Purpose or Prestige — An Honest Reflection

I have been thinking aloud lately, mostly with friends who know me well enough to use my own discipline against me. For the better part of a decade, I have studied how stars are born, how they age, and how the elements forged in their cores eventually settle on Earth as the gold in a wedding band, the carbon in a diamond, the iron in our blood.

What no formula prepared me for was how to ask those same questions when I turned them inward — and what I am only beginning to learn is that you do not turn them inward alone.

I was born in Accra, Ghana, but grew up in Abuja, Nigeria, in the years that shape a person most. There, I absorbed the reverence for education that, in many sub-Saharan African households, borders on the sacred. The path was clear, almost geological in its certainty: go to school, study hard, pass your exams, get a good job, be happy for the rest of your life. Simple. Sequential. Sufficient — or so we were told. The formula had the bright hardness of a diamond, and like a diamond, it cut cleanly in only one direction.

When the time came for university, I returned to Ghana — first to Accra, then to Kumasi — and from there the journey extended outward in ways I could not have mapped at the start. A scholarship to the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Coast. A Development in Africa with Radio Astronomy (DARA) Newton Fund scholarship to the University of Leeds in England, where I studied the birth of massive protostars. Before leaving Africa, I had spent time at the Ghana Radio Astronomy Observatory, contributing to the Square Kilometre Array — the continent’s most ambitious scientific undertaking, a network of dishes that will one day listen across borders to a sky that does not recognise them. A full PhD scholarship eventually brought me to the University of New South Wales in Australia, where I spent three and a half years mapping the chemical history of the Milky Way, classifying more than 600,000 stars by age and origin. During the PhD, a DAAD–Universities Australia Joint Research Grant funded a Visiting PhD Fellowship in Germany — at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies.

In June 2025, I submitted my thesis. It was subsequently nominated for the Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses. One of my independent examiners wrote:

“This thesis is in the top 10% of theses I have examined and makes an outstanding contribution to the field.”

I have given invited talks at Oxford, at the University of Hertfordshire, at KU Leuven in Belgium, and at Max Planck. I have shaken hands with Nobel Laureates. I have lived and worked across six countries on three continents. By the formula I was given, I had done everything right.

Reading all of that, you might say: this lad has seen it all. In some sense, you may be right — it depends entirely on the frame of reference you choose to measure a life. But the truth is more uncomfortable than the CV suggests. What this attainment has brought is not the arrival I expected. What it has brought, if I am being honest, is a quiet vexation — a restless stillness, a busy emptiness, the kind of unease that grows in soil that looks fertile from a distance.

For the first time in my adult life, I am asking questions the formula never prepared me for. Who am I? Where am I from? Why am I here? What can I do? Where am I going? These are not idle questions. They have arrived with weight, and they have stayed. They have caused me to look back at choices made in good faith and wonder whether the life I have been building is truly mine — or whether it is simply the life I was told to want, pursued so diligently that I never paused to ask if I wanted it.

There is an irony in this that I have not been able to escape. For years, I studied stars — how they form, how they age, how the chemical signatures locked inside them betray their origins and their histories. I developed methods to determine, from the composition of a single star, where it came from and when it was born. I spent my most formative years asking, on behalf of the Galaxy: where did this come from, and how did it become what it is? Now I find myself sitting with the same questions, aimed inward. The telescope, it turns out, was always facing both ways.

There is also a contrast in my daily life; I have grown to find it instructive rather than embarrassing. I am an astrophysicist with peer-reviewed publications in some of the field’s leading journals, and I spend part of my week as a Specialist at Apple, helping people make sense of their devices. On paper, that looks like a detour. In practice, it has reminded me that the thread running most consistently through my life — through the radio observatory in Ghana, through the astrophysics research group at Leeds, through my research desk at UNSW, on the floor at an Apple store — is not the research itself. It is the teaching. The translating. The quiet thunder of the moment when something complex becomes clear to someone who could not see it before. I called myself a teacher by calling long before I had the language to explain why. Looked at honestly, the record has been writing that sentence underneath my CV the whole time.

What unsettles me most is a question I keep returning to: have I missed the planting seasons of my life? There are seasons for planting — for laying down roots in relationships, in community, in self-knowledge — and seasons for harvest. I do not ask this out of ingratitude. I know what grace has made possible. I ask it because ambition, at its most consuming, has a way of pulling you forward so insistently that you do not always notice what you are walking past. A pearl, after all, is only an oyster’s response to grit; some restlessness forms a thing of value, and some merely scratches the shell. I am trying to learn the difference between what I have been forming and what has merely been forming around me.

A friend put this to me recently, in language I have not been able to shake. He said: a particle in motion stays in motion — physics, at least, is on your side — but a particle does not always know where it is going. It feels the field of every other particle it passes, drawn toward some, deflected by others. In a dense enough region, collisions are absolute; the path forms itself by impact. At higher velocities, you skim surfaces, you weave, you boomerang past the gravities that would have held a slower version of you in place.

Every collision becomes a point of inflection. Every near-miss leaves the impression of choice. From inside the trajectory, the difference between purpose and momentum can be very difficult to tell.

He said something else, too, which has stayed with me. The International Space Station was not where the Artemis astronauts were going. It was a place to dock, to test systems, to confirm that what they had built could still carry them farther. The station was real; it was not nothing. But it was not the moon. And if you had asked them, mid-orbit, whether they had arrived, they would have said — perhaps with some impatience — that arrival is not quite the right word for this part of the journey.

I do not yet know whether the life I am living is a destination or a station. What I am beginning to suspect is that, for any of us still in motion, the question itself may be premature.

And so, I have been asking myself three things with as much honesty as I can muster.

What am I doing that I should not be doing? What should I be doing that I am not doing well enough? And what am I doing that I should stop doing altogether?

These are not questions born of crisis. They are questions of reckoning — an attempt to move forward with intention rather than only with momentum.

The formula I was given was not wrong. Education opened every door I have walked through; it gave me discipline, confidence, and decision-making range, and I am grateful for that without reservation. But a door is not a destination. And what I am slowly learning — what perhaps anyone who chases excellence long enough eventually learns — is that prestige is the polished surface; purpose is the structure beneath. A diamond is beautiful because of its facets; it is enduring because of its lattice. Prestige can confirm your direction while you are moving, but only purpose can tell you whether it was ever the right road. I am still working out which one I have been following.

This is where I am. Not lost, but recalibrating. The stillness is loud. The pause is full. And I suspect I am not alone in this.