Monica & Monica 2 - The Film.

The astonishing success of Monica reveals something deeper than cinematic taste. It exposes an ancient moral architecture embedded within the Nigerian family: the quiet coronation of the firstborn child.

In much of Nigeria, the first child is not merely born; they are appointed.

Long before adulthood arrives, the firstborn is initiated into an invisible office. They learn, often without explicit instruction, that their life no longer belongs entirely to them. They are expected to become a shield against chaos, an insurer against poverty, a negotiator of family disputes, a sponsor of education, a substitute parent, and eventually a custodian of familial continuity itself. The burden is so culturally normalized that many firstborns mistake it for personality rather than conditioning.

One suspects that had Bertrand Russell examined this phenomenon, he would have approached it with both admiration and alarm. Russell possessed a profound distrust of traditions that converted accident into obligation. To him, the mere fact of being born first could not rationally justify a lifelong sentence of sacrificial responsibility. He would likely ask: by what logic does chronology become destiny?

Yet Russell was too intellectually honest to dismiss the system entirely. He understood that societies construct moral expectations to survive instability. In environments where state welfare is weak, pensions unreliable, and institutions fragile, the family becomes the primary insurance mechanism. The firstborn thus emerges as a kind of social technology. They are trained to carry collective anxieties so that the family unit may endure economic uncertainty.

Nigeria, perhaps more than many societies, perfected this arrangement because necessity demanded it.

The firstborn learns early that failure is not private. Their unemployment is interpreted as a family crisis. Their success is communal property. Their salary acquires many invisible signatures before they even spend it. Younger siblings may speak of “our eldest” with a tone usually reserved for ministries or development agencies. Weddings, hospital bills, school fees, rent, funerals, and business ventures all gravitate toward them with the inevitability of planets toward gravity.

And the remarkable thing is this: many firstborns accept the arrangement willingly.

Not because it is easy, but because duty, once moralized, becomes emotionally seductive. To provide is to matter. To sacrifice is to earn reverence. The firstborn often derives identity from usefulness. If they cease to rescue others, they fear becoming spiritually irrelevant. Thus, exhaustion is romanticized. Burnout becomes evidence of love.

Russell would have regarded this with caution. He spent much of his philosophical life warning humanity about the danger of inherited moral systems that glorify suffering. He argued repeatedly that guilt is one of civilization’s most efficient instruments of control. Nigerian firstborn culture frequently operates through precisely this mechanism. The child is praised not for discovering themselves, but for dissolving themselves into obligation.

This is why stories like Monica strike such a powerful nerve. Nigerians do not merely watch these narratives; they recognize themselves in them. The audience sees the eldest daughter who abandons her dreams to train siblings through university. They also see the eldest son whose private ambitions are postponed indefinitely because “home needs them.” They see the silent arithmetic of African responsibility: one child becomes the bridge over which the rest of the family crosses into stability.

There is nobility in this ethic. But there is also tragedy.

For every successful firstborn celebrated at family gatherings, there are thousands quietly carrying resentment, depression, emotional fatigue, or arrested selfhood. Some become authoritarian because burden hardens them. Others become emotionally unavailable because responsibility consumed the years in which personality should have developed freely. Many cannot distinguish love from obligation. They enter marriages already exhausted by decades of unpaid emotional labour.

Russell might ultimately conclude that the problem is not responsibility itself, but absolutism. A society may reasonably honour duty without transforming children into instruments of collective survival. The moral beauty of sacrifice disappears when sacrifice ceases to be voluntary.

And yet, despite the philosophical objections, the Nigerian family persists because it achieves something modern individualism often fails to provide: continuity. In the West, the individual is liberated but frequently isolated. In Nigeria, the individual is burdened but rarely abandoned. The firstborn suffers under expectation, but also inhabits a dense network of meaning. They belong to something larger than themselves.

This tension, between freedom and duty, selfhood and kinship, is precisely why the cultural psychology behind Monica resonates so profoundly. Nigerians are not simply applauding a film, they are witnessing the dramatization of an unwritten constitution that governs millions of homes.

The firstborn child, whether daughter or son, is often raised not merely as a person, but as a future institution.

The 500 Missing Talents.........The Misalignment Ignored.

The lament is familiar: vacancies abound, yet suitable candidates do not. In Moniepoint’s telling, some 500 roles sit unfilled for want of qualified young Nigerians. It is a striking claim, one that speaks to a deeper anxiety about skills, productivity and the future of work. But like many such claims, it risks flattening a complex labour-market failure into a moral fable about a generation.

Start with the arithmetic. “500 vacancies” is not the same as 500 equivalent opportunities. In any fast-growing fintech, the hiring stack is sharply tiered; a long tail of customer support and field-agent roles at modest wages, and a narrow apex of highly specialised engineering and risk positions commanding premium pay. To present this as a single, undifferentiated shortage is to conflate two distinct phenomena, underemployment at the base and scarcity at the top. A graduate who cannot write production-grade Go is not therefore unemployable; he is mismatched to a particular segment of demand. The bush may not be empty; the hunter’s rifle may simply be ill-suited to the game.

The supply-side critique, of students, parents and the narcotic pull of social media, is not without merit. Yet it glides too quickly over the institutional decay that produced the very deficits it decries. Nigeria’s education system did not falter in a vacuum. Two decades of underinvestment, recurrent industrial action, and a steady hollowing-out of teaching capacity have left curricula lagging far behind industry needs. When lecturers teach from notes older than their students, the surprise is not that graduates lack cloud-computing skills, but that they possess any marketable skills at all. To moralise about outcomes without naming their architects is to misdiagnose the disease.

Evidence, too, is treated loosely. Sweeping claims; “80% cannot pass SS1”, or that parents now enlist internet fraudsters as tutors, circulate widely but are rarely anchored in verifiable data. Nigeria’s National Bureau of Statistics does indeed document high youth unemployment and underemployment, particularly among those with lower levels of education. But anecdotes, however vivid, are a poor substitute for baselines. Without them, outrage becomes an end in itself.

Definitions matter. What counts as “qualified” in a modern fintech? Firms such as Moniepoint require engineers fluent in distributed systems, container orchestration and regulatory compliance regimes such as PCI-DSS. Yet few Nigerian universities offer sustained exposure to these domains; fewer still possess functional cloud laboratories. To berate graduates for lacking skills they were never taught is to demand mangoes from a cassava field. The failure here is systemic, not merely individual.

Nor is the demand side blameless. Nigeria’s most capable young developers are increasingly plugged into a global labour market. Remote work and dollar-denominated salaries have altered incentives decisively. A 22-year-old Python developer in Enugu can, with modest connectivity, earn several multiples of a local salary from an overseas employer. In that context, unfilled roles may reflect not an absence of talent, but its rational reallocation. The problem is less a shortage of workers than a shortage of competitive offers.

Class constraints further complicate the picture. Prescriptions about “early exposure to money” or “practical skills” assume access to devices, reliable electricity and affordable data, inputs that remain unevenly distributed. The child idling on a shared handset may not be choosing distraction over discipline; he may be rationing scarce bandwidth. In such conditions, exhortations to self-improvement, though well-meaning, risk sounding glib.

Companies, for their part, tend to behave as extractors rather than cultivators. If there is a pipeline problem, what has been done to repair it? How many internships have been funded, curricula co-designed, or polytechnics adopted? In advanced labour markets, firms routinely invest in apprenticeship and training ecosystems that align supply with demand. In Nigeria, such efforts remain sporadic. To lament a barren field without irrigating it is, at best, incomplete.

The critique of youth culture, of skits versus skills, also deserves scrutiny. Nigeria’s digital creators have built one of the country’s most exportable cultural industries, combining storytelling, marketing and platform strategy in ways that many formal sectors struggle to emulate. To dismiss this as mere frivolity is to overlook a domain in which Nigerian youths are not laggards but leaders. A more imaginative education system might study, rather than scorn, such comparative advantages.

None of this is to deny the kernel of truth in the original complaint. There is a genuine skills mismatch. The attention economy does distort incentives. Many households, strained by poverty, cannot provide the scaffolding that middle-class narratives take for granted. Discipline, creativity and economic literacy will indeed matter more than rote learning in the decades ahead.

But diagnosis should lead to prescription. A more constructive agenda would distribute responsibility more evenly. Firms could publish training budgets and commit to structured apprenticeship programmes. Government could prioritise basic infrastructure; abs, electricity, connectivity, without which any talk of digital skills is fanciful. Data, not anecdote, should guide the debate. And success stories, of young Nigerians building, coding and trading against the odds, should temper the prevailing pessimism.

The question, ultimately, is not only whether young Nigerians are prepared for the jobs of the future, it is whether those jobs, and the institutions that create them, are prepared for them. Until both sides of that equation are addressed, the vacancies will remain, on paper plentiful, in practice elusive.

The Coming Electorate: How Britain’s Youth May Redraw the Political Map by 2029 and 2034.

A quiet but consequential shift is underway in British political consciousness, one that may not fully register in Westminster until it is electorally unavoidable. It is not being driven by party manifestos, parliamentary debates, or even leadership contests. Rather, it is emerging in classrooms, group chats, and algorithmically curated feeds, where the next generation is forming a distinctly different understanding of politics itself.

A recent informal exchange with a 16-year-old voter-in-waiting is illustrative. When asked how young people might vote in future elections, her response was immediate and unambiguous: the Greens would command the youth vote due to their “humane policies,” while Reform would attract those who, in her words, “are basically racist but pretend they are not.” Notably absent from her political universe were the traditional pillars of British politics; Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats.

This is not an anecdote to be dismissed as adolescent simplification. It is, instead, a diagnostic signal.


The most striking feature of this emerging political lens is its moral absolutism. For this cohort, politics is no longer primarily a contest of economic frameworks, governance competence, or administrative credibility. It is a referendum on values, on perceived humanity, fairness, and social inclusion.

This represents a departure from the post-war electoral paradigm, in which class alignment and party loyalty structured political behaviour. Even the ideological battles of the 1980s retained a grounding in economic doctrine. Today’s younger voters, by contrast, are less concerned with the mechanics of fiscal policy than with the ethical posture of the actors proposing it.

This shift carries profound implications. Moral frameworks tend to produce binary classifications; good versus bad, humane versus inhumane, leaving limited space for the compromise and ambiguity that have historically underpinned British parliamentary politics.


Within this moralised landscape, smaller parties are acquiring disproportionate narrative influence. The Greens, for instance, are no longer merely an environmental pressure group seeking incremental policy gains. They are becoming, in the minds of many younger voters, a proxy for a broader ethical worldview encompassing climate responsibility, social justice, and anti-establishment sentiment.

Reform, conversely, is not being engaged on the technicalities of its platform but is interpreted as a cultural symbol, an inheritor of a political lineage associated with Brexit-era nationalism and, for some, exclusionary rhetoric.

This dynamic suggests that by 2029, and more decisively by 2034, British politics may not fragment electorally to the extent that proportional representation systems might produce, but it will fragment narratively. Smaller parties will define the ideological poles, while larger parties are forced into reactive positioning.

For the traditional parties, this presents a structural challenge. Their historical strength has lain in their ability to aggregate diverse interests into broad coalitions. However, coalition-building becomes significantly more difficult when voter expectations are framed in moral rather than transactional terms.

Labour, for instance, may find that technocratic competence and incremental reform, once sufficient to secure electoral trust, are no longer compelling to a generation seeking clear ethical positioning. Similarly, the Conservatives’ emphasis on stability and continuity may struggle to resonate in a political environment that increasingly rewards perceived moral clarity over institutional stewardship.

The Liberal Democrats, long positioned as a centrist alternative, face perhaps the greatest risk of irrelevance in a polarised moral landscape where nuance is easily interpreted as equivocation.

By 2029, the oldest members of this emerging cohort will be in their early twenties, politically active but not yet dominant. Their influence will likely manifest in:

Increased vote share for smaller, value-driven parties. Pressure on major parties to adopt sharper rhetorical positioning. Greater volatility in urban and university constituencies

However, the full structural impact is more likely to be realised by 2034. At that point, this generation will constitute a substantial portion of the electorate, with more settled political identities and higher turnout rates. If current attitudinal patterns persist, several outcomes become plausible:

1. Major parties may undergo ideological redefinition, aligning more explicitly with moral narratives rather than broad policy coalitions.

2. Electoral competition may increasingly resemble a contest between competing ethical frameworks rather than policy programmes.

3. Even without securing parliamentary majorities, smaller parties could exert sustained influence over national discourse, shaping what is politically thinkable.

It would be premature to conclude that this trajectory is fixed. Youth political attitudes are historically fluid, often moderating with age, economic responsibility, and exposure to institutional realities. Moreover, current perceptions are heavily mediated by digital ecosystems that amplify certain narratives while suppressing others.

Nonetheless, generational shifts in political cognition tend to leave lasting imprints. The post-war consensus, the Thatcherite realignment, and the Brexit coalition all originated in changes to how voters understood politics—not merely in how they voted.

What is emerging among Britain’s youth is not simply a preference for one party over another. It is a redefinition of the criteria by which political legitimacy is judged. If this redefinition endures, the elections of 2029 and 2034 may not just produce different winners, they may be contested on fundamentally different terms.

For a political system long anchored in pragmatism and incrementalism, that would mark a profound transformation.

The Age of Approximation.

There was a time when truth arrived unannounced; barefaced, unfiltered, occasionally inconvenient. It had pores, asymmetry and the audacity to age. Today, however, truth has undergone a quiet rebrand. It has been contoured, lifted, laminated, injected, and algorithmically refined into something far more agreeable; an aesthetic of approximation.

Welcome, darling, to the era of the Artificial Look.

It begins innocently enough. A little volume here, a little lift there. Hair that defies both gravity and genealogy, nails that could double as architectural extensions, and faces that hold the light not because of life lived, but because of glass-skin serums and ring lights positioned with military precision. The body, once a biography, is now a mood board; curated, constructed, and constantly updated.

We no longer arrive; we render.

And in this rendering, something fascinating has occurred; we have become the physical analogue of our own machines. Artificial Intelligence learns from data to produce something convincingly human. We, in turn, learn from curated images to produce something convincingly real. The feedback loop is exquisite, and the illusion is near perfect.

But perfection, as it turns out, is a rather fragile fiction.

Scroll long enough and the faces begin to blur into one another; a soft convergence of identical cheekbones, identical lips, identical expressions of effortless effort. Individuality, once the cornerstone of beauty, now feels almost… rebellious. To look unmistakably like oneself is, in some circles, the ultimate act of defiance.

So what, then, is our truth?
Is it the face before the filter, or the one that receives the applause? Is it the body that wakes up in the morning, or the one that exists forever in flattering angles and forgiving light? Is authenticity something we possess, or something we now strategically deploy?

Perhaps, the truth has not disappeared. Perhaps it has simply gone underground, retreating into the quiet spaces where the camera is off, where the mirror is unkind, where the self is encountered without witnesses. There, in the uncurated moments, truth still breathes. Untouched. Unbothered. Unmonetised.

And yet, one cannot entirely dismiss the allure of artifice. There is creativity here. Agency. Even a kind of authorship. To construct oneself is, in its own way, a declaration; I am not bound by what I was given. There is power in that, undeniable, intoxicating.

But power without reflection becomes parody.

And so we hover in this exquisite tension, between invention and inheritance, between simulation and self. We are, all of us, a little edited now. A little enhanced. A little… improved.

Or so we tell ourselves.

The real question is not whether we have become artificial. It is whether we still remember what it feels like to be unmistakably, imperfectly, gloriously real.

Because in a world where everything can be perfected, the last true luxury may well be authenticity, the kind that cannot be injected, downloaded, or designed.

The kind that simply is.

The story of Hồ Văn Thanh and his son Hồ Văn Lang is one of the most extraordinary modern cases of long-term isolation from society, a real-life survival narrative that feels almost mythic.

The Origin: War, Trauma, and Flight (1972)

The story begins during the Vietnam War.

In 1972, American bombing struck Thanh’s village in central Vietnam (Quảng Ngãi province). The attack killed several members of his family. Traumatized and convinced that the outside world was no longer safe, Hồ Văn Thanh fled into the dense forest with his then-infant son, Hồ Văn Lang.

At that moment, a decision driven by grief and fear became a 40-year separation from civilization.

Life in the Jungle (1972–2013)

For over four decades, father and son lived deep in the Vietnamese jungle, completely cut off from society.

How They Survived
Shelter: They built treehouses elevated several meters above ground—likely for protection from animals and perceived threats.

Food: They lived off wild fruits, cassava and maize they cultivated, small animals (hunted using rudimentary tools).

Clothing: Minimal; they wore loincloths made from tree bark.
Tools: Handmade from wood and salvaged materials.

Thanh, the father, retained fragmented memories of the outside world, but lived in a constant wartime mindset, believing the conflict might still be ongoing.

The Son: A Life Without Society

Hồ Văn Lang grew up entirely in the jungle, with:

No formal language (only a limited, improvised dialect with his father)
No concept of modern society, money, or social norms
No interaction with other humans beyond his father

Reports suggest:

He had extremely limited vocabulary
He did not fully grasp abstract social concepts
His behavior was described as calm, instinctive, and almost childlike, even as an adult

In many ways, Lang was not “escaping” society, he had never known it.

Discovery (2013)

In 2013, local villagers and authorities finally located them after years of rumors about “forest people.”

They were found:

Emaciated but alive
Living in primitive conditions
Initially resistant and fearful of outsiders

Their reintegration began cautiously.

Return to Civilization

They were brought back to a nearby village.

The Father – Hồ Văn Thanh
Struggled to adapt
Continued to exhibit paranoia linked to wartime trauma
Lived only a few more years, passing away in 2017
The Son – Hồ Văn Lang
Became a subject of global fascination
Slowly began adapting to:
Clothing
Basic social interaction
Structured living

However, full integration was extremely difficult:

He lacked foundational social conditioning
He struggled with language acquisition
His identity was rooted in a completely different mode of existence

Later Life and Death

Hồ Văn Lang lived quietly in Vietnam after returning to society. His story attracted international media, researchers, and filmmakers.

He died in 2021, reportedly from liver cancer.

Deeper Themes and Interpretations

This story is often discussed in terms of:

1. Trauma and Withdrawal

Thanh’s decision reflects how extreme trauma can lead to total disengagement from society, essentially creating a self-imposed exile.

2. Nature vs Civilization

Lang’s life raises profound questions:

What does it mean to be “human” without society?
How much of identity is socially constructed?
3. The Limits of Reintegration

After decades outside structured society, reintegration is not just difficult—it may be fundamentally incomplete.

Final Reflection

The story of Hồ Văn Thanh and Hồ Văn Lang is not just about survival—it is about:

Fear crystallized into a lifetime decision
A child raised outside the architecture of civilization
And the irreversible consequences of total isolation

It sits somewhere between anthropology, psychology, and tragedy, a stark reminder that while humans can survive almost anywhere, belonging to society is something that must be learned early, or may never fully be learned at all.