Mid-Life Crisis

It’s going to be National in a matter of hours and I thought I’d try and bash out something about the country that I’ve called home for the last two decades. Singapore is going to be 56-years old (counting from the day we got booted out of the Malaysian Federation). Although it’s going to be nine-years more before I hit, 56, it is a significant enough milestone both for the nation and people of my generation – Gen X, the generation between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. We were the first to only sing “Majullah Singapura,” and the last to know Lee Kuan Yew as Prime Ministers.

On the surface of things, Singapore has much to be happy about. We are, when compared to many parts of the world. On the surface, we are relatively prosperous and live within a clean and green city. We have certain luxuries like being able to breath our air, which is a luxury when compared to other parts of the world. Then, as one Englishman once pointed out to me – there is “safety,” which provides us with a freedom that no one else seems to have. As a dad of a young girl, I don’t worry when she goes out late at night.

Covid-19 seems to have made the comparison between Singapore and the rest of the world even greater. Sure, we could have vaccinated more people and the sudden return to “phase 2” was annoying. The explosion of cases in the dormitories last year and the karaoke lounges were undoubtedly failures of policy and enforcement.

However, when all is said and done, we’ve done better than many parts of the world. It’s actually newsworthy when an individual dies of Covid-19 and more importantly, our government and people have allowed the conspiracy nut jobs to take charge of health policy. As an English friend of mine who is now living in the USA says:

 

However, despite a seemingly “good” environment, many of us are feeling angsty. You could say that Singaporeans are going through a collective mid-life crisis. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has friends from elsewhere looking at me like I’m a strange person who complains about life in paradise. However, whilst things may appear to be exceedingly good on the surface (I’m not starving, I have a roof over my head and so on), I, like many Singaporeans, am terrified by the future. Unlike my grandparents, I cannot rely on the constant assurance that the government will ensure the environment I live in will always be conducive to my ability to make a living.

Let’s face it, whilst I have a home that is worth something at the moment, who is to say that it will be worth anything in the next decade or so (I live in an HDB flat). As I get older, my worries increase. It looks increasingly unlikely that I’ll be able to touch my only source of retirement savings (CPF), and costs like healthcare look set to increase. In the meantime, it looks like any employment I can get will be out of the kindness of a few folks.

Whilst the future looks somewhat scary, the system doesn’t seem to be aware of that. Sure, there’s plenty to talk about support for freelance workers and there’s plenty of chatter about fostering innovation and creative enterprises. There’s enough action in these areas to create a few impressive headlines.

However, the truth is, we’re still pretty much a “rentier” economy that’s stuck in a business plan that was designed in the 1960s. One only has to look at the way in which the government rushed to bail out the dormitories that were housing foreign workers from elsewhere. Why did a famously “no-welfare” government rush to bail out an industry that had profited from not doing anything particularly valuable. The reason was simple – a good portion of our economy remains reliant on “muscle” labour. How was it such that the world’s strictest and most efficient government not see that the “pivot” to food and beverage outlets would be abused? The truth is, too many people were making money from a business. Why does the government not clamp down harder on companies that invent reasons to keep people in the office? The answer is simple – landlords hold a lot of clout within the system.

Singapore’s old model need to be restructured. We need to learn to deal with people from emerging Asia and we also need to understand that the Western world won’t bail us out if it does not suite its interest.

As I get older, I long for the need to want to take certain risk with my future so that I’m not dependent on outdated paradigms. Likewise, the nation needs to do the same. Instead of trying to stick to old models, the government should encourage the people to leap into the future. That, I believe is what we need to do in order for Majullah Singapura to continue being sung loudly and proudly.