The Misery of Normal

The year has started on a busy note or should I say, the previous year ended on a busy note that carried on right into this one. December was a month of many late nights (up till 3 in the morning and I pulled off four nights of staying up till 6) and burnt weekends galore. If it wasn’t this project or that, it was a case of catching up with everything else.

I should be grateful. Being busy is a key indicator that business is good and could be good enough for the boss to up the money. This was a fact that one of the customers in the Bistrot made to me on a busy night.  Last year was a particularly good year for the liquidations industry or at the least the liquidator that I work for. Ended up with two pay increases and in all fairness, the bonus was decent (as someone pointed out – getting a thirteen-month annual wage supplement or AWS is considered pretty OK these days.)

An objective viewer might ask me what is it that I am not satisfied with because I’m finally starting to look like a successful man. I have been fairly steady in a “professional” white collar job for the last half decade and I mix with people with nice paper qualifications and hang out in nice offices. I get invited to the parties of the firm’s top clients, which something my better qualified but younger contemporary can’t understand. I should, as they say, feel delighted that I am finally making the right moves.

But I don’t feel successful. If anything, I am miserable and everything around me looks better. Whenever the bus goes past a construction site, I look at the construction workers with some envy. While their lodgings in Singapore are undoubtedly less comfortable than mine and I probably earn far more for the hours I work than they do for theirs, I can’t help but feel that they have something very important that I don’t.

I believe the answer lies in the fact that I’ve become a “normal” person, living the life that one is expected to live. It’s like when I think of going back to being semi-self-employed, I’m held back by the fear of how I’ll pay the mortgage and how Kiddo is going to get her pocket money (to be fair to Kiddo, she’s trying to tell me that we should do something in Vietnam). While I had a decade of reasonably successful self-employment, I didn’t have things like a mortgage and so on and so on.

I believe that what I miss most is the challenge of survival. While I never had a “steady income,” in those days, I actually felt more intelligent and more resourceful. When you’re on your own, you have the luxury of being honest about life because, you have various sources of income or should have say, you get many people giving you things rather than being dependent on one particular person or organization or even industry. If I didn’t get money from PR, I had the Bistrot.

Well, things are changing. I’m working less hours at the Bistrot and more in the office. I can hear people telling me that this is the natural order of things. I have, as everyone else around me keeps saying so silently, “I’ve grown up and understood my place in the scheme of things.” I am, apparently, in a secure place – steady, white collar job that benefits my status as an “educated man.”

Yet, I feel angry that the world is trying to push me in dangerous direction. Having only one source of income is stupid. It means you work as the boss dictates because you are dependent on the boss for your entire livelihood. Something is wrong with that type of situation. How can this be normal?

Being a “white collar” employee is supposed to have a certain “cache” but I don’t get it. It’s supposed to be a thing of pride when you talk about being part of the “professions.” Again, I don’t get it. I am far happier being away from the “professions.” When people not wanting to dig ditches or driving cabs in their sixties, I worry that I’ll be at a desk, going through tomes of man-made ledgers and tracking numbers on a screen.

I am happiest with the guys from my blue-collar existence. I am happiest struggling to understand my Viet rellies. I work in eye-candy land of young things in power suites and “respectable” jobs. Yet, I find myself relating better to the “working girls,” in Orchard Towers or Geylang, who have a far superior understanding of the world (they take money from well to do expats to feed poor people in the third world as opposed to young working professionals who would happily take money from people in the third world to give it to well to do expats).

The fear of the unknown is keeping me from changing. I just hope that this is the year that I find the courage to take that leap.