Other Peoples' Lives / Broken Record

Sometimes, the comment is not about you. Sometimes it's not about you.

I'm back in the same apartment that I had turned my back on almost 10 years ago. I left, trying to take my life to the next level. In some ways, my life is on the next level. In some ways, it is not.

As some kind of backup plan, I had thought about the work that was done in my old workplace. I had written up a white paper about all the problems in there, and while being careful to avoid rubbishing everybody else's work, I talked about what could have been done to make things better.

I sent that paper to a few of my old colleagues. None of them read it, a few skimmed through it. One person did read it, and coincidently or not, he's now the new boss of the place.

I returned to Singapore a few years ago. And I met up with a few of my old colleagues, and talked about what I had written in the paper. Basically my message was for them to embrace big data. I don't think it's controversial, just trying to bring them more in line with what other people are doing in the second decade of the 21^st century (instead of the first decade). Most of the people in that room were people I already knew, but there was a guy who joined after I left.

He made that remark, “you sounded a little angry when you were writing that paper”. I think I replied, “I always sound a little crazy, so don't think too much about it.” But I was thinking, “was I crazy?”

Then a few years later, somebody remarked, “people don't stay long in that work place. People get fed up and leave.” And then it hit me, he wasn't asking about me and who I was. That “you sound angry” comment was something closer to: “if I were to keep on working here, would I end up as angry as you?”

And then that brings me back to the person that I was 10 years ago. Now I'm back in full circle. It was 10 years ago that I set in motion of a series of events that would end up in me moving to “Mexico”. And now I'm back here. I lost my job, I lost my car, and the US is in the kind of pandemic where I would rather not care about living there anymore. And I'm face to face with the country that I left behind. Not that I was even that keen to leave this place behind, but I feel like I've been in some kind of reverse time machine, where nothing has changed, except that you've grown older.

And I bumped into water girl in the lift. Yes, that same girl from my block that I unsuccessfully tried to go after, and magically I got to read her online blog and I realise that she'd make a terrible girlfriend. I'm not happy with her. She sounds immature, excessively neurotic and downright contemptuous. So I did meet her in the lift. She asked, “are you back from overseas?” I said, “you went overseas too didn't you?” I know she went to Australia. And she said she didn't. Which I knew to be untrue. So the conversation ended. We took the lift up to the apartment in silence. Maybe she didn't want to talk.

I may have cared about what she was thinking, or maybe not. But what shook me was that this was the life that I was living more than 10 years ago, and I'm stuck in a loop. I've made no nett progress. Yes, I've done a wonderful thing and lived overseas for years and had whatever adventures I've had in the meantime. But it feels like there's no progress. And I just feel that I'm stuck here, my life span 10 years shorter, cleaning up a 10 year old mess.

But sometimes you just feel sad for her... she hasn't changed in 10 years. There doesn't seem to be any progression. People live in some strange time warp.

Well, maybe I'm not in that time warp. I may be more of a doer than I was 10 years ago. Back then I was just a dreamer. And then I ended up doing stuff. Programming. Music. Feeding myself and keeping myself alive. Wasn't that much, but not nothing. Notebooks full of musical ideas.

It's strange to call her “water girl”. She's not a girl anymore. She's no longer in full bloom, not the kind of person I'd have wanted to go stalk. She's too old to be a troubled youth leading an aimless life. People who are older unfortunately are judged more harshly. That's a fact of life. I probably wouldn't want to get mad at her, but my cutting off that conversation was a flash of anger. She didn't have to lie to me about going overseas. But if she's miserable, then I don't really want to have anything to do with her.

The problem is that I will occasionally bump into her over and over. And it's going to weigh on me. I'll see her and she'll remind me that my life is nothing more than a broken record. I don't want to feel like my progress has stalled, but that might be what life has in store for you after 35. It's just that when people enter parenthood, they have this other distraction, and it's something that counts as progress for them. It's not longer easy from now on. Nothing is given. Everything you have has to be clawed in.

Recently, on a whatsapp chat, a few guys I knew from way back talked about a project that I did when I was in primary 4, and people still remembered that project. It's like that Springsteen song, "Glory Days", when people are reminiscing about the past. It was nice to be reminded of a time when I was one of the smarter guys in class, and in an environment where that was regarded as a good thing. The great and terrible aspect of life is that the definition of success is constantly changing. In fact I would say, at the moment, it is a bad thing, because the definition is also narrowing. When the definition narrows, it's a more unequal society, because the number of people who can succeed is smaller. But yes, there were times when I did have a lot more going for me than right now, and it's just a shame the good times don't last for long. 

And yet the thread that ties these three stories together is that by the time you're in middle age, you will be haunted by your past in many ways you didn't expect to. You might find yourself longing for days gone by, you might find that you have to start over in many ways, and you're unable to because you're still tethered to the past. When you young, you live in a reality that you instinctively understand because you know it with every fibre of your soul. But when you're older, you have one foot in the past and one foot in the present, and you might get conflicted between two completely different cultures.