This week, I got to welcome a new forum member, troodon. It’s heartening to see all the new discussions taking place. Please join in!
Troodon recently spoke to me via instant messaging. He’s what he had to say:
Dear Diodati:
I was back in Singapore recently for a holiday and I was talking to my friends about financial independence and things like that. Good times.
Life in Singapore is so different: I just realized I no longer am used to living in Singapore. People hate their jobs; people have no dreams, no goals. The biggest thing in their lives right now is to get married and buy a HDB flat. I don’t even know why some of them are dying to get married.
Being in Singapore in the last 2 weeks has confirmed my suspicion that quite a few Singaporeans love to not think for themselves. They like things as they are, [in their] huge reality distortion field. Reality will start biting them in their mid-30s but by then it’s too late to turn around.
There’s actually a very good reason for this and it makes a lot of sense: a lot of it has to do with Singaporeans living with their parents, and having a maid to take care of everything. The real world doesn’t really bite them until they start living for themselves. But it’s kind of sad because elsewhere you start living by yourself when you start working, or in your case, in school.
In Singapore you start living by yourself [only] when you register for a flat and get married, which kind of sucks because so many things hit you at the same time. You haven’t even learned how to manage your own finances; now you’re expected to manage finances of your new family and cope with a bunch of other things and make decisions which have been made for you for the past 20+ years. So it’s a big culture shock I think for Singaporeans: people need to feel some sort of impact in their lives before they care about things. People don’t care about politics early on because it doesn’t seem to affect them, but when they start working and realize how screwed they are they start trying to care but it’s normally too late by then.
Like one of my friends doing his PhD in Singapore now. He has this delusion that he will be [going into academia in Singapore] just because he is doing his PhD in Singapore. I fear for his future. This guy doesn’t even go to the lab he stays at home most of the time. He self declares off because his adviser is very slack apparently. [He] goes to church most of the time instead of going to do grad research in school. Yeah, this is the quality of Singapore PhD candidates. Sigh.
So I asked him, ‘What is your thesis?’ Or at least, do you have any idea what you want to do? He said no, [he's] not sure yet but he has time. His attitude is pretty sad, I will say shocking. If he had this kind of attitude in my lab, my prof would have fired him in like a week. The thing is, he’s not even interested in research. I don’t see any sort of passion or drive from this person. It’s really sad. I wonder how the hell he got admitted. Why is he doing his PhD, you ask? It’s a good question. Well basically his parents told him “to study more” so he is studying more. Yeah, I am speechless. He has the impression [that] Daddy will get him a job after graduation. Isn’t that nice?
The thing is, he is getting married anyway next year without any sort of income. They are both church going types but he won’t have income and she might quit her job. So his parents will pay for the flat which is scary but if he’s fine with it, ah well. The scary thing is he’s fine with [his fiancée] paying for the flat through her CPF like it’s a non-issue but [his fiancée]’s CPF will run out [really quickly] if she does it. It’s retarded, [these] Singaporeans with no concept of money at all.
Anyway, it’s his life, but sometimes I feel that as a friend I should advise him a little on financial awareness. You know, 1 in 2 marriages end up in divorce, and most of the time the reason is money. [Yet] he told me marriage has nothing to do with money and he doesn’t need money for a stable marriage, and he doesn’t read the news or cares about politics or anything. All he needs is a Bible, and he said if God wills him to be jobless, there’s nothing he can do about it.
It’s a little scary to hear what he was saying to me, but anyway it’s his life. His parents are paying for his wedding and his flat, among other things. He just has no idea how hard it is to support yourself in the real world - it’s an alien concept to him - so basically when he graduates with his shiny PhD in 3-4 years time, that’s when it will hit him really hard. He still has illusions [about his future]; when I tried to tell him how unrealistic his expectations are he didn’t believe me. He just shut himself off.
So there, lots of people in Singapore get married for the wrong reasons.
The main problem is that the world is changing too rapidly for most people to cope. This goes all the way from the average day person up to the upper echelons of the civil service.
So I have to say that Singaporeans make me sad. People like him are just sad.
Troodon
[Ed: This forum thread based off of Oikono's original post is probably relevant here.]
P.S. Please also see the comments at tomorrow.sg.
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