The first working day of the half way point of the
year was a pretty f***ed up day. I guess you could say it started with the fact
that I ended up upsetting the Neurotic Angel over the weekend when I told her
that I think most 20-year-old guys in Singapore are sad and boring. She
attributed it to jealousy and from that moment it seemed it would get cursed by
my favourite pet peeves.
The day started with a reminder as why I detest
offices and everything associated with them. Walked into an office to read a
series of emails between two colleagues who between them had somehow
miscommunicated certain information to me and I was effectively responsible for
a problem I had no desire to be involved with.
Then, I had to deliver something to United Overseas
Bank (UOB). Normally, it’s a simple process. You walk up to the counter, call
the person on the pone provided and then the person comes out and takes what
needs to be delivered:
Now, that would be the process except that when you
pick up the phone, there’s utter silence. So, I had to use my own phone to call
someone. Now, the phone not working on its own is bad enough. However, this wasn’t
the first time that this had happened. I remember telling the staff that their
phone was not working on two previous occasions in the last six months.
Ironically, this inability to fix the phone happened to be in a section that
calls itself a “technology” and “operations” section.
The final straw was going downstairs to a “Muslim”
coffee shop and hopping to get a cup tea without milk with two limes, which is
something that every Muslim coffee shop serves in Singapore. You just have to
ask for “Te-h-O Limau Panas.” Except the girl serving me was from Vietnam, who
didn’t know what the heck I was talking about. Then, she asked her colleague who
was probably from India, who also didn’t know what I was talking about. It took
a while for someone to explain that they had no limes or lemon and so I had to
settle for tea without milk.
By the time I returned to the office, I was actually
contemplating whether life was worth ending by ending the lives of the people
around me. The heart rate that I had worked so diligently to bring down before
leaving for the UK had shot right back up (to be fair, I’ve been drinking more
since I was in the UK).
I blame the system and I blame the world’s first “Yuppie,”
Confucious who created a Chinese culture that was obsessed with bureaucracy and
hierarchy and trying to get people to have a mindset that existed in a past
that never actually existed. Confucious’s philosophy worked in theory, except
it had one fatal flaw. China became complacent and thought it had everything
and didn’t need to evolve. We, as a civilization, built a great big wall to
keep outsiders out. The reality was, it didn’t work. The barbarian hoards inevitably
found a way round the wall and ended up kicking the crap out of every Chinese
army that was sent to stop them. By the time the Europeans arrived in the 18th
century, China was still in living in the 15th.
If you look at the Chinese societies that thrived
outside China, you’ll notice that it was the very people whom Confucius
despised – the merchants and entrepreneurs. Hong Kong and Taiwan are built by business
people. So, is Singapore. However, Lee Kuan Yew couldn’t accept that and
proceeded to turn us into a Confucian wet dream where everything evolved around
scholar-bureaucrats.
To be fair, the system has worked brilliantly and I’m
still going to make the point that Singapore does measure up pretty well
against most places. However, the cracks in the system are clearly showing and
the saddest place you see it is in our youth.
Talk to enough of them, and you’ll find that what they’re
essentially interested in is money and dare I say voyeurism. You’re not going
to get a “Gretta Thunberg” campaigning for climate change or student protestors
in places like Hong Kong. A few will try to suck up to you if they think there’s
a career advantage for them but that’s really about it. I think of a young lady
who was dating a Finnish student I knew but then started getting touchy with me
the moment she found out I was an intern at Citi.
Now, you could say that this is the way our system is
set up. Young kids are an investment and you want them to start earning fast.
Our kids are, to use that favourite word of Confucious – “filial,” or nice
people. That in itself is not a bad thing. However, if you look at social
changes in just about everywhere in the world, you’ll notice that its
inevitably starts with the young.
Every society needs bouts of change. Yes, young people
should listen to the “wisdom” of those have come before them. However, there
are times when the young should stand up and show the Old Farts that things can
be done differently and actually better.
We’re not letting our youth do that. Instead, we’re
pushing them into silos and cubicles because we’ve told them that this is where
the cushy life is. We tell them that spending long hours in a cubicle will make
you into a somebody and king or queen of the world.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with a cubicle per se.
However, the problem with life in a cubicle is that it eventually leads you
into thinking that the only thing that matters is you, your social circle and
station in life. So, life in cubicle land becomes about protecting your turf
and climbing into the corner office. The basic premise of the business you
serve becomes secondary to protecting your turf.
Hence, you get a nation of people who have their youthful
energy drained out of them by starting at a screen in a space for hours on end.
Nobody is going to try and voice a thought different from the mainstream.
In the mean time everyone will then try and show off
about how they get this and that. It becomes about having the latest of this
and that without any thought as to how it works. In the mean-time, the basic
stuff goes to the dogs. I think of the phone at UOB, which like all banks,
spends enough to keep portions of the IT industry alive. So much is spent on
technology and yet, you can’t get a phone to work.
Our society is so obsessed with showing off that we spend
all our time on glitz and glamour and neglect out basics. We’re at a stage
where we actually need people from elsewhere to manage the basics for us. I
think of the Vietnamese girl and the Indian boy trying to serve me tea.
We just welcomed a new Prime Minister. He will undoubtedly
have a lot of grand ideas about where we need to go. For me, I only wish he
will go back to what was shown during Covid. Go back, get our young to tell us
where they want the country to go. Go back to basics and build from there.
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