Amos Yee

Singaporeans are Slaves: How they are Imprisoned by School, Work and Family

As I wrote previously, if in your life you're not reaching your fullest potential, it is a disservice to yourself and everyone, you're not doing what God wants you to do. So most Singaporeans are failures, because they are slaves to school, work and family. Here's how they enslave you:

After 6 years of childhood (probably the only years of true freedom a Singaporean gets), you spend 10 to 20 years in school. School sucks. You learn things that are mostly useless, outdated or uninteresting. You're forced to fill your mind with garbage.

Now statistically it's said that the better educational qualification you have (university degree vs secondary school), the more likely you'll get a higher paying job. I think that's true, but only for jobs that are horseshit. It's shown by all the people with fancy degrees who get rejected, and all the 'uneducated' people who are hired, that if you're a top-quality company, you won't give 2 fucks about a college degree. Traits like being adaptable, emotional intelligence, speed of learning and implementing knowledge, these are present in all the best workers and organisations. You probably have little of that because it's never taught in school. A college degree just means you have more useless knowledge than most people. Who gives a fuck?

So after school, you'll probably get rejected for great jobs, and just be able to get a shitty Government job, where the culture is just do your job, don't question, where if you notice problems in the company, you're not willing to voice it out because that will make the supervisor look bad and reduce your chances for a promotion. So problems go unsolved, the product might be serviceable, but not of top quality. Everyone has a natural desire to do their best, but most are stuck in a workforce where they're wallowing in subpar mediocrity and can do nothing about it. Years of being lackluster and inefficient gradually fucks your mind up.

Now at some point maybe you wanted to stop living miserably, maybe you had ideas of finding a better job, or learning something relevant, or doing a project like business or art or something. However the obstacle in all those things is there might be a significant amount of time where you're not paid for that. Quite an issue because oh shit, at some point you decided to get a HDB flat. Don't know why you couldn't just continue living with your family when they've been housing you for free for 30 years. And so fuck, I can't afford to not make money for even a few months because I'll lose my flat and my downpayment.

And then holy fucking shit fuck, at another point too, you decide to get married and have kids. And so damn, I can't not have a stable income because without money my family won't survive, my child won't have food. So again you push your dreams to the side, your family far from being a source of support and empowerment, becomes a burden that holds you back. So you suck it up and just stick with your shitty job, you even start fooling yourself to thinking you like it, and oh there's a small increase of $500 in my monthly salary after working for the same company for a million years, now I definitely can't leave.

So you continue working, maybe at some point because of a changing economy you get laid off and find another shitty job. Work, work, you do that for 30 to 40 years until you're around 65, you retire if you have savings, work more if you don't. Having a dull, depressing, purposeless career has a physical and mental toll throughout your life, you maybe start developing bad habits: internet addiction, alcoholism, overeating, you maybe start developing various mental and physical issues: depression, anxiety, diabetes, cancer, ... . Healthcare of course costs money and wipes out your savings. You continue living in a semi-paralysed state until you're 80, you die, and that's it. That's your legacy. What the fuck!

To me, having this kind of life is one of the worst things in the universe. I wrote previously that maybe homelessness, and definitely Prison might be better than that life (link prison better than school post). And the fact that most Singaporeans consider this a great life ... You got a university degree, a stable job, a HDB flat, a family, what's there to complain? This is a systematic endorsement of misery, which is probably why Singaporeans are so depressed. And of course you wouldn't want to fulfill your moral duty and do anything political, like skip National Service, or protest on the streets against the government and get arrested, because you might lose your job or house or whatever.

Singaporeans, if you care about not being miserable and useless, you should avoid this life like the plague. There are many things you can do to gain the skills for an eventual dream job. To be less reliant on your shitty job and have more time for projects and learning, you can live with your family as an adult, ask money from your family, spend less money on trivial things, save more, don't get a HDB flat or a child until you have many years of savings, if you impregnated someone prematurely, get an abortion or give the child up for adoption (someone reading this probably thinks I'm the devil). In any spare time you have, learn valuable skills, less K-Pop and JianHao Tan videos and more good books.

Why Singaporeans rarely do these things is because a lot of them are difficult or go against societal expectations. Like oh it's so embarrassing if I'm still living with my parents at 40, or oh abortions are bad because my priest who believes a guy lived in the belly of a whale said so. Well there's the quote 'Easy decisions, hard life; hard decisions, easy life'.