The moment is a classic—so universally cringe, it’s basically a whole mood. The kind that makes you wanna crawl inside the dictionary just to check if the words haven’t betrayed you yet again. “And thereby hangs a tale”—immediately, I think meetings. Those weird human gatherings where time seems to both ripe and rot, often at the same damn time. Marking the slow, predictable descent of an idea, a person, or an entire org. That’s the rhythm of life, I guess, and the cadence of the absurd: from hour to hour, we move forward, only to be undone.
My rot started sophomore year. A real “ripe and ripe” moment—except it ended in decay. I showed up late to a class, which was already an L. To catch up, I had to borrow notes from my Boswell, who had dutifully recorded the lecturer’s words and deeds. It was a whole feeling—me and this stack of pages, my entire academic future hanging by a thread. The silence of the night, the distant city’s faint clangor, and the slow, terrible realization: I was utterly alone in this self-inflicted in-camera deliberation.
Then the word appeared. Again and again. A relentless, omnipresent figure in the margins of economic thought. “Ceteris Paribus.“
So there I was, a sophomore in econ class that was, let’s just say, a bit of a vibe check. I rolled in late, as is tradition, and was drowning in a sea of notes from some over-achieving classmates. They were pristine, perfectly organized, and honestly, kinda sus. But then I saw it—this character, this absolute main character: Ceteris Paribus.
And I was sure it was a “he.” Kept popping up. “Assuming Ceteris Paribus, the demand curve will shift right.” “If Ceteris Paribus holds, then we can expect…” This dude was the backbone of the whole course! The silent partner, the puppet master. I imagined him as some ghost in the machine—a shadow figure in a tweed jacket, whispering assumptions into the lecturer’s ear.
‘Who’s Ceteris Paribus?’ I asked my study group. They looked at me, bewildered, as if I’d asked about the color of a sound. It was then, in that moment of collective silence, that the truth dawned on me. Ceteris Paribus wasn’t a person. He wasn’t a shadowy figure, not a silent partner, not even a cool dude with a tweed jacket. Ceteris Paribus was just… a concept. A Latin phrase meaning ‘all other things being equal.’ It was a bit of a letdown, to be honest
The world, it seems, is full of people who aren’t really people, and assumptions that are just… assumptions. There’s nothing to be done about it. You go on.
I am not lying when I tell you, my mind was convinced it was a person. A name. Like “John Smith” or “Aristotle.” I saw him as some kind of silent, economic guru, a torpid deity whose assumptions were so fundamental they were simply referred to by his name. A pococurante master of the universe who, for some reason, just lived in these notes, haunting me. Every time the phrase came up, I pictured a guy in a tweed jacket, just chilling, his existence a cruel punchline. You know the type: the middle-aged, middle-class guy trapped by the success of publishing one novel twenty years ago, his fate now merely the footnote of academic meetings. This supposed Ceteris Paribus was that guy, only his novel was the entire economic canon.
This absurd belief quickly morphed into a prosopography on a micro scale, an attempt to build a collective biography of an entire field of thought around a single, nonexistent figure. It was an act of faith, a hagiography, perhaps, a worshipful, but ultimately flawed, portrait. My whole academic life was on the line. I was trying to solve a mystery that was a figment of my own frantic imagination. The entire thing felt like a timocracy, a system where only those with the inherited or innate property of knowing the unwritten rules could pass. And I, a hopeful idiot, had just made up a new rule.
And then the test came. The final battle. I was putting my faith in this Ceteris Paribus, this non-person, and his apathetic, unfeeling rules. The whole situation was absurd. It was absurdist bleak, a play where nothing happens because I’d created my own tragicomedy with a character who didn’t exist. I was trapped by my own success in overthinking, convinced I had found the hidden truth when all I had was a Latin phrase.
And so, from hour to hour, I prepped and prepped. And then, from hour to hour, I got it all wrong. Thereby hangs a tale of the biggest L of my academic career, all because I thought a phrase was a dude. The simple truth is never simple, and language is a snare.
It all came back in a flash, that day in college. A torrential rain locked us in the lecture hall, and our Geography lecturer, Fekade Shewakena, was just… a whole different mood. Unlike the Kozlov-Afanasieve wielding terror of our other classes, he came with a smile, a real one. The dim ambience of that normally light-friendly architectural marvel felt like a setting from a bleak play, but he lit it up with a story.
He hit us with a question that, for our generation, was never a question: “What about the population increase in Ethiopia?” Nobody had the answer, so a wild guess floated from the crowd. A culprit was apprehended: “Electricity.” The room erupted. Laughter was missing from our curriculum, and it felt like a collective release. But for me, it was chilling. It was my red pill moment. A wake-up call that research, that life itself, was out there to improve with every single encounter.
Later, when I first heard the expression “the bigger picture,” I low-key wanted to claim it. I used to call it “looking from above down.” This drive for finished courses and application-prone teachings may have cost me on some simple exams, but it paid off where it mattered. It turned every encounter, every meeting, into an opportunity to learn. This willingness to look “from above down” would become my only defense against the looming stupidity of the working world.
The “ceteris paribus” debacle had a sequel, a relentless second act in the theater of the absurd. I was stuck with other courses—group dynamics, cognitive dissonance, change management—all supposedly easily rote-learned, a continuation of Paribus’s reign. This whole mess was facilitated by a short, wiry Indian lecturer whose classroom was disastrously sucking.
As I struggled, still clinging to the childhood dream of joining the naval or Police College, her essence became a centrifugal and centripetal force that simultaneously pulled me to and pushed me away from college. She was so belittling, her classroom a hypnotizing nagging that reminded me of time wasted in vain. Yet, she was also utterly pitiless in bulldozing what was adrift.
The irony was not lost on my cynical, overthinking brain. She was beautiful. Her name was Meera, which means “ocean” or “peace.” Her classroom was a real contradiction, and a mood. Her essence, lightyears away from our few years in college, was a living paradox: a beautiful bully whose very name promised serenity but delivered only chaos.
It was only in my third year I was a bit reassured. Asmelash Beyene (PhD), with his extreme sophistication, was a different feeling entirely. He’d tell these surreal stories from his junior years as an acting Head of the Department of the Awrajas Administration of The Ministry of Interior just after the eruption of the revolution. There was the meeting that took place in Bedilu Hintsa, with Professor Mesfin and some young Derg officials trying to redraw regional boundaries. Professor Mesfin was having none of it, citing that the land with its mountains and rivers wasn’t just a table they could round. It was all so wonderfully, practically absurd.
Then there was the other story, where he predicted Zambia’s collapse, as beer became the nation’s primary obsession—a kind of perverse nationalistic fervor that he called “unbridled Zambianization” that ignored competence. He told us how the country’s quacha, once equal to the sterling pound, plummeted into ruin. An economic lesson that completely trashed any “ceteris paribus” assumptions or simply the reality of how things should work.
It’s just like him, I had all the respect. And that terrible Indian, Meera, too. Along with other brilliant professors—Ayele, Aklilu, Miheret, Tegegne, Mekbib, Karinga, and Teshome—all PhDs, all our guides. They helped us traverse the gap between academic theory and the messy, contradictory equivalent of realism from the arts. If it was not for them, and the repeatedly notorious bosses I had in my working life, who epitomized that growing up is optional, I could not have come so far. They were my survival manual.
The commute, or whatever you want to call it, to Lideta Mariam when I was a kid? Low-key, it was a whole mood. Not the destination, which was fine, but the atmosphere on the way. It was all about this one house—you know, the main character of the block—whose view was forever garnished with the taste of that sticky, fragrant vine resin my mother would snag for me from the roadside OG sellers. That taste? That view? Still lives rent-free in my head.
Then, plot twist. I found out the house belonged to this absolute legend, a true pillar of society: Sinidu Gebru. She was everywhere the country needed her, doing the absolute most. Patriot, lyricist, the first woman parliamentarian, human rights champ, diplomat—the whole glow-up.
But the real tea was her time as an MP. This wasn’t some quiet background character; she was Slay-nidu Gebru. Her points were so maverick, so iconic, that if you missed a session, the first question anyone would ask was, ‘Wait, what did she say today?’ She was the daily drop of drama, the essential feed.
I threw this whole assertion—her being the daily must-see—onto a history Facebook page, because why not? And then, boom. A comment. A reply. Not from some random, but from her own sister, Emahoy Tsige Mariam. Talk about getting the receipt. A total flex on my part, honestly. It just goes to show you: the background characters are often the most legendary. And the old stories? Still fire.
Look, this all came from a walk that went astray after an idea I thought was worth the page disappeared without a hint. Anyway, here we are. Something is better than nothing. The idea just got lost, maybe because I was fuming that all the “ceteris paribus” were nothing other than their creators and the struggle they had envisaging them.
It’s giving the same feeling as back in AAU. There was always a special consideration for academic staff noted for research. I was told of people who walked in Eshetu Chole and Desalegne Rahmeto. You lament the previous’s languishing in jail with talks of never being able to meet the demand to satisfy his reading appetite. The latter’s bold recommendation on “food for work” to “money for work”—as “food for work” stifled agricultural activities—dug deep into our relevance to society. This is what led me to dedicate myself as a permanent experimentor of variance analysis from “ceteris paribus.” The real-world stakes were so high, and the theories were just… words.
That same feeling of futility seeped into the working world. The first government enterprise I ever clocked into? No hustle, just shelves of management manuals gathering dust. We symbolically jailed Mr. Ceteris Paribus—locked him up like some myth. My bosses, from the first to the last, all shared this unhinged smile—one so wild I’d swear it bordered on insanity. It was a grin that fueled the wasting of mad human and material resources, like some sick joke.
Meetings significantly influence the overall atmosphere. In my previous role, they often lacked a focus on idea generation. They were about roasting gaffers in front of the second, third, or even fourth string. There was this farcical succession plan called “air planes abc,” where a sales floor attendant somehow ended up as GM. The only requirement? A portrait for the license. Grand gatherings weren’t for business—they were for family weddings and birthdays. That’s the rot Shakespeare warned us about, and trust me, it had to be called out.
I never missed a meeting. My college lecturers drilled into me a lifelong obsession with variance analysis. That’s why the Addis Ababa rivers project, while pretty, doesn’t hit the same. It needs a new word—something to describe the atmosphere . It’s giving me flashbacks to my time in the water sector.
One rare meeting on groundwater development, I raised the issue of the catchment flow in the city. A colleague, in a moment of pure gold, said the water tasted “floody in Kiremet.” Absolute absurdity—just a perfect human data point. On a separate occasion, I was disparaged as a “fool” for raising concerns regarding an underground tunnel project, irrespective of its scale, internal dimensions, or resource requirements.
I came out alive—variance hunter. I flagged hundreds of millions in waste, prevented disasters, only to get pushed aside. My work was done. The rot had set in, but I, the eternal experimentor, had saved immense resources. The story of my life? Not just a footnote of a failed equation. And there, my friend, is the tale.
Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye Engida