Rat Race

 Do you remember a time when Singapore was considered a cheap and casual place compared to the US and the West? It seems that things have changed so much.

There are a lot of things that you can no longer have in a shopping mall. Bookstores are out. The only place to browse books is the library and a lot of libraries are being downsized.

I don't know if you're still able to get a copy of Douglas Rushkoff's “Life Inc”, but that was a book – probably just one of many books that drew the connection between the rat race and modern capitalism, and put it all under the same branch of “corporatism”. But we were selling out to the values of corporatism and letting those values dictate our lives.

Corporatism dictates the composition of our shopping malls. Probably in the nattier neighbourhoods, it's still possible to have cheap furniture, hardware, a lot of econ minimarts. But in the major shopping malls, rent is so expensive that you can only really afford these few things:

1. Spas

2. Eating places

3. High velocity discount goods

4. Tuition centres

It's the last one that makes me gag. We no longer have free range childhoods. Children no longer will have the freedom to roam around as they were. The tuition industrial complex has triumphed. When we were kids, our lives revolved around a set of values. It was about proving how smart you were, how much better than the other guy you were.

I sometimes still wonder how much this great game had on our psyches. I saw an advertisement about a new fangled thing, a collaboration between Ecole 42 and SUTD. And one of the features, they said was that the Ecole 42 system is a gamification of programming education. Then it occurred to me: the education system itself is a gamification of life. You make a lot of activities, make it look like some competitive game, in order to get the kids to do what you want them to do. It's always better when you play to win, rather than if you were to regard it as a chore.

And in many ways it was good. But from the outside, it looks very sinister, especially if you as an adult understand that there are alternatives in life, but the kids don't. The first goal in life is to “do well”. That means grades, or ECAs. Or “enrichment”, which means that you are a genius but you actually get to show that you are a genius. Or you get waved on to some entitled station in life, like entry into a competitive university.

So at the age of 18, you don't understand life in general. You don't understand the principles of life. I may not even understand executive functioning. But I understand that there is a game out there, and that I play to win.

The kids are going out to cram school and helicopter parenting. They've only known being cocooned, and being in a hypercompetitive environment. If you have a generation of kids who believe that their only exercise of power is snitching, then you will have a lot of weirdo behaviours. People whose only recourse is to believe that everything in this system is tilted against them, and their only recourse is to appeal to some kind of indignation against injustice. You will have people who don't actually do more than petition for some kind of army of people out there to help them fight a fight.

And so it was, when I discovered that there was the 4^th floor of Harbourfront (the shopping mall formerly known as World Trade Centre) and it used to house a food court, but – I think a lot of high floored food courts are a thing of a past, especially in the CBD – it's now some kind of experential learning centre for kids.

Today's kids go through an experiential learning centre which is partly cram school, partly entertainment, and partly a cult-like est / landmark forum motivational thing. And they're in some artificial environment that can only exist because their parents paid top dollar for it, and it can only exist in expensive real estate because of that. No more hanging out in bookstores after school. No more wandering around record shops, trying to piece together the mysteries of life in solitude.

Machine learning distinguishes itself between supervised learning and unsupervised learning. What we have is the advent of supervised learning. You can't afford to wander all out on your own. You shouldn't be trusted to figure out the big questions. Your job is to hit all the marks, to master reams and reams of context-free and unrelated knowledge which may (but probably will not) serve you well later in life.

And what makes it even worse for kids these days is that .... for me, I knew that I should do well, and that building up a good ECA record is a good thing. But these kids have it all spelt out to them – aim for the Ivy League. At least, give your parents something interesting to talk about. No more kampong football for you. No more Fandi Ahmad and his merry gang of grinning mats lifting the Piala Malaysia for the final time. If you want to play football, you need multi-million dollar facilities and expensive summer camps and you have to play in specially designed cages.

The uses of real estate are a good illustration of the priorities of society.