Author: Cornelius Ndubuisi

Cornelius Ndubuisi is a philosopher, graduate student of education, editor, publisher, and public speaker. He is passionate about educational and leadership development. This passion leans against the backdrop that sustainable development – at individual, organizational, national and international levels – simply and squarely depends on meaningful and functional education – not necessarily ‘schooling’.

10 Commandments for Friendship in Today’s World

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Everyone talks about friendship as if it’s simple: be loyal, be kind, be honest. 

But friendships today are more complex than ever. They are stretched thin by distance, distorted by social media, and pressured by the emotional demands of adulthood. The old advice is wholesome, yes, but insufficient for a world where connection is both easier and more fragile.

What’s one to do then?

Not have friends? Of course not.

There’s always a way out and here are 10 unconventional, outlier commandments of friendship.

The kind that actually builds depth, security, and long-lasting bonds in a noisy, fast-paced world.

Commandment #1

↪Thou Shalt Not Compete With Thy Friends

Comparison is the silent killer of friendship. Celebrate your friend’s wins without turning them into a mirror for your insecurities. Your friend’s success is not your failure but evidence that good things are possible. If you need to “keep up” with your friend, you’re a rival, not a companion. And if their success triggers anything in you, it should not be comparison but an earnest sense of happiness and maybe hope that your congratulations are also around the corner.

Commandment #2

↪Thou Shalt Give People Space Without Taking It Personally

Modern friendships fail because people interpret space as abandonment. Adults have schedules, stresses, ambitions, and seasons of silence. A healthy friendship can survive being put on ‘Do Not Disturb’. But, that does not mean allowing yourself to be taken for granted, either.

Commandment #3

↪Thou Shalt Not Demand Emotional Perfection

Your friend is not an emotional vending machine. They will disappoint you. They will misunderstand you. They will have days when they have nothing to give. Friendship thrives not because people are perfect, but because they are safe enough to be imperfect.

Commandment #4

↪Thou Shalt Practise the Discipline of Low Maintenance

Good friendships don’t require constant conversations but  consistent truth. You don’t need to talk every day. But you must be real every time you talk. Depth beats frequency.

Commandment #5

↪Thou Shalt Be Loyal in Silence, Not Just in Speech

It is easy to defend people when they are watching. True loyalty happens in rooms where your friend’s name comes up and they are not present. If you won’t protect your friend in rooms they cannot enter, you don’t deserve access to their trust.

Commandment #6

↪Thou Shalt Tell The Truth Even When It Risks the Friendship

A real friend is not someone who agrees with everything you do. They are someone who refuses to let you self-destruct politely. If you feel slighted that your friends are calling you out, maybe it’s time to ask if what you want is a friend or a yes man.

Commandment #7

↪Thou Shalt Respect Boundaries, Even The Ones You Don’t Understand

You may not understand why a friend asked for what they asked for, but if they tell you they need boundaries, respect it without interrogation. You need to stop seeing boundaries like obstacles and more like fences. Fences protect the home, same as boundaries.

Commandment #8

↪Thou Shalt Not Treat Thy Friend as a Dumping Ground

Venting has its place, but friendships collapse when one person becomes the emotional landfill of the group. Share your struggles responsibly and  don’t confuse friendship with therapy. Your friend is a human being, not a cushion for your chaos.

Commandment #9

↪Thou Shalt Not Make Everything About Thyself

A shocking number of friendships die because people forget to ask, “How are YOU?” Self-centredness is subtle. It starts slowly with interrupting stories, builds into hijacking conversations, and soon lands at minimising others’ pain. And when you ask, “how are you?” mean it? Don’t rush over or hope they simply say “fine” so that you can go on to discuss you. Ask and be intentional about getting into their responses.

Commandment #10

↪Thou Shalt Grow or Thou Shalt Drift

Friendships don’t last because of time; they last because of growth. You cannot remain connected to someone if one of you is evolving and the other is committed to stagnation. The rarest friendships are those where both people rise, learn, mature, self-reflect, and expand. 

True friendship isn’t built on constant closeness or similarity but on trust, maturity, emotional intelligence, and mutual evolution.

These commandments are like principles that elevate you. In a world full of shallow connections, the people who follow these principles become something rare: friends who feel like home, not like weight.

Minding Your Business: The Forgotten Skill for Growth in a Nosy World

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Somewhere along the road to hyper-connected living, we normalised a strange cultural habit of treating other people’s lives as public property. We zoom into their relationships, career choices, parenting styles, mistakes, joys, holidays, wardrobes, emotions, and even the tone of their captions.

In a world where everyone is watching everyone, minding your own business has quietly become a radical act, and paradoxically, one of the most powerful drivers of personal growth.

Most people think “mind your business” is about rudeness or indifference. Or that it means not calling out something wrong when you see it. It’s not. It is the posture that frees the mind from comparison, frees relationships from tension, and frees society from unnecessary friction. It is a discipline, a wisdom, a worldview, and quite honestly, a survival skill.

So, how do we mind our business the right way? Here’s how:

1. Assume You Don’t Know the Full Story Even When you’re Convinced you Do

Human beings see surfaces. We infer stories. We fill gaps with our anxieties, biases, and projections. The ability to pause and say, “I don’t know enough to have an opinion” is a hidden superpower. It immediately dissolves judgment, softens the ego, and restores compassion. Most conflicts, gossip cycles, and unnecessary emotional reactions come from the illusion of total knowledge. The truth is, many of us don’t want to miss out on dropping our “one cent”, so we fuel our replies and biases on the offhand, incomplete information we have and work with it. It’s even worse when such people still stand their ground after tangible information that disproves their take is released. You don’t know the full story.

2. Treat Other People’s Choices Like Locked Drawers

You wouldn’t walk into someone’s bedroom and start opening drawers, yet this is exactly what we do emotionally and mentally when we dissect people’s decisions. “But they brought their drawers to social media space. It’s not my fault if I look into it.” I hear you. They brought their matter forward, so you lose all sense of courtesy, right? When you see a choice you don’t understand, tell yourself: “This is a locked drawer. Not my property.” A couple announce they never want to have kids. That does not mean they hate kids, are child haters or bad people; they don’t want to have. It’s simple. You love kids, that’s fine. That drawer is not your property. You’ll be shocked by how much peace this unlocks.

3. Comparison is Emotional Theft; Stop Stealing From Yourself

Every moment spent analysing someone else’s path is a moment stolen from your own. You cannot grow and compare at the same time. Comparison is not admiration; it is distraction dressed in jealousy. It keeps you stuck in observation mode instead of creation mode. When your eyes are too busy on other people’s lives, your own life becomes blurry. The most successful, fulfilled people are not necessarily the smartest. They’re simply the most focused. They refuse to live life sideways. You can admire and not compare. You can infer and draw lessons without belittling your worth. They are them, and you are you. If there are decisions you have to make to adjust your life, make them, but do so with respect to your journey, not someone else’s.

4. Curate Ignorance Intentionally

The world tells you that you must be informed about everything. This is a lie. You need to be informed about what shapes your purpose, not what fuels your curiosity. Selective ignorance is a mental health strategy.

You don’t need to know who broke up with whom.

You don’t need to know what the neighbours bought.

You don’t need to know why someone quit their job or moved houses.

Curate ignorance like a minimalist curates furniture: keep only what adds value.

5. Celebrate People Without Studying Them

It is possible to admire someone’s success without performing a full autopsy on how they got there. You don’t need to decode their happiness, reverse-engineer their profits, or investigate their marriage. “Wow, they’ve only been active for three years and now have their own mansion.” “Can’t believe it’s digital products that gave him his wealth.” Why can’t you believe it, dearest inspector? Celebrate and move out of that space. Admiration becomes toxic only when it turns into analysis.

Try this: “I’m happy for them.” Full stop. No second sentence. No silent comparison. No psychological detective work.

6. If it Doesn’t Concern your Purpose, Goals, or Peace, it’s Noise

A simple filter to live by: “Does this information help me grow, help me love, or help me heal?” If the answer is no, it is noise, no matter how dramatic, juicy, or enticing. Confusing noise for relevance is one of the biggest growth-killers of our time. “But, I still need the information.” For what exactly? To gossip later on and distract yourself from your goals? Stay focused!

7. Your Attention is your Life, Protect it Like Property

Imagine your attention as a house. Every time you poke around other people’s business, you leave your own door wide open. You abandon your responsibilities, delay your dreams, weaken your confidence, and clutter your mind. Minding your business is ultimately about owning your mental estate. Personal growth accelerates when attention stops leaking.

8. Let Maturity Replace Curiosity

Curiosity is natural; maturity is chosen. Maturity tells you:

I don’t need to know everything.

I don’t need to verify rumours.

I don’t need to scrutinise strangers.

I don’t need to have opinions on lives I don’t live.

Freedom begins where unnecessary curiosity ends.9. Silence is sometimes the highest form of intelligence

In a loud world where everyone thinks their opinions are indispensable, silence is elegance. Choosing not to comment, especially when you can, is a sign of internal strength.

You don’t need to join every conversation or enter every digital argument. You don’t need to offer takes on issues that drain you.

You don’t need to drop hot takes on every subject matter. Sometimes the wisest thing you can say is nothing.

Minding your business is self-mastery.It is choosing depth over noise, focus over distraction, and growth over gossip.It is refusing to let your life become a spectator sport while you analyse everyone else’s highlight reel.In a world obsessed with watching, dissecting, criticising, and commenting, becoming a person who minds their business is transformational. It clears your mind, strengthens relationships, and makes coexistence not just possible, but beautiful.And best of all, it frees you to finally, fully, live your own life.

Unconventional Ways to Stay Sane in a Toxic and Addictive Social Media World

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Everyone already knows the standard advice: “limit your screen time,” “turn off notifications,” “unfollow negative people,” “take a break.” These are all lovely suggestions, but hardly transformative.

Social media is engineered to override such well-intentioned boundaries. Limit your screen time? What if you work as a social media manager? Turn off notifications? And if those notifications are part of your job? Unfollow negative people? Most times, you don’t even have to follow them for their vileness to spill over. Take a break? And if it’s your source of income? Then what? So, if the usual advice isn’t cutting it anymore, what is one supposed to do? How do we survive it and maintain our sanity? The answer lies in embracing a thinking pattern that is unconventional.

Here are some unusual, strategies for staying sane in a digital ecosystem that profits from your insanity.

1. Don’t Detox; De-personalise

The usual recommendation is to “step away for a week.” But detoxing only resets the hunger cycle. Because in that one week, so much would have happened, and with the evidence of FOMO reminding us that we left things behind, we find ourselves playing catch-up, which in turn leads to some serious binging.

Try this instead:

Stop treating your feed as a mirror. Treat it as a billboard. A mirror may reflect you, but a billboard doesn’t define you. The less personal meaning you attach to what you see, the less power it has over your emotions. When you stop interpreting every post as commentary on your life, your brain stops reacting as though social media were a battlefield.

2. Mute 90% of People You Actually Like

This sounds outrageous, but stay with me. The problem is not only toxic content but also excessive content. Even good content can be overwhelming. Mute people you genuinely care about but don’t need to keep up with daily. You will still check up on them from time to time, but at least it’ll be on your terms. This transforms your feed from “the whole world shouting at once” into something closer to a curated library. Peace returns instantly.

3. Create a “Boredom Folder” on Your Phone

Put all your social media apps inside a folder named BORING or ROAD TO POVERTY or TIME WASTER, anything that triggers your higher self. It works because identity beats discipline. Imagine wanting to doomscroll and you’re staring at the folder you called Road to Poverty. Would you not immediately snap out of that desire and find something better to do? 

4. Ruin Your Algorithm on Purpose

Your algorithm is essentially a mirror of your impulses. To weaken its grip:

  • Click random things you don’t care about.
  • Search for medieval pottery.
  • Like a video on mushroom farming.
  • Spend 20 minutes looking up cloud formations.

Your feed will become so confused that it stops controlling you. A chaotic algorithm is a safer algorithm.

5. Designate Areas For Your Apps

Don’t use social apps everywhere; choose one specific spot: a chair, a corner, or even the edge of your bed. You can take it a step further by designating apps in different corners. When you’re cooking, Spotify. When working, LinkedIn. In need of ideas, Pinterest by the window.

What if I have a small apartment? 

Work with your furniture then. When on the bed, decide that Instagram is a no and must be used by the door. By the time you’re settled for the night and realise you need to adjust towards the door to use IG, you’ll forgo the inconvenience and go to bed. This technique is strange but remarkably effective. Limit the territory, and you calm the craving.

6. The “Two-Minute Pride Rule”

Before you post anything, ask yourself: “Will I be proud of this in two minutes?” Not in two years. Two minutes. Posts made from impulse, be it a spike of anger, insecurity, envy, or validation-hunting, lose their power when subjected to this tiny delay. The question creates a psychological breath that many social media apps are designed to steal from you.

7. Follow Your Future Self, Not Your Current Mood

Your mood will always gravitate towards distraction. But your future self, that wiser, calmer version of you, has better taste. Before following a page or creator, ask: Would the person I’m trying to become find this useful? This mental shift filters your digital diet and makes your online environment a partner to your growth, not a parasite on your attention.

8. Treat Your Attention like Money (Because It Is)

Before scrolling, ask yourself: Would I pay £10 to see what I’m about to see? If the answer is no, why offer something more valuable than money, your focus? If you were charged £10 for every content you like, share or comment, would the final grand total make you say, Yes, money well spent, or would you cringe at your outcome? This mindset re-prices your time and shatters the illusion that social media is “free.”

9. Stop Trying to Stay Updated and Start Staying Aligned

People scroll endlessly seeking updates: on trends, on news, on other people’s lives, on gossip, on opinions. But staying “updated” is an impossible, draining task. Staying aligned? With your values, goals, identity, and purpose, now that’s worth your time. This is a better way to refocus your mindset. It’s not updates you need, it’s value alignment on that course you want to take, that tutorial that will make your art better, that recommendation for the next book to read, that review for a movie that will expand your reasoning and vocabulary. Every time you open an app, ask: Is this aligning me or fragmenting me?

10. Curate Your Digital Silence

Silence is not the absence of noise but the presence of meaning.

Schedule deliberate “silence pockets” during your day. Five minutes where you do nothing: no scrolling, no music, no notifications. You can find these five minutes when commuting or bathing, or immediately ou come back from work. Let your brain rest and catch a break. This will help your perspective to be clear, and your social media cravings will reduce without force.

Finally,

Sanity in today’s internet is not maintained through rigidity or retreat. It is maintained through intelligent resistance. Through thinking that refuses to be predictable, trainable, or programmable. You don’t beat the system by escaping it; you beat it by refusing to let it shape the inner architecture of your life. And the moment you start using the internet consciously rather than emotionally, you become the rarest thing online today: A sane person.

What We Lose When Tech Makes Life Easier

Cornelius Ndubuisi2 Comments

Technology promised to make life simpler. And it has.

Tasks that once took hours now take seconds.

A message crosses continents instantly.

Groceries appear at our doors.

Work that required entire departments can now be done by one person and a machine.

Yet as convenience becomes the new normal, it is worth asking: what have we traded for all this ease?

When everything works at the push of a button, effort starts to feel unnecessary. But effort used to shape how we understood value. You learned patience when you waited in line, skill when you solved a problem by hand, focus when you couldn’t rely on an app to think for you. Now, with most things automated, the connection between labour and reward grows thinner.

We get results without process, outcomes without the struggle that once gave them meaning.We have also lost a sense of attention. Technology keeps us moving, clicking, consuming. We no longer give full focus to one thing at a time, because something else is always a tap away. The constant flow of information promises stimulation but rarely delivers clarity. When every task is streamlined, thinking deeply starts to feel like an inconvenience.

There’s another cost: our tolerance for difficulty. Friction used to be part of living. You wrote things down to remember them. You learned directions by actually getting lost. These small moments built a kind of mental stamina. They forced the mind to engage, to store, to adapt. Today, memory sits in cloud storage. Maps do the navigating. Autocorrect finishes our sentences. The mind stays comfortable, but comfort has its own price: it dulls the edge of capability.

Technology’s biggest gift, convenience, might also be its biggest trap. The easier things become, the less we notice what we’re doing. You no longer need to think about the process, only the result. This breeds a passive way of living, one where curiosity fades and speed replaces reflection. We scroll, click, buy, and move on. The day fills up, but it rarely feels full.Of course, no one wants to go backward. No one wants to type on a typewriter or wash clothes by hand just to feel authentic.

Progress isn’t the problem. The problem is forgetting that ease and meaning are not the same thing. When every inconvenience disappears, so does the chance to discover what we’re capable of.

A tool is supposed to serve us, not replace the parts of us that make effort worthwhile: attention, creativity, resilience. The danger lies in outsourcing too much of what makes us human simply because it takes time. When technology does the thinking, deciding, and remembering for us, the self becomes smaller.

Maybe the question, then, isn’t whether technology makes life better. It’s whether it makes us better. Convenience without awareness only breeds dependence. The solution isn’t to abandon technology but to reintroduce a bit of friction, to occasionally choose the harder path, the slower method, the manual option.

What we lose when tech makes life easier isn’t something you can measure. It’s the satisfaction of mastery, the discipline that comes from patience, the sense of connection that grows through shared effort. The challenge now is to hold on to those things, even as the world keeps finding new ways to remove them.

5 Lessons “A House of Dynamite” Taught Me About Life, Leadership, and Fragility: A Movie Review

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I recently finished watching A House of Dynamite (2025), Kathryn Bigelow’s new Netflix political–nuclear thriller starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, and Jared Harris. Written by Noah Oppenheim, it’s a film that drops you right into the nerve centre of a world teetering on the edge.

A single, unidentified nuclear missile is detected, heading for the United States. What follows are 18 excruciating minutes replayed through the eyes of the military, the intelligence community, and the President himself.

The title, as Idris Elba’s President remarks in a line quoting the writer Norman Cousins, is “a reminder that we all live in a house of dynamite pretending the fuse isn’t lit.”

I said finished because the time I started watching it was different from when I actually finished it. I paused several times, not because the story was slow, but because my heart was pounding too fast. I even stepped outside at some point just to breathe. When I returned, the whole thing had gone from a regular movie-watching time to an experience that pressed down on my chest. And just when I feared the worst and hoped for the best at the same time, the film abruptly ended, leaving me to imagine the rest.

Trust me, the rest was unimaginable. Maybe that’s why the writers left it open-ended, because the only way to picture how it could end is if the real thing ever happened. And may it never.

A Lit Fuse

It’s a film about being caught off guard, about decades of preparation humbled by one unlucky miss, about systems that fail precisely when they’re needed most, and about the crippling paralysis that descends when too many decisions have to be made in too little time.

Picture this: in the Pentagon’s command post, alarms blare and screens flash red; in Fort Greely, Alaska, officers are frantically recalibrating interceptors; in the White House Situation Room, no one can confirm where the missile originated. And somewhere beneath all that chaos, Secretary of Defence Reid Baker, upon being evacuated, makes a brief, faltering call to his estranged daughter, a goodbye disguised as small talk, before walking out, removing his security tag, and leaping to his death. A silent protest against the unimaginable failure of a system built on the promise of control.

The world’s most powerful military was suddenly clueless, helpless, and frightened. The Ground-Based Midcourse Missiles failed to intercept. Communications collapsed. And for once, no one, not even the president, knew what to do.

Lessons from A House of Dynamite

1. Life happens behind the scenes, often beyond our awareness

As you go about your normal day, unseen forces are at work deciding the quality of your life, sometimes even whether you live or die. The ten million Chicagoans who would die upon impact never knew that in those seventeen minutes, their fate had already been sealed. We live each day unaware of how fragile everything is. In one of the film’s most moving moments, Secretary Baker calls his estranged daughter, just to hear her voice, but never manages to tell her what’s coming. And she, on the other hand, doesn’t realise that it is the last time they’ll speak. That’s how close and how distant life and death can be.

2. The weight of leadership is real

President Elba’s character once thought the nuclear football was purely symbolic, a deterrent, not a tool to be used. Until the day came when the impossible sat right in front of him. That’s what leadership often is: facing the nightmare you prayed would never arrive. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

3. Crisis reveals what training conceals

Everyone in those command posts saw and heard things they had never faced before. The alert rising to DEFCON 1. The intercepts failing. Systems collapsing. Designated survivors being whisked away under uncertain orders. In moments like that, training turns to instinct and instinct turns to fear. The calmest people are often the ones who know there’s no playbook for what’s unfolding.

4. Fortune is rarely fair, and luck is never logical

When FEMA’s new deputy was evacuated as a designated survivor, someone muttered, “She’s barely been here a year.” But in that chaos, it wasn’t merit that mattered, but luck. Life is like that. The day that tests your fortune doesn’t ask how long you’ve been around; it simply asks whether your name was on the list.

5. We can’t be too prepared, but we can be grounded in hope

All the systems, budgets, and simulations failed. What remained was faith and the trembling belief that maybe, somehow, it wouldn’t all end in fire. Preparation can take us far,, but hope carries us the rest of the way. And maybe that’s the lesson the movie wanted to leave us with: that the world may be wired for destruction, but we’re wired for hope.

    Watch it and watch it again!

    A House of Dynamite serves as a mirror held up to a world that pretends to be safe because it’s uncomfortable to imagine otherwise. It’s unsettling, brilliant, and brutally honest. It’s the kind of film you don’t just watch but survive.

    So, if you’ve seen it, watch it again, this time, with intent. Watch for the silences between orders, the faces behind the screens, the fear behind the protocol. And if you haven’t, find it on Netflix, and prepare to be moved, disturbed, and awakened. Because, in truth, we all live in a house of dynamite.