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.