Epistemology of My Dreams

I am skeptical of the maxim: “follow your dreams.” It’s popular because it promises adventure and grants the believer a certain degree of confidence—the confidence to go into the world and declare who they are, leaving no room for the world to mold them into a false image. It’s bold, and I respect it. BUT, it assumes the dreamer is a finished product. In other words, the dreamer fully knows who are they are. Can you ever fully know the being that is yourself? And if that knowledge is always incomplete, how can we ever be certain that our dreams are authentic expressions of our souls rather than scripts we’ve picked up from the world around us?

Before she passed away, my grandma reminded me often of how lucky I am to be alive. I was born prematurely, so tiny and fragile that my family feared I wouldn’t make it. My father took pictures of me in the incubator, but they burned them soon after—they didn’t want a constant reminder of what could have been.

My first dream was born sometime during my primary school years. It was during that time I began to see my parents not as invincible gods, but as humans (though that invincibility didn’t fully fade until recently when I noticed the gray hair). In those early years, I began to vaguely understand the joy and gratitude in their eyes as they watched me grow. It was a strange thing for a child’s brain to process; eventually, the awareness of their gratitude became a subconscious hum in the background of my life. I wanted to mirror and extend my parents’ intentions towards me, and becoming a pediatrician was, in retrospect, a fine rationalization for that desire. There is nothing more deserving of love than a child.

Identity is often invisible until you are removed from your element. When I left Zimbabwe for an international high school, I became acutely aware of my Zimbabwean identity for the first time. I had three roommates—British, Bangladeshi, and Chinese—and naturally, every orientation ice-breaker centered on our origins. Because I was the only Zimbabwean on campus, I was forced to think and articulate truths about my country that I truly never paid attention to. The unfortunate/fortunate part: I couldn’t offload the burden of “knowing” my country to anyone around me; I was the sole representative.

This experience set into motion a series of reflections on what it means to be Zimbabwean, a process that seems will last a life time as I haven't reached a neat resolution and it's been six years. However, some things are starting to come into focus. It is obvious to me now that I love my home country. I have been awarded multiple scholarships and grants that come with no strings attached, except the promise to give back. In a way, it feels as though the "act of service" I’ve committed to hinges entirely on me unravelling more about my national identity. While the details are still forming, one thing is certain: I have a dream for a better Zimbabwe.

In life, certainty is hard to find. However, in CS when the code runs, you have a form of "truth" (it works, or it doesn't).

When I started college, medical school was my goal. But after a very hard chemistry class in my first semester, and a sobering look at the obstacles facing an international medical student, I decided to reconsider. I tried CS, and the shift was immediate. CS offered a feedback loop that the natural sciences lacked: you write, you fail, you debug, you succeed. It provided a "tangible abstraction" that felt right to me.

During the summer of 2023, I interned in Harare with Uncommon, an NGO working to make Zimbabwe the most tech-literate country on the continent. Between engineering tasks and helping teach classes, I began to feel the weight of the infrastructure gap. A twenty-year gap was probably a conservative estimate back then, and the distance is only growing with the AI race in full swing.

Initially, CS felt like a good compromise between my first dream and reality because it catered to my interests. But now, beyond my own professional growth, the stakes feel higher. The commitment to give back is still humming in the background, and the big question for me now is the role of software engineering in this commitment.

The pediatrician didn’t die; he simply evolved. However, its still not clear to me if my drive to change Zimbabwe is a soul-deep calling or a beautiful rationalization for the opportunities I’ve been given.I have been given resources on the condition I have a dream, and I guess all of this is an attempt to figure out: are the dreams a response to the contract, or is the contract a response to the dreams?

But perhaps, in the absence of an algorithm for life, that distinction doesn't matter as much as I think.