Dreams vs. Survival

Sometimes I wonder if we ever really get to dream freely in Nigeria, or if our dreams are always tethered to survival first.

As children, our dreams were wild, unfiltered. We said them without calculation: astronaut, writer, footballer, doctor, pilot, artist. We imagined a world where desire alone could carry us forward. But growing older, the dreams began to shrink — not because we stopped wanting them, but because the world around us kept demanding that we trade passion for practicality.

And in that shift, something becomes painfully clear: the line between passion, career, purpose, dreams, and survival is thin. Almost invisible.

We are told to find our passion, but passion doesn’t pay rent. We are encouraged to build careers, but careers can become cages when chosen only for stability, not fulfillment. We are urged to pursue purpose, but purpose feels too heavy when your basic needs are unmet. Dreams are fragile, constantly negotiating with reality. And survival? Survival is impatient. It demands daily attention.

Everywhere you look, these words — passion, career, purpose, dreams, survival — collide. The boy who once wanted to be a filmmaker now spends his days buried in spreadsheets. The girl who once filled notebooks with poetry now sells wigs online, her words buried under invoices and dispatch notes. The musician hums under his breath while sending office emails. We call it hustle. But sometimes hustle is just another word for quiet surrender.

And it is worse here, because being young in Nigeria means survival is not just personal — it is national. It is the traffic that eats up hours of your life, hours you cannot pour into your craft. It is the unstable power supply that interrupts a song halfway or silences the hum of a sewing machine. It is the job market that pushes you toward anything available, never mind if it matches your dreams. It is the constant negotiation between wanting to live fully and needing to simply stay alive.

Still, dreams refuse to die. They live in hidden corners: in sketchbooks under beds, in unfinished songs saved on old phones, in business plans scribbled during midnight when the noise dies down. They whisper in moments when no one is watching, reminding us of who we thought we could be.

And yet, survival keeps screaming louder. Rent is not patient. Traffic does not respect time. Bills do not care about vision boards. Hunger has no respect for “finding your purpose.”

So we wait. We postpone. When things get better, when I earn more, when I finally have time.

And maybe the cruelest thing about it is that being Nigerian often feels like being born into a system that weighs down your dreams before they even learn how to walk. Here, dreaming itself feels like rebellion.

The line between passion, career, purpose, dreams, and survival will always be thin. Sometimes they overlap beautifully; other times they pull us apart. And the hardest truth is that for many, survival wins more often than it should.

But still, we carry our dreams like fragile glass in our pockets, hoping the world won’t break them before we find space to breathe.

Because perhaps the heaviest part of being young and Nigerian is this: not that survival steals our dreams, but that it teaches us to live as though dreaming were a luxury we cannot afford.