Thoughtflow Rant

Let's not do any tracking talk for a change. It feels like cheap content masquerading as some faux competition just to make it sound like I'm doing more things than I am doing. Anyone who wants to find out what I have been reading/how much I have been reading can go check out my reading list and my read list respectively. I'll just say in passing that I have been reading as much as I care to each day ever since the completion of Handbook of Data Structures and Applications, with the intention of completing the Animorphs series as soon as I can.

Things aren't going smooth with respect to the COVID-19 situation in Singapore. The community case counts per day are not exactly going down, and while it is too early to tell if the ``Phase 2 (Heightened Alert)'' measures are effective in stemming the community spread, the negative effects of the measures on people's lives are starting to show.

I will leave it to the other media (social or mainstream) to focus more on what this means for the average Ah Seng, and just talk about my own perspective instead.

It's peaceful enough for me. As the social isolation draws on, people start forgetting about my existence, and I slowly fade away into the background. In many ways, this is a Bad Thing, because despite all the claims of meritocracy, the reality of it all is that the official job market in SIN operates more or less like a CN-lite instead of being a ``true'' meritocracy. Besides, meritocracy doesn't really extend that well into the tertiary education and beyond, because the governmental support to boost high potential adults into the ``elite'' by arming them with the right amount of resources and opportunities to compete at a meritcratic level (sans the more obvious cronyism) gets prohibitively expensive.

Right, fading into the background. It's funny, actually. In some sense, I'm getting my wish granted---I had been in the foreground (and centre stage too) for a long time ever since I was young, sometimes for the right reasons (achievements and what-not), and most times for the wrong reasons (``that kid with the bad skin''). Moving through the school system from a neighbourhood primary school to a ``special assisted programme'' secondary school and finally to a neo-elite junior college gradually showed me that in the grand stage, I am literally nothing, even smaller than the mote of the stars. Because I'm not born with a silver spoon in my mouth.

I will never go as far as someone who has connections. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't have connections, but that my connections are absolutely useless where I am---I did my college in the US, so I can probably talk to some folks there should I want to go there to work.

But why do I want to go to the US to work? I'd be a second-class citizen there, with even less support than being a first-class citizen out in SIN. And anyone who I knew who have decided to go to the US to work... let's just say that they are, with high probability, going to be US citizens---they ain't coming back to be proper SIN citizens, ever.

So then, am I a fool for staying in SIN?

I suppose it depends heavily on what criteria I am applying to make that judgement, I suppose. If I am looking at it purely from an economic point of view, then yes, I am the biggest damn fool on the planet for still staying in SIN where the opportunities are slim, the competition is undercut by cheaper labour from elsewhere, and cronyism lurks in the shadows of a supposedly meritocratic system outside that of the civil service.

If I am looking at it from a cultural and familial perspective, then no, since my parents are here, as are folks that I make music with regularly in the form of the Chinese orchestra. I used to have a wife-candidate here too, but that's now passed and is in the past. And thanks to COVID-19, we (as in the orchestra, not the wife-candidate) have not done any rehearsals for more than a year.

Do we still have an orchestra left? I don't know. I really don't know.

The days themselves have started to have little to differentiate among them---each day I need to physically remind my mum (and by secret extension, myself) the day of the week it was, just so that we can keep a certain cadence going. She's been home-bound for a long time for being a housewife, and I'm on sabbatical. Days easily meld into a blur when there is no [obvious] change going on.

Connections; cronyism. A technocratic agency cannot claim to be so if it is affected by cronyism. I don't discount the importance of having good relationships with people, but there is a difference between having a good working relationship and having some other kind of relationship that is taken as a surrogate for a working-type one. That's just disingenius, and more importantly, ends up complicating the decision process, making the final decisions much weaker than they should due to additional and potentially unnecessary constraints that come from the cronyism aspects.

I used to be less exacting---as long as I am not outright being cheated, I'm willing to put up with quite a bit of things. But now, the longer I am on sabbatical, the more stringent I am setting things up in many aspects of my life. My time is valuable, and I need to put my money where my mouth is.

If this means that when I need to get a job, I may need to hold out for a better fit and negotiate for my terms, I will do it. If it means rejecting some HR drone's pathetic excuses for frowned-upon practices, then so be it. In the end, it's just a job, and while the company has the right to pick a good candidate to work for them, I too have the right to pick a good company to work for.

That is, assuming that I intend to work for others as a corporate drone. Not totally discounting that yet---six/seven months is a long time for many things to happen, and that's roughly the number of months I have left of my sabbatical.

Chara once said at the end of a two-month break between jobs that I was going stir-crazy, which I vehemently disagree. I still do, and I'm proving to myself now that I am still in the right. Because I'm not stir-crazy. I'm not restless nor frantic, because I have time to think about things that I need to do, and more importantly, do them, all without having to worry about being badly managed by someone else in a time where everyone is highly stressed out due to living on the razor's edge of not developing reserves/contingencies in the bid for profit.

So much to read, so much to think, so many Steam/GOG games to play, so many flute/笛子 pieces I can play. How would I ever feel bored and restless?

I don't, that's the point. And the scary thing is, it gets dangerously comfortable the longer I am in this state.

Perhaps retiring twenty years earlier than expected is not too bad an idea after all. No bitcoin riches to live off of, but having a small amount of savings, and the willingness to do part time jobs to pay the bills, and to pursue knowledge and understanding without it being tainted by the crushing pressures of capitalistic tendencies. To live like an old time member of the intelligentsia. Very alluring.

I wonder if that can actually be viable. Might be worth a thinking through for feasibility, especially in such harrowing times where the national strategy for economic output is hashed, the labour market is scuffed, and the social fabric of society threatened by all these new measures stemming from a situation that promotes survival through isolation instead of togetherness.

Alright, enough yammering for now. Till the next update.