Most of my time is spent indoors or within my immediate vicinity, but every now and then, I have to step out of my comfort zone. Moving around Lagos is a completely paradoxical experience. It is fortunate in the sense that you get to see glimpses of absolute beauty like Ikoyi, one of the richest neighborhoods in the state, filled with incredible architecture and aesthetics.

But it is also an unfortunate, grim reminder of how bad things can be.

When you leave those curated bubbles, you are immediately confronted with the reality of the streets: large deposits of unmanaged waste, countless homeless individuals, and terrible road infrastructure. Don\'t even get me started on the “Agberos” (local thugs) who aggressively tax commercial bus drivers for no real reason other than the fact that they can.

When you look at this long list of systemic failures, you would think there would be public outrage. But everyone just seems so... normal. To most people, this is just another Tuesday on the commute to work or school. They have seen it so many times that a collective numbness has set in. It is so bad that a bus can drive past a mountain of waste—or a smell so awful it could literally be anything—and no one even blinks.

If the citizens have stopped caring, why would the government bother fixing it? No one is complaining, so the dysfunction remains.

My personal breaking point was the traffic. I made the brutal mistake of heading home at 5:00 PM when the workday ends. I spent exactly three hours in traffic. Three hours at home doing nothing isn\'t bad, but three hours jammed in a commercial bus with barely any breathing room, surrounded by a chaotic symphony of blasting car horns, feeling like you haven\'t moved an inch? That is as close to hell as I ever want to be.

Yet, for most people on that road, it was just another day. Some were probably relieved they only spent three hours in it.

To cut a long story short, we have been deprived of basic amenities—clean environments, motorable roads, subsidized housing—for so long that the abnormal has become our baseline. When I speak to people who didn\'t grow up here, the shock on their faces, especially regarding the traffic, reminds me that this shouldn\'t be our standard of living.

The problems in Lagos, and the country at large, are too massive for one person to solve. But I do believe the first step to finding a solution is waking up from the numbness. We have to start being outspoken about these things again.

What is something in your city that everyone has accepted as \"normal,\" but you think is completely unacceptable?