Man U fandom

 I met a friend who was wondering what happened to Man U... he got upset that people always made fun of Man U. I never truly understood the fandom business.

For me the Man U thing started to go south around the time that Alex Ferguson sold Ronaldo for a lot of money back then. He had won the UEFA Champions League with Man U – why would he think that Real Madrid were a bigger club? But they were. And at that time Real Madrid were on the wane. They had sold Wesley Sneijder and Arjen Robben to clubs that would win the UCL with those players in the side. But eventually Ronaldo would triumph and win 4 UCL titles.

From then, the 2008 vintage was taken apart piece by piece, without adequate replacements. At least Van Der Sar had a good enough replacement in David De Gea. But then one by one, the old guard left. Rooney, Evra, Ferdinand, Vidic, Nani, Van Persie, Michael Carrick, Jonny Evans. The players who came in were not at the same level. Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes were recalled in their mid-30s for duty.

The David Moyes era was a very damaging one for the club, first because Moyes and Woodard came in at the same time. Not only was there discontinuity with the manager, but also discontinuity with the CEO running football operations. And also there would be a discontinuity with the players.

One of the most galling seasons ever was the 13-14 season. I knew that it would be a long time before Man U won the league again, but for them to be almost a mid table team was such a dramatic fall from grace. United went from being a club who could always get who they wanted to a club who failed to land all their targets. They paid over the odds for bad acquisitions – Angel di Maria, Falcao, Anthony Martial. They turned great players into mediocre ones, like Paul Pogba, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Luke Shaw and Alexis Sanchez

They had bad scouting, bad recruitment, and an overall lack of strategy on the pitch. We could go into the Van Gaal, Mourinho and Solskjaar eras, but overall the picture was one where there wasn't a grand strategy on the football side of things. It's almost as though Alex Ferguson did several things so well that there wasn't anybody who could replace him when he was gone. Another manager who was extremely damaging was Erik Ten Hag, who came in with a great reputation for taking Ajax to the last 4 of the Champions League, but paid outrageous sums of money for underperforming players and left United with a very bad squad.

United had a a few blips in form before, such as during 2001 to 2006 when they won “only” one premier league title and were threatening to become a mediocre side. For me that was epitomised by two things. One was their inability to replace Schmeichel. They tried various people Taibbi, Bosnich, Barthez, Carroll and Tim Howard. None were particularly convincing, until they landed Van Der Sar. The other thing was the summer where they got in Veron and Van Nistlerooy. They were good players. Van Nistlerooy did very well as an individual, but whether he made Man U better was quite questionable. Veron was simply a misfit for the English league, because he went to Argentina and just made them better.

But somehow they managed to get Carrick, Hargreaves, Vidic, Evra and Van Der Sar in to build the spine of their last great side. I don't know who gets the credit for that. The downside is that they got saddled with the Glazers, who were clearly in the asset stripping business.

So that was the situation that that late great Man U side were in – things were good. The new recruits gelled well with the class of 99 veterans and the ones who came in during the lean years – Ronaldo, Ferdinand, Rooney and Saha. They had some help from Hendrik Larsson, who was on a roll – he helped Barcelona win the UCL, then helped Man U win the EPL the next season.

But that Indian summer started to crumble. Even when they sealed their title in 2011, I knew that Man U were weakening. A lot of their new recruits weren't terrible, but they weren't as great as the last great team. There was Fabio and Rafael, Anderson, Ashley Young, Phil Jones, Chicharito, Danny Welbeck, Robin Van Persie was great for 1 season before it was time for him to wane. But back then we couldn't have known that Man U were going to mess up so badly.

And another angle was that a lot of the former players who were from their teams who got media work. Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Paul Scholes, Rio Ferdinand, Owen Hargreaves. Every player who was in the same room as Alex Ferguson seemed to be touched with greatness, but most of them turned out to be mediocre managers: the ones who had careers were Gordon Strachan, Steve Bruce and Mark Hughes. And the ones who tried were Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Dwight Yorke, Paul Ince, Wayne Rooney, Phil Neville, It turns out that Pep Guardiola is better at nurturing football coaching talent than Alex Ferguson is, because Pep Guardiola nurtures hard skills whereas Alex Ferguson excels at the soft skills, which are harder to transfer.

The problem with having a lot of the old guard in the media is that after a while, a lot of the things that made them great will fade away. Gary Neville used to provide a lot of great analysis, but soon learnt that other people on youtube did it better. Then invariably the things they would talk about be about griping about how their once-great club has fallen on hard times. It would toxicify the conversation.

I saw it happen to Arsenal, during the period from 2016 to 2021 when they were the butt of jokes. The most toxic part about Arsenal was that they were a club in gradual decline, and there would be a long period when they had to be satisfied with finishing in the champions league places and then getting knocked out of the last 16 in the UCL. I think that this “managed decline” was much better than what happened to Man United, but still not very satisfying, until Arteta brought them back from missing out on the champions league to “finishing second all the time”.

Liverpool were always a good side, but there were 2 period when it was hard to watch. The Souness years and the Hodgson years. It was a lucky thing they had Jurgen Klopp coming in the save the day.

The thing I didn't understand about that friend who was a united fan was – he was one of those who switched to United around the time when United started winning big trophies, and people thought of them as glory hunters. It's a good thing that he stuck around. But you knew that the rot was setting in – why didn't you abandon hope and stop supporting that club? Because it's not your hometown club, you don't really owe them any loyalty. You supported a club because of the friends and the contacts.

Supporting a club is a very passive activity. It's one of the most passive activities of all, which is why I question why anybody at all would do it.

Liverpool are a club in danger because – even though you know that Arne Slot has done well with the team that Klopp left behind, you don't know where their future success is going to come from. And there are new challengers like Aston Villa, Newcastle, Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth who are biting at the heels and challenging for champions league places.

Well, I don't know what would have happened to my Arsenal fandom if Arteta hadn't come in to revive my club. All I know is that a lot of my milestones in life have come at a time when they won the league, and I'm always hoping that they'll do it again, and we'll see what kind of milestone I'll hit in life next.

Newcastle vs Liverpool

Last weekend I took the long trip (isn't that long these days but back then it was really long) trip to the old army camp where I lived in for 1-2 months in 1996. They were probably the longest part of my national service. That place was one of the most bleak and barren places in Singapore (although it was not as bleak and barren as Snowy Hill). 

At that time, there was this great football match: Newcastle vs Liverpool. It finished 4-3. It was, back then, billed as the greatest match that we’ve seen since the EPL started. Back then, the EPL wasn’t a great product. It was still coming out of its doldrums, and it would not be taken seriously: the various failures in Europe made it seem that the EPL was left far behind. 

After the ban on the English football ended, it experienced a rebirth. Alex Ferguson’s Man U had won a European trophy in the cup winner’s cup. But sustained success in Europe was a long time coming. European competitions were dominated by the Germans, the Spanish and the Italians in the 1990s. Even when Man U was dominating the domestic league, it wasn’t until 1999’s treble that they won the European cup, and the sheer romance of that occasion highlighted that they won it as underdogs, rather than as one of the favourites who were expected to win it. 

In this backdrop was the Liverpool Newcastle match. 

There was a fork in the road regarding the premier league. It hadn’t been a league that was as dominated by juggernauts the way it eventually became, after Man U won the league title against Newcastle. For a time, people were wondering whether Man U’s dominance was going to last, particularly as back then there wasn’t anything inevitable about Man U’s ascendence to the top of the pile. The other great sports dynasty of the 1990s was Chicago Bull’s dominance of the NBA, and for some reason it didn’t outlast Michael Jordan being part of that team. 

Various clubs challenged for the top of the premier league. There was a power vacuum because at that time, Liverpool were on the wane. Anybody could be the next powerhouse in football. At various times, it could have been Leeds, who won a title. Or Aston Villa. Or Sheffield Wednesday, who won a few cups and reached a few finals. Or Norwich or Nottingham Forest, who reached Europe. It could have been Blackburn, who actually did win one premier league title with the great 1995 team. Or it could have been Newcastle. 

Newcastle and Liverpool had a lot in common. They had a passionate support. They were northern teams. Newcastle had former Liverpool great players managing them, in Kevin Keegan and Kenny Dalglish. Newcastle was supposed to be the next Blackburn Rovers, who had a generous benefactor bankrolling them. 

Manchester United were there for the taking, it seemed. The season started with an infamous defeat against Aston Villa, where the former Liverpool player turned pundit Alan Hansen said, “you’ll never win anything with kids”. But those kids were not just… it usually is the case that you have one or two great academy products coming through a season. But United had a great bumper crop, in Beckham, the Nevilles, Scholes, Giggs and Butt. And there were the ones who didn’t make it, but had respectable careers with mid-table sides, like Robbie Savage and Keith Gillespie. 

They had a youth team with a miraculous crop of youngsters. Only to be rivalled with the Barcelona youngsters who formed the core of Barcelona when Barcelona and Spain ruled the world. Or the Chelsea of recent times. 

The match was played under very tense circumstances, with Alex Ferguson turning the heat up on Kevin Keegan, the way that he threatened to hound Blackburn off the title race. In fact, there were a lot of tense title races with Man U during that time. There was 91/92, which he lost to Leeds. 92/93 when he had to rough it out against Aston Villa. 93/94, he won at a canter. 94/95, he lost it to Blackburn. 95/96, he had to fight against Newcastle. 

Newcastle were letting the title slip away. Around that time, both Man U and Newcastle were playing Leeds United around the same time, and Alex Ferguson made a mischievous remark about which of them Leeds was going to fight harder against, and Kevin Keegan had an outburst which made it plain that the heat was getting to him. 

It was a big, pulsating match, full of twists, turns, excitement, and one to remember for the ages. This may be me looking at it through the lens of myself also being a teenager, but the EPL seemed to be going through some adolescence during that period of time. The football wasn’t yet world class, but the players were very good, it had the potential to be extremely exciting and entertaining. The players were all free to display their authentic parts of their personality. Eventually this would change: first in the 00s, the players were all media trained to give very prosaic answers that reduced the jeopardy on themselves. And then later, after the rise of social media, then they would be trained to become circus clowns designed to “drive engagement” and be an upstanding citizen of the clownshow which is social media. 

Tactically, it was a freer and more open environment. This would not be Brazil 1982, when everything revolved around individuals. But both teams combined attacking flair and skill at the expense of defensive solidity. In contrast, the league cup finals of 2025 would show two teams which were so defensively well drilled, they defended from the front. (This is now known as “pressing”.) 

In the 1996 match, Newcastle were a new pretender to the throne, and Liverpool were the old guard who had lost their throne and were looking to retake it. (It would have been very demoralizing for them to know that they had to wait until 2020 to see Liverpool win the next league title.)

The fact that Newcastle won this match does suggest that this time, Newcastle actually wins something. They had a rough time after topping the table 12 points ahead at Christmas 1995. They came in second twice. Then they fell apart when Ruud Gullit tried to implement “sexy football”. Bobby Robson restored some pride with a champions league finish, but that was as good as it got. Following their tradition for having former Liverpool greats, they got Graeme Souness, and turned into a grim mid table side. 

Then the Mike Ashley period began, and it was a thinly disguised asset stripping exercise. That only ended when the Saudis bought it over, installed Eddie Howe, and produced a lean and mean side capable of challenging for champions league places. 

It’s possible that the era of oligopolies is finally over. This may not be the post-Alex Ferguson, pre-Guardiola period where the league title pinged back and forth between an unsteady Man City, Chelsea and of all clubs, Leicester, when Tottenham were threatening to win a title. But we now have an elite that not only contains the usual suspects (Man City, Arsenal, Liverpool), but a few genuine UCL places contenders (Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa, Bournemouth) and a few lost sheep who are hankering for former glories (Man U, Tottenham, Chelsea).

Neverkusen

 There are teams which are “Neverkusens”. This was the derisive nickname given to teams which got close to winning the league title, but never did. There was Roma, who after their title win in 2001 reached the top 3 roughly 10 times without winning anything. There was the Atalanta side circa 2020 who regularly qualified for the Champions League but didn't win Serie A. There was Parma who had a great side in the 90s but no Scudetto.

In the English league, there was Bobby Robson's Ipswich side which came in second 2 times and won the UEFA cup. There was Kevin Keegan's Newcastle. Pochettino's Tottenham around 2017. Houllier and Benitez's Liverpool. One haunting fact is that after Preston finished the first league season ever unbeaten and followed it up with another title win, it has never won the league again, coming close on a few occasions

Then there was Leverkusen itself.

There is the great question of what happens to Arsenal if it doesn't win the league this season. This was supposed to be the year they were favourites, but they they didn't step up. There were always one or two things: they got too many red cards, or they scored too few goals. Gabriel Jesus had a little bit of a renaissance, and then he got injured. Now, Bukayo Saka, Martinelli, Gabriel Jesus and Kai Havetz are injured, which almost guarantees they will not win the league.

Arsenal went from 8^th to 5^th to 2^nd in 3 seasons. Now they have been 2^nd for 2 seasons. The two seasons where they were 2^nd, they could have been champions if Man City were not around raising the levels to absurd heights. But this season, after the Man City collapse, they weren't able to step up. Liverpool are on course to finish wih more than 93 whereas they are only on course with 73, which gets you a title only when everybody else has screwed up. It's true that the premier league this year is much more competitive, because you have 6 clubs in the running for 3^rd and 4^th place, with Newcastle, Man City, Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, Bournemouth and Chelsea in the mix. And while Man U and Tottenham are in the bottom half, they can hurt you, especially when Tottenham gets their fit players back.

The question is: are Arsenal going to win the league one day? The galling part for Arsenal is that they had genuine opportunities in the last 2 seasons. They lost in seasons when they were genuinely competitive. In the 22-23 season, they spent the great majority of the season in first place, before Man City went on one of their unstoppable marches to the table. In the 23-24 season, they alternated between 2^nd and 1^st, but were unable to get to the top. They got their best ever points total in the premier league, but was ultimately unable to reach Man City's level.

Arsenal are the classic “things will get better” side. They had a rivalry with Man United but I think they ultimately lost it because while they were knocked off their perch by Chelsea in the end, it was Man U who came back and won 3 in a row when Chelsea were at their best. Arsenal could have had a three-peat between 01 and 04, but they showed their frailty because they allowed Man U back in to win their title in 2003. They had always had a bit of that fragility, even when they were at their best. George Graham's side at their best didn't have this problem, and the 1998 Arsenal side were mentally strong, when the back four were at a late peak. But Arsene Wenger wasn't able to maintain their discipline.

This team is mentally stronger, but they always were a thin squad and prone to a bad spell when the injuries piled up. Liverpool had that problem, but they are reaping the rewards of Klopp building his second great side and Slot finding out how to get the best out of them.

The biggest question mark over the future of this Arsenal side is whether they can mount another title challenge in the future. I think that it's hard to tell. It's possible that having come close on so many occasions would break their resolve. This Arsenal side has had to shed some of the players who brought them forward, and Arteta has already shown his ruthlessness at showing Ozil and Aubamayeung out of the door at the first opportunity. He's since cleared off Emil Smith-Rowe, Aaron Ramsdale, Rob Holding, Fabio Vieira, Granit Xhaka, Eddie Nketiah, Reiss Nelson, Ainsley Mainland Niles and Folarin Balogun. He had a few academy players with some promise, like Ethan Nwanieri and Myles Lewis-Skelly.

But Liverpool are also a side which needs refreshing soon. They might lose Mohamad Salah and Trent Alexander Arnold, and Virgil Van Dijk doesn't have a lot more time. Man City have to rebuild and get back to winning ways – the spine of their team is getting old. Arsenal, if they can push on from this level, will probably find a season in the future where everything clicks.

It sometimes takes time to create a winning side. Arteta started from a low level, when Arsenal were basically upper half of mid table, to regularly challenging from the Champion's League to regularly challenging for the title. But today the competition is very tough, and the bar for Arsenal is higher. For Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Newcastle and Nottingham Forest, regularly challenging for champion's league is already considered very good. I don't know what it would do to Arsenal if they were to lose one or two more title challenges, would it trigger them to finally go into decline.

There is the threat from the newcomers mentioned earlier. Any one of them could be on the verge of reaching Arsenal's level in the future and blocking their path to the title. Chelsea and Nottingham Forest's approach of buying too many players doesn't seem to be an outright disaster.

Another possibility for Arsenal would be another 10 years of late Wenger: regularly making the champion's league but never to win the league again.

Emotional Distance

 

I thought about the last few years. Something has changed, and one of the biggest things is that I stopped being very emotionally involved with people.

It is an exaggeration to say that I no longer have a friend in this world, but it's true that I haven't really taken the hard work to hang our with my friends.

I also think about my love life. There's not really been anything. The first phase was when women were untouchable and unreachable. I hadn't really known how to approach them, and they were painfully awkward years.

The second phase was when I was emotionally involved with a girl for the first time. And some of the moments were probably good (probably because I don't really remember.) The term didn't really exist in those days, but I was very likely the victim of narcissist abuse.

The third phase was when I still hung out with that girl, and I thought we were going to be “friends”. But I've come to realise that some of it was that I didn't want to lose her company, and some of it was that I still harboured the hope of getting into her ass. Time went on and it slowly dawned on me that

1. The prospects of consensual sex were very dim.

2. She was a bitch and I was wasting time with her.

3. We were growing apart. You could go along with anybody you found attractive when you were a teenager, but when you grow older, you'll know each other better and the differences will start to matter. I started to see more clearly that the person that she really was was really getting on my nerves. She was studying things that did not have a strong relationship with reality – an incredible amount of postmodernist mumbo jumbo.

We started getting contemptuous of each other, and eventually I made the decision to ghost her, which was quite easy because at that point I was mainly the one initiating contact. To be honest, I ghosted her because it was the one thing I could think of doing that would piss her off the most.

And as time went on, I didn't just ghost her, I promised myself that I would not talk to her, ever (it was surprisingly easy to keep this promise) and I would not hold on to any memory of the time that we had together. It would be like “Sunshine of the Eternal Mind”, when a person wiped his memory of an unhappy relationship. It brought me a peace of mind that I hadn't had for ages, at least since my adolescence. And I wasn't totally unaware of it, but every time I took out pictures of Japanese gravure models to get myself off to, I was emotionally distancing myself from women by reducing them to sex objects (and getting an hour of fun while I was doing it.) If my love life was a cute furry animal, this was a conscious decision on my part to strangle the life out of it, and also inflict the same kind of abuse on my own privates. 

The fourth phase was when I finally got my freedom back and I loved not having around so much that I didn't look for a girlfriend for the longest time. After a few more years, I ended up living in Mexico and that probably killed the prospect of me finding a girlfriend. Life was great.... up till the point when it was not.

I've now realised that that was very short sighted. When you are older, that is when you need the most the girlfriend that you met when you were young. My entire youth had gone by without me being in a proper relationship, and I had missed that rite of passage. I spent half an hour at the public piano, bashing out song after song. It happens very rarely but I did have one or two people clapping for me. That's me, reaping the reward as an old man, for what I did as a young man. Maybe I should have gone through the ordeal of having a girlfriend. Your happiness level outside of a relationship is a 5. Your happiness level in a relationship is somewhere between 0 and 10.

So while I'm happy that I got myself a peace of mind after emotionally distancing myself from that girl, I'm wondering if this is filtering into my contempt for the opposite sex. And while wiping my memory of all the good and bad things that took place was good in the short run, I wonder if it would have cost me in the long run.

Every School is a Good School

 

In hindsight, there is some consistency in the policy that the government wants to close down Yale NUS, and wants to close down the GEP. In both cases, they're taking what was purportedly an elite form of education, and trying to scale it up and make opportunities available to more people.

I'm an alumnus of the gifted program. I enjoyed my time there, and I will mourn the passing of that program, but I'm not going to mourn if some of the programs that made it what it is are opened up to more people.

When Singapore was newly liberated from colonial rule, there was some kind of sense to elitism. You didn't have a lot of money, and whatever you did have, you probably wanted to pool them together and select a few of your brightest people to send to developed countries, so that they could get educated, come back to Singapore and help build a society.

That was why a Columbo Plan scholarship was set up. And that's why, in a family of five, you would choose your eldest son to study and get into the middle class, so that after that happened, he could figure out a way to bring the rest of the family into the middle class. There's a mirror of that in Black America: Harlem was the place of art and culture for the Black people. It was where the entertainers went to prove themselves, at the Apollo theatre. Morehouse would be their Harvard University. (It's a respectable school but probably not an Ivy, unfortunately.)

But then the existence of elite universities is an uncomfortable one, because a few people could climb the ladder, and then kick it away when they reached the top. Over the years, there was this obsession about who would reach the top of the pile. There was the mentality amongst Singaporean students, that they needed, as children, to obtain the best credentials, then as adults they could take it easy and coast along on those great credentials. This is hardly a formula for maximising peoples' potentials.

Also, there was a crying need for Singapore to embrace multiple paths towards excellence. There was a lot of wastage of talent for people who may not fit in with the main strain of test taking.

These days, the computer science schools of NUS, NTU and SMU all have good students coming in. I know some of the graduates who are from neighbouring countries. I wish I knew what the Singaporeans who came through those programs are like. At the Factory, which is where I work, I've seen people from those three major universities, as well as Singapore Tech and SUTD.

Another significant change is that they've narrowed the credential gap between polytechnics and “A” levels. There are clueless morons who are chiding the youngsters for choosing polytechnic over the “A” levels. But polytechnic is better for preparing you for engineering and IT, whereas “A” levels is better for preparing you for science and data science. Obviously “A” levels is more intellectual, but polytechnic teaches you a lot of different skills. Instead of teaching critical thinking, it teaches pragmatic thinking.

We're in a different phase of developing our education system. We're no longer seeking to find our best people to create a beach head. It's now about Singapore being a magnet, and trying to attract the best talent from everywhere to turn it into a future ready economy.

I even spoke to one or two of the colleagues who worked with me, and they were wondering why Asia has this obsession with sending their children to the best grade schools. It's also notable that a lot of youngsters from overseas just enroll into whichever neighbourhood school they can find, and the best amongst them still end up in the best integrated programs and get good university places. 

They may be living in a world where it was no longer the case that all the best resources would be funnelled into the Raffles schools. Those schools would probably continue to be centres of excellence, but they would have to compete with the rest on a more level playing field. 

The idea that a leaving cert from a good school would set you up for life is an old idea from the 80s and the 90s. We have entered an era of creative destruction where it would not be good enough to latch on to a prestigious institution - a blue chip company or a prestigious government department. You had to be good, and had to prove yourself constantly, or else you'd get left behind. 

Changi Airport

 

Changi Airport is one of the most Singaporean things ever. A modern metropolis, a futuristic caravansarai. An island in the tropics which is somehow not like the rest. In a relatively backwards (but not necessarily unpleasant) part of the world. Hospitality, cosmopolitanism. A gateway between worlds. Between the Chinese, Malay, Indian and Western worlds. Between the civilised and rural worlds. A concrete jungle in the lush tropics. A piece of tarmac carved out from filling the sea in. A garden city housing a facility which is inherently destructive to the environment. A waiting room, a quarantine. A check-in area which is neither here nor there. A hundred kopitiams await you as you while the time away. In case you didn't know that Changi Airport is a bubble, they even built a glass dome around Jewel to press the point home.

Singapore is one of those great contradictions. It aspires to be a great city, and yet it is obviously too small to be a great country, let alone a great power. It is not a great cultural centre, and yet it imbibes from the great cultures of the world. It is small and yet it aspires towards exceptionalism. This exceptionalism is necessary, because without it, that would be the end of our existence as a an independent entity.

I was talking to a visiting angmoh, and he told me that this was an unreal and ephemeral vision. That was back in the day when Asia was still a rising power, and not yet a serious challenger to the west. I thought there was something quite condescending about that remark, but other than that, it showed how the idea of an Asian metropolis is quite strange and alien to his point of view, and it does highlight the vast contrasts – if not contradictions – in the various aspects that make up who we are.

It's not true at all that we are nothing more than a vision of the “floating world”. There are solid bases to who we fundamentally are. You should look at all the old photographs of pictures from the Rust Belt during the glory days. Your Detroits and Cincinnatis and Kansas Cities. The beautiful art Noveau buildings which no longer exist. That's ephemeral too!

Something to Die For

 I read a review of “wicked”, and one of the things is that it was revealed that Elphaba was actually a bit of an animal rights activist. She turned against society because of how animals were treated.

There was something that bugged me 10 years ago. Around that time, I was on a roll. My first few post-graduation years were not good, but gradually, I settled into my adult life, and it turned out to be not bad. I had a pretty good run of 7 years.

I learnt how to play basketball.

I became competent at work.

I learnt software development.

I earned a degree.

I picked up useful skills at work.

I made friends at work.

I enjoyed life in Singapore.

I became a good songwriter.

I moved to another country and was accepted there.

I earned a master's degree.

I found a well-paying job as a techie.

I ran a marathon.

Those years were and still are the highlight of my adult life. But later on, I sensed that things weren't going well. It was quite subtle at first. Life was still good, only I felt like I had lost my sense of direction. But a few years later, it became more obvious: I was in groundhog day, and I was living the same life over and over again. I lived alone with a housemate I didn't really know but was nice and civil all the time. I worked in a job that had nice perks, but didn't really interest me that much, and I stopped trying to stretch myself. I never managed to make time and space for my hobbies. I was wasting my time and energy on things that were unproductive.

And in hindsight, that was probably the prelude to what was to come: the midlife crisis.

When you're young, in some ways you are consumed by passion for something. Every time I did something out of the ordinary, it was because of where my passion led me. I would do a little extra to be good at mathematics. I would learn to be a great musician. I would write something special for the stage. I would go overseas and live and see what it was like.

But I never recaptured that drive that would make me want to uproot myself and move to another country. That drive, I think, was rooted in those years of failure, where I was lost and going around in circles, and things were so different from when I was in an elite school and it seemed really unlikely that I would ever fail in life. I think, the first few years after I started pulling my life back together, things felt really great. I was around 30, I was in my prime, it felt as though anything could happen.

But then things started to fall apart 10 years later. Because it stopped feeling great. Because good things happening to me felt like some kind of a routine, and maybe I started taking it for granted. There was no longer a drive, and no longer something I wanted to die for. I just wanted more of it, and not to have to sacrifice for it anymore. Or maybe things stopped being fun and rewarding.

So what was lost? What was lost was a cause to get excited over. I guess that would happen to anybody. What was lost was this sense of sportsmanship, this association of putting in effort with the possibility that something good was about to happen. What happened was that it was no longer about a yearning for adventure that was yet to happen, and instead looking back on the time that you tried this or that, and it turned out to be less satisfactory than what you had hoped.