categories in my world

No matter what we think, feel, do or say, it is an open fact that this world has always had three categories of people and that somehow, most of us are always trying to navigate the ladder to reach the third category. I have tried tocome up with three appropriate names for these categories.
The first group has always been those I’ll term as ‘the existing!’ To the members of this group, medication and balanced diet is a luxury. Their income summed up and divided by their basic needs results into a disgusting figure and sometimes into a syntax error! These guys wake up not knowing what they’ll have for supper (coz this is a vague future tense.) For them, breakfast and lunch is a forgotten past tense. Any education that goes beyond the secondary level where something beyond 125$ a year is involved, falls beyond their sphere. For these masses, diseases like cancer and apenditis become a curse, coz they cannot afford the huge sums of money to have an operation or carter for a chemotherapy session. Luckily, they rarely suffer from such misfortunes. Since they believe that they are just but passing through this life, they are very religious.
The second category is what I will call ‘the surviving!’ Members of this category can afford moderate medication and education. They can afford three meals a day with a fancy tag: ‘balanced diet.’ Since they can afford music systems, they enjoy loud music with a result that the majority suffers from acoustic trauma and other hearing disorders before their middle age! This group has most number of obese people due to the excessive junk food they consume. Cardiovascular diseases like blood pressure are just conditions and not diseases, a direct effect of raising a family and handling a nagging boss. It is the members of this group that struggle to save money to go visit foreign lands and watch sleeping lions, admire mischievous monkeys and get excited by free flowing waters. Most of you reading this note belong here. Since people here think that they have an independent mind, they engage in almost anything; from religion, to politics, to sports and yes, to sex!!
Lastly, we have those who ‘Live!’ Basically, most people want to reach here. The members of this group can afford virtually anything money can buy. They can have one-month holiday in Bahamas, another month in St Tropez, two weeks at the Grand Canyon and the remaining days visiting a sophisticated costly gym. These people do not bargain and do not carry coins and as a result, they are synonymous with the phrase; ‘keep change.’ Since they want to protect what they’ve acquired, they cannot be separated from the phrase ‘Mbwa kali’ (harsh dog). Because any slight noise may be offensive to them, they’ll rather live a solitary life in the middle of nowhere!! In Africa, if we have any, it is an abomination for these guys to visit their rural homes. Unfortunately, with lots of stress on how to manage their finances, most of their families are in shambles, divorce is their companion. They suffer from psychological conditions, engage in illicit drugs and sex and most of them live a wretched life and die unfulfilled people.
A real challenge therefore is trying to make people appreciate who they are. The problem we have in our world today is that most of us do not exactly know what we want or let me just plainly state it that most of us think that money can solve all our problems. Yet to be honest, the more money we acquire, the more insecure we feel. This desire to reach the third categories has built into materially poor guys a feeling of inferiority and an anger that says “you rich guys have taken all that is rightfully ours” and the materially rich on their part are insecure that “the poor may steal our wealth so let’s build walled fences around ourselves.” Despite all these struggles, the freedom to be happy and realize one’s worth is always hidden deep within us and it is only through contentment that we can actualize ourselves. The pragmatic world has taught us that consumerism is a good thing, that capitalism is unique to human beings, yet such a mentality only takes us to the Hobbean ‘state of nature,’ where there is ‘war of all against all.’ It is within our power to look at the reality a new. My uncle P. (R.I.P) before he died told me, “when I was young, I wanted to have as much money as I could; I wanted to have a good family and a honourable life. i got the money right, but definitely not the good life i dreamed of."
Material wealth and good life have never been synonymous!!