My mother has always told me that the surest way to success is patience—patience with a job, respect for a boss, and diligence in your work. She is a teacher, and to her, success has a shape: a payslip sliding across a desk at the end of every month.
I don’t see her as successful. And I don’t want to become her. For me, and for my friend Cathy, a salary is not security. It is slavery with better branding.
That conviction is why we turned to making reels, building a TikTok presence, and chasing online gigs. Six months after I quit formal employment, I earn a living—modest, unpredictable, but mine. It buys me something no payslip ever did: peace and distance from a corporate boss I feared the way you fear something with teeth.
I no longer wake before dawn to negotiate with a mirror over what to wear, or sprint for a matatu, or walk into an office to absorb the temper of a supervisor who profits from my sweat while I spend years accumulating nothing but a title that pays no dividends when I die.
My lifestyle now fits inside a phone, a laptop, and a few AI tools. Some days I’m designing a logo for a client in the United States. Other days I’m shooting content to market Mama Ciru’s mitumba stall on TikTok or editing footage for a local fish joint down the road. I set my own pace. I answer to my own standards. My boss is the version of myself that shows up each morning, and that version has never once shouted at me.
I grew up watching my parents labor for decades, only to be met with retrenchment, low pay, or hours that swallowed their evenings whole. The old promise, that a degree leads automatically to a good job, no longer holds the shape of truth for people my age. So instead of waiting indefinitely for a government post, a county vacancy, or a private-sector opening that may never come, I decided to build my own.
I learned early that freedom arrives with a price tag: uncertainty. There are weeks with no clients and months where sales stall completely. I have posted content for months at a stretch before a single shilling came in. There is no guaranteed salary waiting for me at month’s end, no paid leave, and no employer-sponsored cover if I fall ill. The safety nets that cushioned my parents’ generation simply aren’t mine to inherit.
Still, I take the risk willingly, because what I’m buying with that risk is control over my own time and the chance to build something that belongs to no one but me.
This independence has taught me something the corporate world never could: skills that don’t expire and can’t be declared redundant. I can edit. I can shoot. I can go live, tutor, photograph, and market a brand online—each one a separate stream, so that if one runs dry, another is already flowing. In a world where a single job can vanish overnight, I would rather be irreplaceable than employed.
When I get home in the evening after a whole afternoon shooting content, my mother in the kitchen having come from school and ranting about how I can’t be just productive in her own way, I’ll be following on the comments on my latest videos while looking for a potential client.
