Thursday, April 14, 2022

Living in the Ponzi Scheme

 

I’ve never been one for the corporate office. Although freelancing was not the most lucrative in as much as I was unable to build without a steady income, I am far prouder of the things that I did as an independent contractor than when I was employed by a corporation. Whilst peers in the PR agency could boast of reaching certain positions in Western multinationals run out of New York and London, little me, a nobody with no great corporate experience from little Singapore was compared with a multinational PR agency (“You did more for us than….).

I only swallowed getting properly employed in an insolvency firm when the then Evil Teen became a part of my life. My pride of being able to survive outside the Singapore norm (needing New York, London or the Government to tell me what to do) had to give way to the responsibilities of fatherhood and so I stayed in the “steady,” and “respectable” space of being a working “professional” in establishment Singapore. I actually worked more than office hours on a daily basis because it was the “normal” thing to do.

Then came the pandemic and the lockdown in April 2020. Life in the lockdown took some adjustment, especially at the moments when retainer income wasn’t coming in. However, I started a simple walking routine and when I started moving more, the brain started to function. When I had to return to the office and resume a life of having to be in a certain location more than two hours at a time and had to look at files and store bits of paper, it finally dawned upon me that the “normal” life of an office job and being part of some self-made tribe of a profession is in fact not normal at all.

The increasingly crowded bus ride into the office puzzles me. Why do people take such joy in going to places that go against what nature designed us to do? It is not natural to sit at a desk for eight hours a day looking at bits of paper containing information about things that happened a decade ago. People take pride in being chained to a desk. I hear of people bragging about how they were up looking files all night or how they are under so much stress that they can’t sleep or eat, I’m suddenly aware of why populations in the developed world aren’t growing – people are too busy masturbating over files in the office to have sex

I shouldn’t knock masturbation – as Woody Allen says, “It’s sex with someone you love.” However, there comes a point when we’re so busy masturbating over our self-importance (the usual sources of masturbation being I am a degree holder with many professional qualifications working in a managerial post in a big company in an office in the centre of town and I am too busy to eat or sleep), that you forget that there’s the “actual sex” of doing something useful for someone (the paying customer) without doing harm to people.

Sure, I get the fact that we all need to make a living. I get the fact that a steady income is paramount to survival. I do make my way into Shenton Way on a daily basis because I do need regular payments. I am also grateful that my main employer understands that I function best when I am moving around, so he uses me for the task that allow me to move.

However, we’ve created a system that is unsustainable and, in many ways, a total scam. We have conditioned people to believe that they need to go to a desk and stare at a screen and bits of paper for a third of their day because their entire livelihood depends on it (one of worst forms of slavery in professional firms is the clause that prohibits you from taking on another job even if it’s in a totally different industry). Once’s entire life then gets forced around a certain company or to an extent on a certain industry. Lawyers will only hang out with lawyers, accountants only mix with accountants, PR professionals only mix with other PR professionals. No other animals tie themselves to a single source of food – the grazing animals move around for different grazing areas and the hunting animals look for the grazing animals.

Governments around the world have failed miserably to build a more sustainable system and only encouraged a return to an unnatural normal with the encouragement to return to normal. While I do think that Singapore’s government did a reasonable job in managing the pandemic, it failed in trying to create something new. Instead of encouraging experimentation with work models, it proceeded to encourage the landlords to run various adds on how much better life was in the unnatural normal (incidentally the Singapore government is the largest landlord in Singapore).

Masturbation only encourages people to continue jacking off rather than thinking of ways to get better. Look at the way in which professional firms get paid – selling time. Whenever you see a working professional, what you’re essentially paying for is the time that the said professional spends on your issue rather than whether the said issue gets solved at all. Senior partners in Singapore’s big law firms can charge around $1,000 an hour – the underlying words being an hour. This holds true even when you lose a case. As Mad Magazine once said – “No lawyer is ever undefeated – they get paid whether they win or lose and they continue billing after the case when they go for appeals.” The system is designed in such a way that it is not in “professionals” interest to solve the problem in the most efficient way.

Thus far, only one professional has had the courage to challenge this established system by including a “success fee” clause in his contracts. The professional has made a lot of money but even he has on occasion had his success fee struck down by the courts on a few occasions. In another instance, there is a case of a judicial management where the court had no problem taxing the fees of the lawyers and restructuring professionals who charged by the hour. However, they proceeded to hold up the fees of the auctioneer of the equipment, who was the only one who could quantify the value they brought (dollars and cents) and charged based the measurable dollars and cents they brought in.  The court felt it was expensive to charge based on measurable value (the auctioneer in question is not known for being cheap but they’re known for providing value which cheaper competitors do not provide). How is it common sense to accept charges on an efficient system but challenge the payment of the only party that actually can measure the value of the work they provide?

Thankfully, I am not the only freak who thinks that the current economic system is an unsustainable scam designed to promote masturbation. Someone from the Temasek Review Emeritus pasted a link to a post of mine, which lead to a Forbes article where Nobel laureate Steven Chu described the world economic system as a “ponzi scheme.” The article can be found at:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/04/05/the-world-economy-is-a-pyramid-scheme-steven-chu-says/?sh=229613734f17

 


 I may be a nobody from a Little Red Dot, so its understandable that nobody will take what I say seriously. However, Mr. Chu is more than qualified to talk about the economic system of the world. Policy makers around the globe would do well to take him seriously and restructure their systems to encourage productivity and sustainability instead of defining insanity by repeating the same things and hopping for different results.  

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Maira Gall