AN ODE TO THE DREAMS WE HAD TO LEAVE BEHIND.

Dreamsss By Beck

When I tell people how much I hate what Nigeria robs you of, I think they sometimes assume I’m exaggerating.

But I don’t mean only money, comfort, infrastructure, or opportunities.

Sometimes I mean dreams.

Do people think I always wanted to become an engineering lead, consulting for companies and working in environments that can be incredibly demanding on your health?

I’m grateful for what I’ve built. I know how fortunate I am in many ways.

But this wasn’t always the dream.

I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer.

Maybe the stereotypical little-boy dream, but I really wanted it.

I wanted to work on planes. Properly work on them. Build things that felt enormous and impossible. Be somewhere doing core engineering and contributing to the kind of machines people look into the sky to see.

At some point, yes, I became interested in tech too.

But growing up here teaches you to pivot.

Then pivot again.

You learn to look at the dream, look at the opportunities available, look at the economy, look at what can actually pay you, and quietly begin negotiating with yourself.

Maybe not this.

Maybe something close.

Maybe something practical.

Maybe I can do this instead.

And before you know it, you have become very good at adapting.

People praise you for it too.

Resilient.
Resourceful.
Versatile.
Tough.

And sometimes I hate those words.

Because nobody asks whether you wanted to be that resilient in the first place.

Nobody asks what you had to let go of to become so adaptable.

I think about people who genuinely loved biology, chemistry, physics, agriculture, or some deeply practical science. They went to university and actually studied the thing they loved.

And then graduation comes.

What next?

How many people eventually have to move away from the thing they spent years imagining themselves doing simply because there is nowhere meaningful for that dream to go?

That bothers me.

There is a particular kind of grief in becoming successful at something you had to learn to want.

And perhaps that is why I get so angry about this.

Because I don’t only mourn my own original dreams.

I mourn all the versions of people that never got the chance to exist.

The scientist who became something else.

The researcher who stopped researching.

The engineer who never got to build.

The artist who became practical.

The person who eventually stopped answering the question, “What do you want to be?” and started asking, “What can actually work?”

I have new interests now.

Mechanical engineering fascinates me. Hardware does too. I enjoy homelabbing, pulling things apart, understanding how systems actually work.

Maybe these are new dreams.

Maybe life does that sometimes. Maybe one dream dies and another one slowly introduces itself.

But I still hate that adaptation was compulsory.

I hate that so many of us were taught to toughen up when what we really needed was room to explore.

I hate how easily survival can become a substitute for ambition.

And I hate that I’m sitting here on a Sunday evening writing about it on Substack.

There is no lesson here.

No inspirational ending about everything happening for a reason.

Some dreams simply deserved a better chance.

This is just a small tribute to them.

To the things we wanted to build.

To the people we thought we would become.

And to all the lives we quietly left behind while learning how to survive.