“Life as a reality to be experienced, not a problem to be solved.” I’m quite sure that is actually what my life is centered on, has always been centered on and I am just discovering that now. The thing about life experiences is that, long before you have a meaning for it, you’ll find that you have actually been inhabiting it. Just like I discovered that I have been living like a Kierkegaard for the past three years now without knowing that until I recently discovered Søren Kierkegaard. And if I had discovered him before then, maybe I would have said his philosophy influenced my whole ideology, but I was already a Kierkegaard before I knew that what I was living out as my life already had a founding father and the ideology fits perfectly with your reality to the point you begin to question yourself: How is it possible that this is exactly what I’ve been rediscovering on my own from my experience? This is something you’ve been philosophizing on your own, without any teacher, and you find out what you’ve been discovering on your own from your deep thought and meditation was already in existence and created before you.
Life is a reality to be experienced, and not a problem to be solved says Søren Kierkegaard. When you get to understand that phrase, it feels like a real life hack, like you’ve been given the formula to solve an equation just like in mathematics. The mindset is a very powerful tool, and whatever you feed the mindset tends to regenerate into a much bigger perspective. And maybe that is why it is so easy to indoctrinate the mind of a child into whatever you want it to be before the child could get to the point of developing his or her own thoughts and reasoning. It is a tool so powerful that when the child eventually grows up with it, he defends that doctrine like his life depends on it, and sometimes with his life. Understanding life as a reality to be experienced means that you get to see things from a whole different perspective, and you start to redefine a whole lot of things, if not everything you know. You tend to discover what we call the power of internal locus of control, which means you start to redefine the meaning of things according to how best you think it is from the perspective of fulfillment and self sufficiency. And maybe that has always been the problem with society in regards to free thinkers. Because the ideology of a free thinker might be the most dangerous tool to ever exist and it is the one tool they cannot wield. So it is easier for them to create an indoctrination that bounds everyone into a single line in a way that gives them control over what people do and how people see or define things. I call that getting trapped by the system.
The internal locus of control definitely teaches you how to see things from a whole new perspective. For example, when it comes to failures, we see failures as something that is actually not a good and ought to be avoided by all means. But understanding life as a reality to be experienced is when you get to be so open minded to the point of seeing failure not just as failure, but as a reality to be experienced. What is that experience that this failure, or what you see as failure, could ever teach you? And when you get to that point of being open minded to see what could be instead of what has been, you start to understand that from success you don’t learn much, but from failure you learn a whole lot more. You tend to discover a whole lot of new different abilities and potentials you never knew you had. You start to see and understand failure from a positive perspective because you realize that with success you could never have learned this much and discovered a whole lot about yourself. In 2023, I had an encounter that I would see then as a failure because when my visa was denied twice that year, it felt like a life threatening failure. But that failure led me to a new path or rather it rerouted me back to the original path because it has always been the path and I ventured off it which took me on a whole new journey where I had to discover a whole lot of potentials that I never knew that I was capable of within three years. Things I never imagined possible all my years before 2023, even though I went to one of the best schools and I was one of the brilliant and intelligent, smart kids then. I still am even now
2023 required me unlearning a whole lot of things that I had been taught, and I had to start relearning everything from a new perspective and ideology of experience. Literally, I had to start seeing everything, every issue, every encounter as an experience. So instead of focusing on why, I start to focus on: what is this trying to teach me? What am I supposed to learn from this? And that change in my thinking and understanding perspective, when my questions change from why to what, as simple as it sounds, became one of the most illuminating epiphany I could ever discover. So understanding life as a reality to be experienced will have you walk through the same path others walked through and where others failed, you succeed. Where and what others see from a negative perspective, you don’t just see positivity, you discover life changing opportunities that others have been hustling for. Life with society, or living life according to society’s doctrine, teaches you to follow a timeline, a particular pattern, formula, systemic confinement. But life as a reality to be experienced teaches you to look beyond all those timelines and you start to see them as limiting factors and obstacles to what you could definitely achieve because the size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them.
And how did I get to this part? I got to this part after I literally tried everything I’ve been taught by society in 2023 and none of them produced the expected and desired result. So I decided to try the most dangerous thing ever, doing the opposite of what I’ve been taught to do, the opposite of what I’ve been doing all my life. And it took a whole lot of courage for me to venture into what could be, into the unknown, rather than sticking with what’s familiar. I took a radical step of trying the opposite of what I’ve known my entire life, to try the unknown, to see what could be. And I discovered that what I’ve been dreaming and hoping for, what I’ve been seeing as fulfillment and the perfect life, was too small. The size of my dreams and visions increased tremendously and is still increasing because the unknown will show you the possibility of the things you think are impossible. It will also teach you that you don’t need what you think you need in order to make that happen. You could be in this space where you think you need a certain certification or degree in order to attain or get to this, to be let into a particular room. But you would find out that even without those degrees, a seat was already being made for you there.
Life loses its shackles and that’s the phase I call the becoming phase, and there is still so much to become. Because if I stop becoming, I stop living. That is the essence of life: to see what could be, and not to stick to what has been. I guess that’s why we say the best of God is not in the past, but in the future and the future is not known to us(Unknown). I have long been fascinated with philosophy, way before I studied it as a course in the university. It was something that was intriguing to me when I was a young adolescent, and maybe part of the reason was because I knew it’s one of the courses you must study before you become a priest. As a kid, I so much wanted to become one, and I still do right now. Even though the path towards that dream has been anything but straight. My classmates have been ordained priests in our home diocese and here I am, 6 am on the morning of 5th September 2026 at the age of 29, writing a statement of purpose for a master degree application in philosophy because my life is a reality to be experienced and not a problem to be solved.
My life as a reality to be experienced would take me through going to the university to study philosophy for my undergraduate degree. Even though my first choice was English and Literature Studies which I was ineligible to study but was qualified to study philosophy. And no, I did not see that as a coincidence. Philosophy, I studied and I graduated with flying colors in 2021. But by 2023, I would start living philosophically without even knowing that was what I was doing. I became a Kierkegaard before I had a name for it. My life as a reality to be experienced would continue to the part of getting visa denial twice in 2023, discovering a whole new career path in social work by 2024, applying for my master’s in social work and getting admitted with a scholarship.
But also, my life as a reality to be experienced would unlock the dormant potentials in me I never knew I had, turning me into an academic counselor and a clinical researcher by 2024, a writer in 2025, and by 2026, an award winning author, with quite a number of my writings being published across international blogs and literary magazines including the United Nations Poetry Anthology (Vol. 4)
My life as a reality to be experienced would be me writing my PhD thesis on the topic: Life as a Reality to Be Experienced and Not a Problem to Be Solved. After all, I’m a Kierkegaard.
