By Morris Wambua

I have become a Professor of Doubt. In God I trust; but everyone else must provide data. I am a citizen of the question.

So, now. I dare ask a few questions.

What is a good life?

What does it mean to be educated?

Is obedience a virtue or a carefully disguised surrender?

Why do we accept the world as it is handed to us, whole, finished, and unquestioned?

Who designed this architecture of normalcy, and why do we call it sanity?

You see, the eyes are useless when the mind is closed, and whoever wants to feed you on worms switches off the lights first.

Wait, did they switch off the lights on us?

We live in times where conformity masquerades as stability, and agreement is mistaken for truth.

So, what is the truth? Who defines truth? And can truth lie? The average person no longer thinks. They inherit thought. They inherit ideas, roles, values, ambitions, and even anxieties, all passed down like old furniture: dusty, unquestioned, yet strangely sentimental.

We are born into scripts. We do not write them. We are told what success looks like, what respectability entails, and what growth means. The world teaches us very early what to aim for: a certain school, a certain income, a certain family structure, a certain tone of voice, and a certain kind of silence.

The tragedy is not that we fail to achieve these things. The tragedy is that we succeed, only to discover that none of it nourishes the soul.

Is it not curious that we’ve built entire lives chasing what we did not choose?

Education is perhaps the most celebrated of these institutions. A revered pathway to enlightenment, they say. But what is education, truly? Is it the systematic accumulation of facts, dates, and formulas? Or is it a preparation for life, a life of thought, of critical engagement, of radical self awareness?

If education were indeed liberation, would its primary function be to sort us into employment categories? Would it not instead encourage rebellion, doubt, and original thought?

We claim to educate minds, yet we punish deviation from the syllabus. We ask students to be curious, and then reward only those who reproduce what we’ve already told them. We have designed
an elaborate system to ensure that the young emerge thinking not for themselves, but like everyone else.

We must ask: Who does this serve?

There is an unspoken violence in the way we school our children, shaping them for usefulness rather than authenticity. We reward obedience and punctuality over creativity and moral courage. We normalize a life spent in desks and cubicles, where silence is a virtue and asking “why” is a problem.

Are we not merely manufacturing citizens who can function in the economy, rather than people who can think critically about the world they are building?

And the economy. Yes, the high altar of our secular age. We speak of it with the reverence once reserved for gods. GDP growth. Unemployment rates. Inflation targets. But rarely do we ask: What is this machinery for? Who oils its gears, and who benefits from its motion?

We are told the economy exists to serve people. But in practice, it is people who serve the economy. People wake when it demands, move where it commands, sacrifice leisure, rest, and even ethics in pursuit of its approval. We do not live in economies. We live under them. Beneath them. At their mercy.

We work jobs that do not inspire us, sell products we do not believe in, and compete in arenas that were never designed for our flourishing. And when we feel the dull ache of meaninglessness, we are
prescribed productivity. When we feel exhausted, we are offered consumerism. When we feel broken, we are blamed for not adapting better.

But who created this value system? Who declared that waking up before dawn to enter traffic, arriving in glass towers to answer emails about services we do not need, should be called a “career”? Who convinced us that burnout is a badge of honor, and that rest must be earned through suffering?

Can an economy be considered healthy if the people in it are not?

We hear that success is within reach, that meritocracy rewards the worthy. But we must be honest. The ladder of progress is tilted. Some are born at the top. Others are handed a broken rung. The story of hard work is comforting because it makes the privileged feel moral and the suffering feel responsible.

And so we work harder. Endlessly. Tirelessly. But toward what? A house with more rooms than inhabitants? A retirement party with cake and forgotten dreams? An obituary filled with titles but empty of self?

We rarely interrogate success itself. Is it accumulation? Is it recognition? Is it survival? What does it profit a person to gain the world, yet lose the ability to feel, to question, to be? And when we look for leadership, what do we find?

Not visionaries, but managers. Not moral clarity, but marketing. Not courage, but calculation. Our leaders do not lead. They perform leadership. They study public sentiment, memorize empathy, rehearse grief, and simulate outrage. They manage perception, not reality.

We no longer expect wisdom. We settle for charisma.We no longer expect ethics. We settle for slogans. And in doing so, we become complicit in our own misgovernment. We must ask ourselves: why do we permit this?

Is it because we are afraid of chaos? Because deep down, we have given up on the idea of transformation, and now merely hope for decency?

Perhaps the most dangerous thing about the modern condition is not that it is unjust, but that it is comfortable enough to discourage revolt. We do not rebel because the lights are still on. Because the paycheck still arrives. Because the entertainment never ends. The system does not break us with brutality. It seduces us with convenience.

It distracts us.

It entertains us.

It keeps us busy.

You wake up. You scroll. You attend a meeting. You buy lunch. You answer emails. You get paid. You go home. You watch. You sleep. And repeat.

When, in this choreography of compliance, do you get to ask: Who am I?

When do you get to say: This is not enough.

We are haunted by the ghosts of possibilities we buried to please society. Artists who became accountants. Poets who became public servants. Philosophers who became managers of other people’s dreams. And all along the way, they were told: "Be practical. Be realistic. Play the
game."

But who wrote the rules of this game? And who wins,truly?

It is no accident that the greatest crises of our time are crises of meaning. We have housing, but no home. We have food, but no nourishment. We have data, but no wisdom. We have jobs, but no purpose.

We are surrounded by systems — legal, economic, educational, and political — that are efficient, but not humane. They function, but they do not feel. They produce, but they do not reflect.

And we, caught in the cogs, begin to forget that we are more than participants. We are more than functions. We are more than profiles, more than roles, more than the sum of our responsibilities. We are conscious beings, capable of reflection, of resistance, of revolution.

But that capacity is being dulled.

We are taught to distrust discomfort. To avoid solitude. To fear the questions that wake us at night: Is this it? Is this all I am meant to be?

These are not questions of despair. They are the beginnings of awakening.

To question the system is not to be ungrateful. It is to be alive.

So we must cultivate doubt, not as paralysis, but as power.

We must learn to ask uncomfortable questions without rushing for answers. We must embrace the ambiguity of being human in a world that demands certainty. We must dare to stand still in a culture of constant motion. Because stillness is where truth begins. In stillness, the lies lose their volume. In stillness, you hear your own voice, the one that got lost beneath the expectations.

And when you hear it, your real voice, raw and uncertain, do not turn away. It may not offer clear answers. It may not promise prosperity. But it will give you something the world cannot manufacture: honesty. So I ask you again: What is a good life?

Not the one they told you to live. But the one you would choose, if you were finally, fully free. Now pause. Breathe. And ask: who have I become? And who did I promise myself I’d be, before the world told me otherwise?