By Toyin Falola
Delulu is the only Solulu
To make your dreams come Trululu.
Delulu is thinking that you will wake up one morning, set out as usual to go about your business and you will, by luck, meet the popular Instagram philanthropist, Asherkine. Then he asked you what you wanted, and you told him 50 million naira, and he credited your account immediately.
Boom!
E don better for you. Delulu is having fee-fee imaginations such as you find in a Ghana-Must-Go bag filled with dollars. Boom! Your fortune turns around. From a poor person, Dangote begins to pick up your calls.
Delulu is when you are single to a stupor, yet stay indoors every day with zero social life and communication skills and hope that your life partner will miraculously appear in the form of Angel Michael to propose to you in your room. Delusional single!
Delulu is thinking that by recording a dance video to an artist’s song, as Moses Bliss’s wife did, it will also earn you your conjugal bliss. It is thinking that by joining Bro. Theo to chant and sing “No Glory in this World,” you will bag your own full package American babe. Boom!
Delulu is hoping that you will one day find out that your father is not your biological father and you are Femi Otedola’s son. Or that your father, Falola Idan, has babanla bastard money and has only been pretending to be poor so that he can teach you humility. Or that you are a trust fund kid and will only be able to access the billion dollars your parents have kept for you when you are 42. Baba Falola, die now so that I can collect my inheritances at First Bank. Boom boom!
Delulu is thinking that you will sleep, wake up and miraculously have all the things you have ever wanted at the snap of a finger without you working for it. Delulu is wishing you were a genie or had superpowers to make your dreams come true at the wave of a magical wand.
Abracadabra!
Yes, all of these can happen to you, as has happened to some people, but what are the chances? It is like tossing a coin; the probability that it will fall on a particular side is very slim.
Delulu is living in a world of fantasy, thinking and imagining things that may or may never happen. Delulu is you having vivid imaginations. Delulu is the Gen-Z term for “delusional,” Solulu means “solution,” while the ajasa, trululu means “true”. Delulu is the Solulu;therefore, it means that being delusional and living in the world of your imagination is a way to create the life of your dreams and escape the harsh reality of the present world.
The slang, Delulu is the Solulu, went viral following a TikTok video by Moses Wong, in which he said, “In this generation, being delusional is one of the key factors to being happy.” While the slogan might be a Gen-Z term for thinking and staying positive, the idea is nothing new. Universally, the law of assumption states that by believing the things you want already exist in your life, you will manifest them into reality. This positive thinking tactic is a strategy for creating the life of your dreams; if you want something desperately and you believe you will have it, the forces of the universe will attract them to you. Why do you think millions flood the religious camps every month?
Delulu is choosing to think positively and be optimistic even in the face of a harsh reality. Nigerians are a perfect example of delulus. Nigerians catch cruises with everything; we use everything about our situation or the situation of the country to crack jokes. Once we lament about it and it seems like the echoes of our voices are not heard, not to talk of our voices themselves, because we cannot kill ourselves or start dying from depression, we resort to laughing and cruising about our predicament, even when we know that nothing about it is funny. Our sense of humour seems to be what gets us through the tough times. We have probably made peace with the opinion that delulu is the solulu to make the Nigerian dream come trululu. The great Nigeria we dream of is in our minds. A Nigeria free of corruption, insecurity, economic struggles, leadership crisis, and other national problems is only real in our minds, and this assures us that Nigeria will be great again. We may not know how or when, but this is our delulu as a nation. This delulu is easy to imagine but difficult to experience.
Delulu is all about living life even when all odds are set against you, when the walls around your life are crumbling, and your whole life seems to be on fire. Delulu believes that even though you walk “through the valley of the shadow of death”, you fear no evil. It is passing through fire and not burning, walking through water and not drowning.
Delulu is when you manage to soak garri with groundnut due to sapa in Tinubu’s economy, but you make yourself believe you are eating “groceries and floating berries.” Delulu is when you are the owner of the largest conglomerate in the world and No. 1 on the Forbes list, but in reality, you keep making excuses to start up just one business. You are delulu when you start calling yourself a CEO because you just started a popcorn and groundnut business in front of your house. In your delulu, you are the big man who runs the town with big money, spending like sweat, wealthy enough to afford anything. But in reality, you avoid whatever you cannot afford.
Being Delulu is having unrealistic fantasies and beliefs. The way children are tricked into believing in themselves as they grow up is by making them delusional. With the advent of comic cartoons, such as Power Rangers, Barbie, Cinderella, Frozen and the like, children begin to see themselves as these characters to the extent of behaving like these characters until they grow up to realize that those characters were never real and their delulu can never be trululu, except they choose to collect witch so they can fly at midnight.
As funny and harmless as it may sound, delulu can be negative. You may be having delulu about how to japa from the country, while someone somewhere is having delulu about bombing up a town so he can be rewarded with ten virgins in paradise. There may be someone out there who considers his or her delusion fun enough to enter into a school, shooting and killing innocent schoolchildren just because his mind is powerful enough to conjure up such thoughts and imaginations.
Delulu, in and of itself, is not bad, but it becomes a problem when you dwell in it for so long that it begins to blur out reality or makes you want to slack or become an idiot. There is a way imagination or living in your mind too much can affect your life and mentality such that irrespective of facts and reality staring you in the face, you adamantly choose to believe the falsity your mind is wrapped in. Delulu may stem from other people, the things you read, watch or listen to. Try Twitter for a month and see. You are welcome! The things you expose yourself to gradually begin to have a hold on your mind, so strong that even if the origin of the delulu later comes to say they were wrong, you are already a goner because nothing can change your deluded mind. Like that, psycho is entering small small.
Having fee-fee imaginations can be a good way to escape reality for a while and create the life of your dreams; delulu can help you go on a trip to the Bahamas without leaving your bed in Ajegunle, but if you live in that delulu longer than you should, your life may never become as good as you have imagined. Let your delulu instead ginger you to work harder so that all your nice dreams will not just be in your head. Rather than keep hoping that you are Elon Musk’s secret child who will inherit all his money, strive to be an Elon Musk for your children and generations yet unborn. Your parents may not have given you a trust fund, but they work hard and smartly to make your children trust fund babies.
Remember, if you can dream or imagine it, you can be it. But delulu without action or hard work is not the solulu to make your dreams come trululu. Of all the people who think that Toyin Falola uses juju to write over 200 books, their delulu has taken them to the mountains and valleys to write their own books, but they are still praying for solulu without trululu. When next you sleep, and you dream of living in a mansion by the ocean, abeg, never wake up! Or should I have said I pray that you will never wake up so that you don’t face your dululu? Or should I ask God to let you continue to sleep forever as your solulu?
Trululu!