By Sam Agona
A serie of events in the recent past have triggered my mind into thinking that humans get bored of a mainstream life but they just don’t know it. Human beings have a high propensity to look out for a something different within life than live within confines of day to day routine. I am sure I am not thinking crazy and some of these scenarios will shed light to my imagination;
University education has become too mainstream and will soon be dissolute. It is about some system of education like 7-4-2-3/4/5 like it is in Uganda. But what is all this about? Going to school getting a few documents, looking for jobs here and there or starting up some business of your own, need not to mention vying for a political seat, over time, school completion looks to be a baseline of success, I find this just too mainstream and boring.
Mainstream life is boring. People out there construct houses, and blame it on vanilla life. The roof will always be asbestos, tiles, dry grass thatch and or iron sheets. Why is it this way? Can’t we think of a life less boring than iron-sheets sort? Can’t we?
This is dynamism..
Social behavior; around 2009 – 10, Pastor Male and Pastor Martin Ssempa, opened a case against Pastor Kayanja of Miracle Center because of what they called “Sodomy”. In the subsequent weeks, Dr. Hilary Bainemigisha (whom I consider one of the best writers in Uganda) elaborated it all this way. People do great things and get bored. They can actually get bored of their success, thus rendering life unchallenging. Its human nature that they always seek for something outside the normal way of living, therefore it was understandable if a man who has close to 10,000 people forming part of his congregation one day chooses to have a sexual relationship with young boys. If you asked me, what is this? This is nothing but getting out of the mainstream way of living.
Marriage life; Man identifying a woman or woman identifying a man, marrying them, living happily ever after and spending all your nights with only them until death. This sounds so terminal. People have been doing this sort of dating as back as the BC days. How, however does this happen today? Plenty a people are bored by such “mainstream-ism”. My advise, is date.. date and date till you cant date no more..
Yes only one, but till when?
Women with their body sizes; why on earth do women stress over slimness and slenderness in the name of something as fictional as body figure; So many women are bothered by the level of estrogen generated by their body. Who really wants and or cares about this? Almost every woman out there is bothered about her size, how mainstream can life be?
She is perfect in her own world..
Mainstream in Ugandan media, the best man at the end of the year will always be Museveni, worst man will be Dr. Kiiza Besigye, on the first of January; pages will always have pictures of fireworks. After releasing results, it’s the rule of thumb that a bunch of students will have their pictures on the pages following their results. This has become so mainstream that possibly newspapers that ignore pasting pictures of a few students on their pages won’t get enough sales for the day. Lately even TV stations show students based on results.
Working from 8am – 5pm; to begin with who said stamped the rule that people have to work from 8-5pm. Why can’t people change and start dressing up at 1 am or even 4 pm and go open office to attend to the day’s business? This is very mainstream; it may probably change one time in life.
Related to the above, who hard coded it that night is meant sleeping? Dying with the rule of thumb that night is meant for sleeping. This could be changed as well including how you sleep, the stress on putting on heavy clothes on your body in the name of a nighty is just not the thing, why not sleep how you were born? Life needs some dynamism than what it is right now.
Take the simple way please.. avoid being mainstream..
Birthday gifts and messages are too mainstream. Over the last so many years people write on each other’s Facebook wall, wishing them a happy birthday. This is great but till when? When I began finding this too mainstream, I stopped writing “HBD” or “Happy Birthday” on people’s Facebook wall just because I got bored by it, it’s just too mainstream.
To some people, life itself becomes too mainstream; this normally happens when challenges outweigh the reasons to be alive; such people normally do the obvious.
“Don’t be too blind to see that you need a change” – Justin Timberlake, 2002
