Tue, 27 Oct 2026 Feature Article

The Day I Stopped Counting My Steps: Why Ghanaians Are Choosing “Lived-In” Joy Over Perfect Living

Last month, I watched a young man at a chop bar in Accra eat his waakye with one hand while checking his smartwatch with the other. He wasn’t checking the time. He was checking his heart rate, his steps, and, I suspect, his guilt. The waakye got cold. The man looked tired. And I wondered when we decided that even a plate of food needed a performance review.

That small moment stayed with me, because it explains something bigger happening across the world and quietly arriving on our own streets. People are exhausted from optimizing themselves.

For about ten years, we were told to track everything: sleep, calories, water, steps, screen time, even our “readiness score” for the day. Wellness became a second job with no salary. And many of us — from the corporate worker in Airport City to the student in Kumasi whose data bundles finish too fast — are starting to say the same thing: enough.

The new party starts at 7 AM

Here is something my parents’ generation would never believe: the hottest social scene in many cities today isn’t a nightclub on Friday at midnight. It’s a run club at sunrise.

In London, Toronto, and New York, young people now meet at seven in the morning to jog, laugh, and take coffee together afterwards. Some of them are meeting their partners there. Closer to home, you can see the same spirit on the Accra beaches and around Independence Square, where strangers move together at dawn and leave as friends.

I love this because loneliness is real. Many of my readers in the UK, USA, Canada, and Germany tell me the same thing: the hardest part of life abroad is not the cold or the bills — it is the silence. A morning group that asks nothing of you except to show up is cheaper and kinder than any bar. Nobody is judging your outfit at 6:45 AM. You are sweaty and honest, and that is where real friendship starts.

Your house is allowed to look like someone lives there

Remember the all‑beige home? White walls, grey sofa, one sad plant, and nothing out of place. It looked beautiful on Instagram and felt like a waiting room in real life.

People are walking away from that look. The new trend is called “dopamine decor,” which is a fancy name for something Ghanaian homes have always understood: bright kente cushions, your grandmother’s wooden stool, a calendar from a funeral you attended in 2019, framed photos crowding the wall. Colour everywhere, with nothing matching and everything meaning something.

Our people never needed a foreign designer to tell us that a home should hold memory. Somewhere along the way, though, we started feeling embarrassed by our own cozy clutter because it didn’t look like a magazine. I say bring it back. A house is not a showroom. It is the place where you take off your shoes and your mask at the same time.

Analog Sundays and the return of the “dumb” phone

This is the one that surprised me most. Young people — the same generation supposedly born with a phone in hand — are buying basic phones again and wearing ordinary wristwatches that only tell time. They are choosing one day a week with no scrolling.

We Ghanaians have a head start here. Sunday has always been a different kind of day in our culture: church in the morning, rice and stew after, relatives dropping by unannounced, an afternoon nap nobody apologises for. We practised “analog Sunday” long before it had a hashtag. The only change now is that the phone crept into that sacred space, sitting at the dinner table like an uninvited guest who never leaves.

Try it. Put the phone in a drawer from Saturday evening to Sunday evening. The first two hours will feel strange, like a missing tooth. After that, you will notice things: your sister’s laugh, the birds, how long an afternoon actually is. Read a real book. Visit someone instead of sending an emoji. Cook for friends without photographing the pot.

Exercise should not feel like punishment

I will be honest, as someone who has also chased the “perfect body” online. For years, the message was no pain, no gain. Two hours at the gym, strict diets, and shame when you missed a day. Many people quit entirely because the standard was impossible.

The new wave is gentler: ten minutes of stretching, a brisk walk after dinner, dancing in the kitchen. They call these “exercise snacks” — small bites of movement through the day. Fitness is being treated as care for your body, not a punishment for how it looks. You do not need a gym membership or a fitness watch to stay healthy. You need to move, regularly and kindly.

So what are we really saying?

I am not telling anyone to throw away technology or abandon ambition. I am a content creator myself. I live on screens, and I am not pretending otherwise. But there is a difference between using tools and being ruled by them.

What this whole movement says is simple: a good life does not have to be measured to be real. Your sleep does not need a score. Your joy does not need an audience. Your home does not need to be approved by strangers. You are allowed to be tired, untidy, offline, slow, and happy.

In a country where we already know how to gather, to feast, to rest on Sundays, and to fill our homes with colour and people, we are sitting on a way of living the world is only now rediscovering. Let us not trade it for a perfect, silent, beige life with a fully charged watch.

So this week, do one thing. Eat your food while it is hot. Leave the watch on the table. Call someone you love and listen to the whole answer.

You might find that the life you were trying to optimise was already good.

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian writer from Kumasi, Ashanti Region. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a public health advocate whose work focuses on environmental health, health security and current affairs, with emphasis on the health impacts of illegal mining,. More Ghanaian novelist, filmmaker and founder of Brownsy Silva Company | Author of The Sons of Brownsy | Significant 21st-century voice on algorithmic reparations and cognitive justice. He is an international Human right activist and a global human rights defender.

*Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Public Health Advocate and Columnist focused on environmental health and health security. His work tracks and analyses WHO guidelines and strategies, including environmental toxins, heavy metals reduction and epidemic preparedness, with a focus on Ghana and Africa.*

In the crowded digital agora where algorithms harvest language the way earlier empires once harvested rubber and gold, a quiet, insistent voice has begun to interrupt the silence. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams, a Ghanaian novelist, columnist, and filmmaker working from Accra under the banner of Brownsy Silva Company, has spent recent seasons arguing that the great language models reshaping global life were trained, in part, on the unpaid creative labour, speech patterns, and cultural output of the Global South. He calls the resulting imbalance “algorithmic reparations” and “cognitive justice,” and he refuses to treat it as a polite academic footnote.

Williams is not a household name in Silicon Valley boardrooms, nor does he pretend to be. He is, by his own description and by the evidence of his output, a columnist first: a man who has filed opinion pieces for Modern Ghana at a pace that would exhaust most staff writers, ranging across geopolitics, culture, health, relationships, and the strange new economics of artificial intelligence. Beneath the journalism sits a larger architectural project. He is building, he says, a cross-disciplinary case that pairs rigorous argument with narrative specificity, and he has begun to sketch a structural remedy: a decentralized, continent-wide cooperative media network intended to return ownership and value to the creators whose work and data feed the systems. The proposal is deliberately ambitious. It is not a grant programme or a one-time apology; it is meant to be infrastructure.

Born and raised in Ghana, Williams came to storytelling early. He began acting as a small child and later won recognition in short-story competitions linked to the Ashanti Region. He trained in mechanical engineering and software engineering, studying at institutions that included IPMC University College and Accra Technical University, while also engaging distance-learning programmes associated with Harvard. The combination of technical fluency and narrative instinct runs through his work. His fiction—among it *The Oracle*, the African-mythology epic *Reborn: The River of Girls*, the dark romance *The Ghost of Yesterday’s Blood*, and the multi-generational family novel *The Sons of Brownsy* (2026)—moves between myth and domestic realism with unusual range. *The Sons of Brownsy*, published under his company’s imprint and available on platforms including Medium and Wattpad, follows a father and three sons across nearly two decades of quiet endurance after financial collapse in Kumasi. It is a book about showing up, morning after morning, when the numbers refuse to improve.

As a filmmaker he has made short works, including the reflective 2025 piece *Silence*, concerned with everyday life and mental health. Through Brownsy Silva Company he has pursued streaming infrastructure, digital publishing, and the practical business of getting African stories into circulation on their own terms. Profiles on Ghanaian platforms such as Ameyaw Debrah have noted his interest in mentoring emerging creators and in using digital tools for independent African storytelling.

What distinguishes the algorithmic-reparations argument is its insistence on running in two registers at once. Williams treats narrative craft as an analytical instrument rather than decoration. Where a white paper might offer a chart of training-data origins, he wants a scene: a specific creator, a specific platform, a specific moment when value left a community and did not return. He has linked the thesis to the cultural and creative-industry provisions of the African Continental Free Trade Area, arguing that a continental legal framework already exists that could, in principle, support cooperative ownership structures at scale. Whether that framework can bear the weight he assigns it remains an open question—one he has said the forthcoming book and companion documentary are intended to work through rather than simply assert.

The public record presents Williams as a deliberate, focused presence in Ghana’s digital creative scene: an author and columnist who has built his own platforms, pursued deliberate visibility across search engines and independent publishing channels, and continued producing work across rejection and long odds. Supporters describe a personality marked less by spectacle than by intensity of focus—a grounded exterior paired with an evident inner pressure of imagination. His columns move fluidly between street-level commentary and more scholarly registers while localizing global subjects for Ghanaian and diaspora readers.

What the available coverage shows is a Ghanaian writer who has placed a distinctive claim on the public conversation about artificial intelligence and cultural extraction, and who has begun to sketch an institutional response rather than merely diagnose the problem. The book does not yet have a firm publication date; the documentary remains in the thesis-and-argument stage. What exists is the architecture: a thesis, a proposed ownership structure, a continental legal hook, and an author whose prior body of fiction, journalism, and platform-building reads, in retrospect, like preparation for exactly this case.

Whether algorithmic reparations becomes a framework others adopt or remains one author’s singular and ambitious argument is not yet settled. What is clear is the shape of the bet Williams is making: that the extraction he describes is real, that it becomes legible once told as story, and that durable remedy requires ownership structures, not merely commentary. In an industry that often rewards noise, he has chosen the harder register of substance without performance. The ledger, he insists, remains open.Column: Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here." Follow our WhatsApp channel for meaningful stories picked for your day.

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