Few days ago, my phone beeped. A credit alert. Arrears from our newly negotiated salary. In this battered economy, any alert should provoke gratitude. Money is money no matter how small. But instead of joy, I became angry. The alert arrived while I was still haunted by what I had witnessed on my way to work the previous day.

I saw senior colleagues struggling to find seats on a crowded commercial bus. On my way back , I saw an old professor stranded on campus, standing helplessly beside his rickety jalopy, apparently defeated by yet another reoccurring mechanical failure.

I looked at these men and wondered whether this was what a lifetime of education was supposed to produce.

These are not graduate assistants. They are senior men! Intellectual giants , whose ideas shape the frontiers of knowledge in their fields. Men and women who had spent decades acquiring qualifications, teaching generations, supervising postgraduate research, publishing papers and serving their nation with pride. Yet, getting to work and returning home has become an excruciating burden.

At what point did the pursuit of knowledge become such a poor investment in the life of the person pursuing it?

How can someone spend decades producing knowledge and nurturing young minds , yet struggle to maintain ordinary decent life?

How does a professor’s intellectual capital translate into financial anxiety while a young comedian can turn a few hours of livestreaming into earnings that dwarf an academic’s monthly salary?

Why does knowledge wear the badge of poverty while court jesters are rewarded as kings?

And how did we arrive at a point where a university professor may need to think twice before using his car to come to work?

Consider Peller, a young Nigerian live streamer with his unfiltered mannerisms and unconventional English, earning more than many professors can only dream of?

Before Peller’s fans come for my head, and start trolling me online. let me be clear. This is not an attack on the young man. He has found a market, understood its demands and convert attention into money. That is entrepreneurial intelligence, whether academics appreciate it or not.

The boy found the money we had been looking for inside laboratories and lengthy manuscripts.
This is not an argument against entertainment. It is a somewhat a question about the kind of society we have become and the values our economic arrangements reward.
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While I was struggling with this painful contradiction, I remembered some years back while having a conversation with my colleague, Obinna Ihunna, he introduced me to the work of Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist known for his distinction between solid modernity and liquid modernity.

Suddenly, yesterday’s salary alert became more than a personal irritation. It became a sociological conundrum.

This is where Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of solid and liquid modernity becomes valuable. It helps us understand how the old promise of a stable career, predictable employment and a secure future have gradually weakened in a world characterized by economic uncertainty, rapid technological change and shifting labour market demands.

In solid modernity, society offered a relatively predictable script for success. Go to school. Acquire qualifications. Secure employment. Build a career. Work diligently. Retire with dignity.

The system was far from perfect, but it sustained a powerful social contract: education, hard work, professional competence and years of service were expected to yield some measure of economic security and social respect. For many Nigerian academics, this supposed contract now looks like delusion.

Then the world melted and became more liquid and fluid.Jobs disappear,Careers are less secure, professions are restructured, and skills that once guaranteed relevance can quickly become obsolete. Institutions inspire less confidence, and yesterday’s formula for success no longer guarantees today’s survival. People are compelled to reinvent themselves continually, chase opportunities and monetize whatever resources they possess.

Many of us are discovering this new reality rather late, and often at considerable personal cost.

You have all the qualifications, yet your salary struggles to cover household expenses. Your car has become a mobile workshop. Conference attendance and paper publications compete with children’s school fees. Retirement, which should reward years of service, begins to resemble a financial sentence.

Then you open social media and discover that teenagers who are dancing in front of ring light are earning more than senior lecturers. Suddenly, your certificates, publications and years of sacrifice begin to look like investments with questionable returns. And the question returns: Maybe you have been scammed by society?

The young lad seems to understand something we in the traditional academic system has been slow to appreciate. Knowledge does not automatically generate income. Qualifications do not automatically create markets. Hard work does not guarantee financial security. And social usefulness does not necessarily translate into economic reward.

In the digital economy, attention is an asset. A smartphone can become a workplace. An audience can be monetized. Visibility can attract sponsorships, gifts, advertising and commercial partnerships. In this new economy, a smartphone can become a workplace, an audience can become capital, and visibility can become income.

The creator who understands these mechanisms may earn substantially more than someone whose work has immense social value but no effective route to financial returns. The market has become better at pricing visibility than rewarding intellectual labour.

Academics must learn from the young rather than dismiss them. We need to realize that social value and market value are not the same thing. We may have the degrees, titles and publications, but many young creators understand digital visibility, audience building and value creation better than we do. The lesson is not to abandon scholarships for entertainment, but to take our knowledge beyond lecture halls, communicate it in accessible ways and explore how digital platforms can extend our influence and create legitimate economic opportunities.

The real scandal is not that a live streamer can earn more than a professor. It is that decades of intellectual labour may no longer guarantee the scholar a decent life.

Now here is the most uncomfortable question: if years of education and intellectual labour can no longer guarantee a decent life, have we failed to prepare people for the future, or has society broken its promise to the educated?