By Kemol King
For a long time in Guyana, unreliable power and unstable internet have just been part of life. People complain, yes, but they also adjust and accept. They plan for it. They create space in their lives for all of the inconvenience and damage on various aspects of personal life and business that unreliable critical services will have.
Behavioral Economist Dan Ariely, in Predictably Irrational, talks about how people make decisions based on what they are used to.
About a century ago, zoologist Konrad Lorenz discovered goslings would follow and show loyalty to the first moving object they saw, usually their mother. He called this imprinting.
Ariely questioned to what extent human beings, like goslings, are influenced in their decision-making by our first impressions of things. The prices we are willing to pay. The situations we sit ourselves in. The quality of life we are willing to accept. He explains the idea of an anchor, that first reference point we use to judge everything else. If your baseline is low, you expect less.
But your expectation changes when your anchor changes.
Spending time in places where power is constant and the internet just works does something subtle but profound to your perspective. You stop thinking about it. You don’t wonder if your internet connection will drop in the middle of important work. You don’t think about whether the lights will go out at night. Basic utilities function the way they are supposed to, and because of that, you function better too.
Then you come back to Guyana.
While sitting on a flight back home recently, scrolling through social media and seeing people complain about blackouts, I realized that I dreaded returning more with every flight. ‘This is what you’re going back to, Kemol.’ It has been the same issue for years. But it doesn’t feel the same anymore, because you have seen that it does not have to be this way.
This is the re-evaluation. It is the anchor shifting.
And once that happens, the effects of these problems become harder to ignore. When the power goes out, work stops or is slowed. This cuts into your financial bottom line. When you can’t sleep properly because the fan has no power in the middle of the night, that follows you into the next day. You’re tired, you’re slower, you’re less focused. When your internet drops in the middle of something important, you have to restart, wait, and try again.
It affects everything. Your job, your health, even how you relax. These are basic things, and when they don’t work properly, it chips away at your ability to operate at your best.
The thing is, Guyana is not in the same place it was years ago. The country is growing. There is more money, more projects, more ambition. But these core services that people rely on every day are still not where they need to be.
As more Guyanese travel, even for short periods, they see what consistency looks like. Not perfection. Just consistency. And that experience changes how they think about what they are willing to accept.
When people think about staying or leaving, it is sometimes about something very simple: being in a place where you can work without interruption, sleep without disruption, and go about your day without planning around failure.
Guyana has dealt with brain drain for decades. There are many reasons for it. If the environment makes it harder for people to function, then people will look for environments where they can.
There are solutions in motion. The Gas-to-Energy project and its accompanying projects are among them. It’s meant to help with unreliable power. But the timeline keeps moving, and for many people, it still feels far away. In the meantime, the problems remain.
So the question becomes simple: how long is this acceptable?
Because once people see that better exists, that it works, that it is normal elsewhere, it becomes harder to justify why it can’t be normal here.
This is where Guyana is. Not just growing, but being compared more increasingly, by its own people, to a different standard than before.
