More of us are burning out; and we’ve been burning at both ends. There’s work and the strain of being at home. We can’t find breathing space. Meanwhile we are running out of fuel and the fire is still burning.
Stop. We have to stop. And we need to accept we don’t need to keep working and there is no shame or guilt about it. There is no shame that we need to take a break. So please ask for one. Please ask for less work; make it known to the higher ups that their working style is not promoting a healthy environment and culture; at least not during this season of pandemic.
There should be no fear of appearing like a lousy worker. This is not the time to be concerned about competition and work ourselves to death. Our mental health matters; and as the Chinese saying goes: “if we preserve the highlands and forests, we’d never run out of timber for fire”. Preserve our minds and bodies, the ultimate sources of our motivation.
In school, there seems like there’s only one basis of competition: grades. But there are other elements surrounding that in the school environment: friendships, relationships with teachers, appreciation of music and arts, sporting capabilities, popularity, leadership ability, strategic thinking, time management, charisma, etc.
Schools are supposedly little societies and a microcosm of the world that they eventually live in. But of course, being part of a bureacracy, a system, even an instrument of the state, there is top-down direction to skew the basis of competition towards one thing rather than another. It has to do with merit as defined by the prevailing “ruling class”. And since the ruling class is typically made of those who had good grades, that factor gradually gets amplified in importance.
But in overall society, those other basis of competition are still relevant. While the impact of grades might be persistent and have cascading impact in education, they can be compensated by confidence developed in the children from doing well in the other parameters in the “competition”.
Those who have followed my blog, my mentees and coaching clients would know I’m an educator at heart. And I had some really dated education products still listed for purchase. Now, I’ve just completed a really jam-packed intense 9-day email course design which I’m doing a bit of a soft launch here on my site. This is the first of my coaching products after getting really good feedback on the ebook which lays an important foundation for the materials I teach in this email course.
For a limited time this month, I’m pricing it at US$100; but it will be increased to US$120 after that. Reason is that I want to test run this new e-commerce engine I’m using so as to make sure the delivery is smooth and I want to make sure I compensate you for any inconvenience; while also giving you the full value of the course.
This course will normally take me at least 4 hours of coaching to impart the concepts. It also features an accompanying workbook which will allow you to get the most out of the course if you work on the exercises alongside as the email comes in.
When a country industrialises, it pulls workers from the farms and agricultural sector to a city or industrial core and draws upon some of the various economies to eventually drive some degree of prosperity. Such as the economies of scale, economies of agglomeration, and efficiencies coming from technical advancements whose costs are maintained by concentrating a lot of labour in a small space – a factory with a single line shaft for example.
The benefits of industrialisation and the surpluses of products do not naturally go towards the workers. As long as there’s influx of workers from the rural areas, wages are held down. And living conditions in cities were really bad. The means by which the masses gained affluence was usually not by the benevolence of the capitalist but the fact that government, industry associations and other influences pushed up labour standards and the bargaining power of labour. Public investments in infrastructure, education, healthcare helped to improve quality and sustainability of labour.
Jobs are ways to increase production; but they are also a means of distribution in the economy. Unfortunately, they are not always distributing the spoils of the economy in a sustainable way that helps us thrive. Because there will be a time when industrialisation and economies drive out labour in favour of capital. Imagine when goods can be produced purely by capital. Then employment no longer is a relevant metric; rather, ownership of capital determines ability to consume. Labour cease being a valuable factor of production.
More significantly, market economics tend not to provide a good way to distribute income (and by extension, wealth), even if it allocates limited or scarce resources well given most (but not all) context. Public economics helps to plug the gap; but we need more and better brains there to work out all the learnings we need outside a market-based dogma built over the decades of market triumphalism. The point of industrialisation we are at calls for a different paradigm towards jobs, production, consumption and distribution.
Is every field a good field? Is every job a good job? I think we have to admit that the notion of goodness in schools has to do a lot with this society’s worship of grades by parents and this naturally transmit to the younger ones.
Giving up on suggesting every school is good might be a step in the right direction to acknowledge that the problem lies with a society whose values need some updating. Yes the “elite” schools have Oxbridge interview guidance but is that what every student needs?
What we need is to tear down the hierarchy where academics represents a hygiene factor on which other attributes such as sporting or music excellence can only serve as bonuses. And it is not just an issue of the system. The system changes the government implemented shows a good commitment to the desire to change our culture.
So maybe the next step is to clamp down on the private education sector like the way China did?
It is PSLE season during the pandemic year again – and the kind of response just shows that we once again failed to change the culture. MOE tried to change the stakes with the new system, but they need to target the culture that needs changing; the culture around what it means to win, and what it means to be ‘good’.
What is good for a kid has become whatever gets the kid good grades rather than what gives the kid a good challenge and enables them to deal with adversity. This is why we have people crying over spilled milk even when they are in their 40s. A better approach to parenting would be to encourage the child and say, you’ve tried your best and I’m proud of you braving through this. In the first place, the crying of the kid and the pressure she felt is a reflection of the kind of expectations she sense from the parent. And having the parent exhibit this sort of ’empathy’ by crying alongside reinforces to the child that throwing a tantrum at undesired outcomes is the right thing to do.
That was a missed opportunity to teach a kid how to bounce back, how to be brave, and to encourage rather than to assign fault (to someone else). I really liked the recommendations and thoughts from the counsellors towards the end of the article. Whatever pain a child feels from a difficult exam, is not an affliction from the school or MOE, but from the parents and the expectations that is placed upon the child. It is only right for SEAB not to comment. They don’t have to answer to anyone for the level of difficult of an examination.
Karl Marx once argued that all value comes from human labour and that capital owners should not be allowed to profit from their ownership of capital. Perhaps that was a time when labour is often needed to operate capital, to work the land in order for capital to be ‘productive’. To that extent, it is probably right that labour always had a disadvantage in bargaining against capital because capital is often more concentrated in the hands of certain owners. Or that the dictates of capital can easily be reassigned and concentrated to maximise bargaining power.
This is much harder with labour, and that’s why there were periods in history where labour unions were important. And there are still many societies today, especially in Europe that ensures significant participation of unions in industrial decisions and even policy-making.
The truth is, we’ve been using human labour as a way to distribute economic gains to the broader masses. And it has worked as far as the economy transits towards being more and more knowledge-based as equipment got better and capital starts being able to produce goods and services without as much labour inputs. Yet we might be moving to a point where there’s insufficient jobs for everyone, including knowledge-based ones, as capital come to be able to produce goods and services for our economies independently without labour. And yes, I’m thinking about more automation, more data-driven operations that only require periodic human interventions, and so on.
We must start considering how to distribute capital and wealth better; and to allow the strata of the society commonly contributing to ‘labour’ side of the economic equation to start owning capital and learning how to use the capital to generate the returns sufficient for them to continue surviving without utilising their labour as much. Or that labour can be channeled towards greater social needs such as caring for the old and young; some of these which may have to be funded more and more on the taxes on capital and wealth.
What do you choose when you have aspirations? What you do, or who you are? When I was 9, I wanted to be a librarian. But it was because librarians get to be at the counter to see who borrows what books, and to put the date due stamp on the books. They get to change the date due slips on the books when they are full, and they work in a quiet environment.
I was thinking about what I want to doing rather than who want to be. Because what being a librarian is about organising information, about helping people to access to knowledge they want. It is also about safeguarding the ability for libraries to do so, by making sure people return the resources they borrowed on time so that others have access to it too. It is also about increasing public education and awareness of things that matter: culture, heritage, arts, science, and lots of common sense. The 9 year old me made no such connections nor cared that much about all that.
When we are younger, our parents explained professions and jobs in terms of what they ‘do’; very practical elements. A police catches thieves, the lawyer fights court cases, a doctor sees and diagnose, then treat patients. But in order for us to appreciate the greater purpose of these professions, to be able to aspire ‘to be’ rather than to aspire ‘to do’, we will have to develop greater appreciation of what these people are ‘being’ when they take on the roles. It will involve understanding what policing does to public security and now, to the cyber space. How the legal profession creates avenues to address justice on all sides, and means to ensure laws are applied properly. Or that doctors not just make people better but play a role in public health, confidence-building and psychological comfort to those who are unwell.
As we learn to train ourselves to develop visions for our role and professions, we become better professionals, and work with greater motivations.
I buy electricity on the open market in Singapore. So when the bill came for the month of August, it looked pretty crazy. I have never seen my averaged cost of electricity actually exceeding the retail package pricing.
Of course I’ve allowed myself to be subject to the volatility but I wonder how often people really bother to understand or check their cost of electricity. For most part they might be using the overall cost as a proxy for consumption since they usually assume the electricity tariffs to be fixed. Well, that’s if you’re on a retail package. And even then it is fixed only for a certain time period.
I begin to wonder if there were any events and outages in the power system in August that resulted in some of those crazy rates. And with gas shortages in the world, things might be changing in the market quite a bit. People were even warned of the rising prices on the papers.
And this makes understanding the energy transition even more crucial for ordinary people like you and I. Getting a clearer view of the options for energy security for Singapore, greater transparency of the plans by the government, how far the market will be playing a role in determining the energy mix vis-a-vis policies to ensure a low carbon energy future.
Besides how much our electricity cost us, we should be also wondering how much it is costing our future and the earth.
I wrote about how we tend to overestimate mental strength and underestimate physical strength. The story is a bit similar with growth; we tend to overestimate our ability to grow and change in the short run. We would think that we can achieve some crazy target or try to force ourselves to get from Grade E to grade B in a few months. They are probably not impossible, but it will take a lot of effort and even if we plan well, things might not work out so well.
On the other hand, if we allow those short term lack of performance to cause us to be disappointed and discouraged from trying on and on, then it would be a pity. Because we tend to severely underestimate the potential for change and growth in the longer term. Even if things don’t seem to go as planned in short term, interestingly, once a direction is well-set, the longer term situation tends to be more optimistic even though more time tends to cause people to think more things can go wrong.
But more good things can happen because of that too. We severely undervalue and underestimate what we can accomplish over longer period of times and tend to think whatever happened in the short term will simply stay the same. If you’re unhappy enough about your situation, you’d tend to change it.
