Reflections: What Africa Taught Me About Joy
In Nairobi’s largest slum, I discovered that joy can be rebellion.
We don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
When I boarded a flight to Nairobi in 2010, I thought I knew what I was walking into. Kibera (pronounced Key-beh-rah) is Africa’s largest slum, home to nearly a million people pressed into just a few square miles. I prepared myself for heartbreak, for despair, for the kind of sadness that stays lodged in your chest long after you’ve left.
But that’s not what I found.
I worked with boys in a rehabilitation center, kids barely into their teens, most of them addicted to glue. And yet what they handed me wasn’t sorrow. It was joy. They sang. They danced. They wanted to be filmed on my iPhone. They peppered me with questions, hungry for stories, hungry for life itself.
They didn’t have much, but they weren’t consumed by what they lacked. They didn’t carry the burden of comparison that so many of us in the West treat as normal. Their joy was rooted in presence, in curiosity, in courage. Because that’s what joy really is: courage. It takes courage to keep singing when the world has given you so little. It takes courage to play. To laugh. To let your heart stay open when life keeps trying to close it.
The only day I cried in Kibera was the day I left.
From there, I flew straight to West Palm Beach for a wedding at The Breakers, one of the most opulent hotels in America. Crystal chandeliers, marble floors, tables groaning under the weight of abundance. By all traditional measures, it was “joy.” And yet I felt strangely hollow. Because in that contrast, I realized: we’ve been sold a lie.
The hardest realization was this: we don’t just misunderstand joy, we project our own version of it onto others. In the West, we equate joy with abundance, success with status, happiness with having more. And when we see people who don’t have what we do, we assume they must be unhappy. We assume their lives are incomplete because they don’t match our template.
But that’s not truth, that’s projection. That’s our lens, not theirs.
In Kibera, I saw joy unshackled from the trappings we chase. The boys didn’t need status to laugh until their bellies hurt. They didn’t need wealth to dance in the streets. They didn’t measure their worth against an endless ladder. Their joy wasn’t derivative, it was direct.
And yet, here we are. We live in a world of consumerism. Bombarded by things we don’t need. A world constantly whispering in our ears:
You don’t have enough.
You’re not enough.
Marketing is miraculous, isn’t it? It creates a need where none existed. A want disguised as necessity.
Instagram knows your insecurities better than you do. Your feed becomes a therapy session, except instead of healing, it sells you things.
You’re too thin, here’s a powder.
You’re balding, try this biotin gummy that’s “10x stronger.”
You’re stressed, take the red pill.
You can’t sleep, take the blue one.
You’re aging? Don’t worry—we have a serum for that too.
And we buy it. Not always with belief, but with hope. Hope that something, anything, might actually work.
We know most of it’s bullshit. But we still click “add to cart.” Health and beauty marketing is the placebo effect on steroids.
But the things that really matter, the things we ache for at night, the things we whisper to ourselves when no one is listening, those aren’t for sale.
Love.
Health.
Time.
And yet we keep hunting.
We hunt grades, trophies, titles, scholarships. Then salaries, houses, partners, promotions. When that isn’t enough, we hunt followers, engagement, influence. We optimize our identities until we forget who we are. And still we wonder why it never feels like enough.
The danger isn’t the hunt itself, it’s hunting without alignment. It’s chasing something that was never yours to begin with. I know because I did it. I built the career. The family. The title. I had all the trappings of success and still felt empty. I wasn’t living my life; I was performing it.
Meanwhile, the boys in Kibera, with almost nothing to their name, had tapped into something we’ve lost. They weren’t immune to struggle, but they also weren’t defined by it. Their joy wasn’t fragile or conditional. It was resilient. And it was contagious.
Which makes me wonder: what if joy isn’t something to be hunted, but something to be reclaimed? What if the real scarcity in our lives isn’t money or status, but time, time to notice, time to connect, time to be?
Because here’s the cruelest trick of all: in our endless pursuit of more, we’ve commodified even time. We sell our calendars to meetings, our energy to inboxes, our attention to algorithms. We tell ourselves we’re buying back freedom with the next bonus or the next promotion, but in reality, we’re spending the only thing we can’t replenish.
Time used to feel sacred. Now it feels stolen.
And yet, I think about Kibera. I think about those boys singing into my iPhone. I think about the narrative I’d been taught about what joy is supposed to look like. And I realize: joy isn’t found in the chase. It isn’t in the endless performance. It isn’t in the consumer treadmill that promises happiness one purchase away.
Joy is an act of resistance. It’s the courage to show up, open, present, alive, in a world that tells you you’re not enough.
That’s what Kibera gave me: a new lens. One that refuses to measure happiness by accumulation, and instead sees it in the places we were told to fear. One that reminds me that sometimes the people with the least carry the most: the most courage, the most clarity, the most truth.
And maybe the point isn’t to keep hunting, but to finally stop. To reclaim time. To spend it like it’s yours. To let joy find you, right where you are.
Because everything you’ve been taught about joy is backwards. And when you finally stop chasing, you realize, it was never out there. It was always here.
Joy isn’t for sale. Stop the hunt. Start living.
If you needed that reminder today, pass this along to someone else who might too.
With Courage,
Maryam