the club, reply to this email and let me know. It promises to be the most international Book Club in the world, not run by someone called Oprah. By joining, you’ll make history.
LIFE.
Is this the end?
“The happiest demographic of men are married with children, and the happiest demographic of women are single and childless.”
We’re not on the same page.
At the end of the pandemic, the government lifted the lockdown, and Ugandans partied like, well, only Ugandans do—more than anyone else. I attended one such party one evening, and while marching towards the warmers to get more soup for my chapati, a drunk stranger intercepted me.
He showered me with compliments the way men do:
Grabbing my bicep, he said, “Mmmh! I’m trying to be like you, man.”
You go to the gym to look sexy for women, and only men fawn over you.
But I’m easy, so I blushed and deflected his compliments the way men do:
“Nah, I’m just trying to be like you, man!”
We laughed. My stomach growled. He didn’t care. He kept speaking.
“I want to get married, man. I see what you have, and it’s beautiful…”
I had thin patience for most small talk, but matters of the heart are juicy, so I did what you would do…
I raised my index finger high and between us, told him to hold that thought, added more chapati triangles on my plate, got a side bowl of soup, and craned my neck to signal him to follow me to the table for two close by as drunkards danced around us under the fairy lights.
“Aha, you love her. You were saying…,” my nosey-ass prodded.
[Lots of oversharing]
“But the thing is, I want to marry a woman like my mother…”
[Record scratch. Freeze frame.]
I turn and look at the [invisible] camera like Jim in The Office:
Without knowing this man’s lovely mother, I knew what he meant. You know what he meant.
He wanted a “traditional woman,” but he was in love with a baddie who topped her finance class at some fancy U.K. university and was a successful investment banker.
He paused and glanced at the warmers, looking for chapati. I pulled my plate and bowl closer to my chest. His stomach growled. I didn’t care. It was my turn to speak:
You were raised by Gen X parents who believed in traditional gender roles and square-peg-in-square-hole cultural norms.
And men rule[d] that world.
But your parents also educated their girls, and the girls became women who went from the back of the house to the front of the class and to the corner office.
Historically, for women, marriage was either a maths problem or a security problem. But now, women can do all those things on their own or pay for them.
This social transition has happened insidiously, and you haven’t properly reckoned with it because the birds perched on top of trees are often the last to learn the forest is on fire.
And we aren’t talking about this transition and what it means. Not civilly, at least.
In the old days, we’d call a village meeting or a town hall, and people would agree to live out whatever reality suited them as long as they agreed to it and didn’t harm anyone.
Instead, people are subtweeting, reposting TikTok videos, and podcasting in echo chambers to feed the masses “content.”
This crucial but missing civil conversation is pushing everyone away from the center to the fringes of the debate.
So how will this end?
The good news is, now, more than ever, marriage, especially for women, is a choice. And when forced to contend with men who are stuck between what daddy taught them (or didn’t teach them) and what they see on Instagram, most women will forego that choice.
Is this better? Is this progress? I don’t know. What do you think?
THINGS.
A quote.
You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.
A tweet.
Marketing guru Seth Godin once said [I’m parahrasing]: If Nike decided to build a hotel, you’d be confused, but you’d have some idea in your mind about what that hotel might look like. But if Hilton or Marriott decided to make a sneaker, you’d have no idea what it’d look like. The difference is branding.
4 mins crash course on branding:
— Marketing Nerd (@Marketing_Nerd_)
1:12 PM • Jul 11, 2024
A picture.
A hammock in a public park? Count us in.
WORK.
I bet you didn’t know this.
You want to multiply a quantity by the unit price to get the total amount.
Something like this:
But once you add those “kgs,” Excel stops treating it like a number, and when you try to multiply, you get an error:
You could remove the “kgs” and make a note [somewhere] that the 40 refers to kilos, OR you can change the formatting of the cell where the quantity goes and then multiply. Like so:
Click in the cell, right-click, select “Format Cells,” under “Custom,” delete the contents and type “# “kgs”,” and click “OK.”
This document will help you get started with Excel.
FUN.
The Friday Fix Playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ The New York Times Book Review’s top 100 books of the 21st century.
✅ For your next vacay, visit the world’s most iconic bars.
✅ Worldle, but for countries.
✅ Some wild NDAs celebrities made people sign.
✅ How to be a good guest or host.
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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