In 2022, I was crashing with a friend in Abakpa, Enugu. We were both spectacularly broke, the kind of broke where you begin to suspect that the universe might have accidentally skipped your name during the global distribution of good fortune. Bruh, were poooor. We even went for NYSC, if only to qualify for the federal government’s generous ₦33,000 monthly allowance, a sum that sounds respectable until you actually try to live on it. The only thing separating his financial situation from mine was a small technicality which was that the house we lived in belonged to his brother, who had sensibly relocated abroad. Remove that detail and we were two one-year-old graduates with no jobs, no prospects, and an extraordinary amount of free time to sit around watching the days pass like the cars flying by us while we shouted “that’s my car!” knowing very well it wasn’t.
Most mornings followed the same loose routine. We would wake up, stare at our phones as if a miracle might materialize in the notification bar, and then spend the rest of the day performing small acts of optimism. Maybe a job would appear. Maybe someone would call. Maybe some mysterious financial windfall would descend from the heavens and allow us to eat something more sophisticated than okpa and lukewarm water. It wasn’t a strategy so much as a lifestyle. Even the okpa itself was usually bought on credit, and the woman who sold it to us had the patient optimism of someone investing in a very long-term startup. She would hand us the food with a smile that seemed to say: one day, when you people finally make it in life, you will remember me.
But the arrangement wasn’t sustainable. Even my body, which had spent years faithfully storing emergency calories, began to surrender to the situation. The skin arund my neck started thinning out in a way that felt mildly disrespectful, and for the first time since 2011 I caught sight of my collarbone. That’s when it became clear that things were getting serious. We were desperate. Not long after, I stumbled into what can only be described as one of the stranger employment opportunities of my life. Through the chaotic labor marketplace that is Upwork, I managed to land a job writing profiles about adult film actresses (y’know pornstars) for a fairly shadowy website whose design suggested it had not been updated since maybe the Obasanjo administration. The gig itself sounded simple enough: I would receive the name of a performer, do some research about their career, and write a short article about them. On paper, it was just content writing but there was a small teeny tiny complication.
I was a Christian. Not the kind who could quote entire chapters of Romans on command (my circuit leader would give anything for that miracle), but Christian enough to suspect that Jesus Christ would probably not consider “professional pornography researcher” a spiritually sound career path. Unfortunately, moral dilemmas have a way of shrinking dramatically when you are broke. Hunger has its own theology, and in that moment the promise of quick money felt far more immediate than any abstract concern about divine disapproval. So I took the job. After all, I figured the task was straightforward; look the person up, gather a few facts, write the article, collect the payment, and move on with my life.
Except that wasn’t quite how the job worked.
As it turned out, the assignment required me to actually watch several videos and link specific moments from them as references for the article. This was apparently part of the site’s commitment to “accuracy,” which is not a word I had previously associated with this particular corner of the internet. What I discovered very quickly is that adult film content much like any other form of media follows its own set of patterns and techniques. There’s a certain psychology to it, a formula quietly engineered to keep viewers watching far longer than they originally intended. And before I knew it, I had accidentally become a very reluctant student of the subject. When I learned the full scope of what the job actually required, my enthusiasm cooled immediately. Research is one thing. Sitting down and intentionally watching several videos in the name of “content accuracy” felt like something else entirely. I already knew, deep down, that this was not a lane I was particularly proud to be occupying. The hunger had pushed me there, sure, but hunger has a funny way of quieting your conscience just long enough for you to make decisions you later have to explain to yourself.
So I did what most confused people do in moments like that: I called a friend. This friend of mine was a software engineer. Technically he still is, though the “soft” part of software engineer has long since evaporated from his life somewhere along the road. He’s the sort of person who delivers advice to me in a very direct, practical way and with very little emotional cushioning. When I explained my situation, he laughed cos as it turned out, he had recently landed a freelance gig of his own. The job was to build a website for a group of clients who, at the time of hiring, had been suspiciously vague about what exactly the website was for. Initially he assumed it was some kind of small business landing page. Maybe logistics. Maybe consulting. Something boring and legitimate.
But as the project went on, he knew there was something up.
Every time he scheduled a review meeting, the only feedback they seemed to care about was whether the site looked convincing. They didn’t want to know if it was functional or scalable. Just convincing. Good enough, they said, to stay online long enough for money to start coming in. That was when the realization slowly crept in tha he had accidentally signed up to build a website for what appeared to be a group of Yahoo boys. It was not exactly the sort of portfolio piece you proudly showcase on LinkedIn. But he had taken the job for the same reason I had taken mine: the money. Work had been slow, opportunities even slower, and when something finally appeared you didn’t spend too much time interrogating it. You simply grabbed it and hoped it wouldn’t explode in your hands. His strategy to these things, he told me, was not to ask too many questions. The less he knew about the mechanics of whatever they were doing, the less complicit he felt in the whole operation. It was a strange kind of moral compartmentalization, a version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
In the end, I did what broke people throughout history have always done when confronted with a complicated moral dilemma and an empty stomach: I finished the job. I watched what needed to be watched. I took notes and somewhere along the way, I realized that the whole industry had its own strange internal logic with all the small psychological tricks designed to keep the viewer exactly where they were. It was unsettling to study, but study it I did. Then I sat down and poured everything I had learned onto the page. When I finished writing the article, I felt… dirty is probably the most honest word for it. I had crossed a line I never imagined could even be crossed but the alternative, at that moment, was to continue sitting around in Abakpa hoping that a miracle would somehow materialize into dinner.
Around that time I found solace in something I had once read somewhere that said: if you ask God for rain, you still have to step outside to see if He answered your prayer. Maybe that was what this was. Maybe this strange, morally confusing Upwork gig was simply the rain I had been praying for, arriving in a form I hadn’t exactly anticipated.
So I sent the article in and to my surprise, the client paid in full almost immediately. No edits or revisions. No long chain of nitpicking emails about formatting or tone. Just a clean payment notification. I remember sitting there staring at the screen for a moment, then using the money to buy food. And I’m not exaggerating when I say I ate that meal with tears in my eyes.
The strange part is that I still have access to that corner of the internet where the article was supposed to be published. Every once in a while, out of curiosity more than anything else, I check the site to see if the story ever went live. It never has. And if I’m being honest, a small part of me is quietly grateful for that.
The stretch between 2021, 2022, and early 2023 was full of jobs like that. Strange, morally flexible, slightly surreal gigs that appeared out of nowhere and disappeared just as quickly. Technically I called myself a writer. On paper, I was a freelancer. But the funny thing about a lot of that work is that it wasn’t the sort of writing you could proudly describe in polite conversation. Nobody asks what you do for a living and expects to hear, “Well, last week I was analyzing adult film psychology for a website that might exist somewhere on the darker side of the internet.” So I developed a simple philosophy which was that if the money cleared, the details were optional.
Looking back, I think the first thirty years of a person’s life — which is the only stretch of time I can speak about with any real authority — are mostly a long process of having your assumptions about the world slowly dismantled. Your dreams change. Your opinions about life change. The things you once believed with absolute conviction begin to look a little less certain. You discover, for instance, that it is entirely possible to work extremely hard and still be broke. You learn that intelligence, by itself, is not a particularly valuable currency if you have no platform to demonstrate it. And you start to understand why people grow skeptical of the sweeping life philosophies that young people tend to deliver with such confidence. It’s not that those opinions are malicious, in fact they’re usually sincere, it’s just that they’re often formed before life has had the chance to complicate them.
Experience has a way of sanding down certainty.
To be fair, my circumstances have improved a lot over the past few years. The strange Upwork gigs have mostly faded into the background, and my luck — if that’s the right word for it — has shifted in many ways but something interesting happens when you spend enough time doing work you don’t exactly love just to survive: that version of you never fully disappears. It stays somewhere in the background, quietly reminding you what things used to feel like. And in a country like Nigeria, especially when you come from a poor background, that memory never really lets you relax. Even when you manage to claw your way into the middle class, the road back to poverty never feels particularly far away. In fact, it often feels like it’s waiting patiently, right there on the ramp after your very next left turn.