Failed Basics – Brain Rotting Bureaucratic Practices and Boring Youth.

 

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:

 

 A basic phone – that nobody has fixed for several months:

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.

 

 Technology and Operations can’t get a phone fixed

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.

 

 How difficult is it for someone to tell me they have no lime?

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 18^th century, China was still in living in the 15^th.

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.