When I was in my second or third year in Junior College (I flunked my first year- was too busy smoking cigarettes, playing bass in a rock band and being a general nuisance to society), something amusing happened while I was reading a book under the desk during GP class.

Some context: GP stands for General Paper, which involves writing essays about “current affairs” and “general” topics like technology, poverty, the arts, etc. A typical question might be something like “Are the arts a luxury we cannot afford?”, which you’re instructed to answer by giving a list of reasons for and against. The questions were always deliberately oversimplistic, and I’d easily score A’s by describing how and why the question was horribly flawed. (Sometimes my tutors would penalise me for being overly self-indulgent and for deviating from the established norms, but I never really cared… I was all about having fun.)

So I was reading a book under the table. I remember the book vividly- It was The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistable Shift Of Global Power To The East, by Kishore Mahbubani. (This was when I was in my geopolitics-is-cool phase.) My GP tutor, a rather sharp-eyed lady, detected a deficit in my attention payments. She snuck up on me and triumphly snatched the book from my hands.

“Aha!”

And then she glanced at the title. It was a beautiful moment that she was clearly unprepared for. She was probably expected a comic or some entertaining fiction, but Kishore’s book was highly relevant to the sort of thing we do in GP.

It might be the equivalent of finding a kid playing with quadratic equations when you’re trying to teach the class long division. What do you do?

My GP tutor made a “haiyah!” sound, smiling as she shook her head. She didn’t know what to do with me, but she knew her energies were probably better spent focusing on the weaker students. If memory serves me correctly, she said, “You cannot get complacent, you know! You better score an A for me!” (I did.)

At that moment in time, it felt like a great victory for me, and it fed my inflated ego tremendously. I was one of the best, and I was definitely getting the best mileage out of the meagre amount of effort I was putting in. (I used to be very proud about that. On hindsight, it was petty and myopic.)

The skillset I used to dominate in GP- I would be able to improvise satisfactory answers to anything teachers threw at me- was almosr completely self-taught from years of reading, and from arguing with strangers on Internet forums. (GameFAQs and SOFT.com.sg).

Why am I telling (or retelling) this story now? Because suddenly it occurs to me that “reading under the table” is actually a rather remarkable phenomenon. It’s indicative of a student’s propensity to pursue her own interests. This is something that’s sorely lacking in the world- people who have come alive, who are eager and hungry to devour knowledge, perspectives, information. (It’s also symptomatic of a healthy disregard for authority, which I often admire in a person.)

Lighting fires not filling buckets

In an earlier post that was well-received, I talked about how we need to light fires, not fill buckets. My proposed (and very provisional) solution was to use prompts- to ask questions that force people to repeat what it is exactly that gets the fired up.

From a broader societal standpoint, though, that might be a little too late. It only works on people who have some sense of what they care about. If you snuff out a child’s curiosity, it’s an uphill battle to rekindle it. School inculcates a sort of learned helplessness- your interests are unimportant and invalid, your worth will be measured by your ability to obey instructions that serve the interests of others. It’s a rather depressing state of affairs, and it’s not even a valid bargain anymore.

If you look at the books being read under the desks of classrooms around the world, you’ll find at students who already have a fire in them. The challenge is to feed and fuel those fires. I’m very doubtful of the public education system’s ability to do that, so I think we need to do it outside of the system. We have to ask kids, what cool stuff have you been reading lately? What do you think is awesome or amazing about the world?

And then maybe we could ask ourselves the same questions.

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Groups are scary

When I was a teenager, I spent an inordinate amount of time hanging out with friends. I think this is pretty common, but on hindsight I think it wasn’t actually a great idea. It is what it was, but I’d like to reflect it for a while.

Groups of friends can be a scary thing because they comfort themselves, almost at all costs. They validate each other’s life scripts. As long as we’re all at this table drinking beer and smoking cigarettes today, we’re okay. You’re okay, I’m okay. There’s someone who’ll listen to your grievances, offer some kind words, a pat and a nod. You’ll inevitably talk about how the rest of the world doesn’t get it the way you guys do, blah blah. It can be pleasant but it often doesn’t go anywhere. You can meet every day for a year and find that nobody’s really said or done anything new. This can carry on for decades.

(I’m surely over-generalising here but I don’t have time in the context of this vomit to make it precise. Just know that I don’t mean to speak for everybody or all groups. See: Losers in the context of the Gervais Principle)

If you hang out in the music scene, you’ll start concerning yourself with music scene politics and concerns. And you’ll start feeling like these issues are important, that they matter somehow. The same for any other scene. The gay scene. The theater scene. A school’s football team or IT club. And perhaps they do, but the reality is that nothing is inherently meaningful. So you actually get to choose. And if you don’t choose deliberately, everyday life sort of chooses for you, very arbitrarily. Your friends think they have your best interests at heart, bless them, but they probably don’t.

All of this is really messy, vague and inaccurate. But that’s the thing about word vomits. I’ll proceed anyway.

I can only speak for myself. I think it’s staggeringly crazy that the world has people trying to solve malaria and sustainable energy AND people who are concerned with celebrity gossip. These two spheres rarely actually overlap. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, Lee Haven Loong, Christine Lagarde, Barack Obama… it’s unlikely that these people are interested in celeb gossip, or who their friends are having sex with. It’s unlikely that they’ll want to watch much TV. They may have some guilty pleasures that help them unwind (Gates likes doing the dishes, apparently) but by and large they’re focused on tackling these incredible tasks.

Sure, nothing in life is inherently meaningful but some things have more impact than others. These things also happen to be more interesting, compelling, challenging. I will have something at the end of these 1000 vomits that I wouldn’t have at the end of 10000 conversations about everyday life. Bill Gates will have something after solving Malaria that he wouldn’t have from watching Internet porn or surfing reddit. I think that’s clearly a better life, a more interesting and fulfilling point on the vast landscape of all the lives a person could live.

I think a lot of my family is merely interested in getting through life. In being a good spouse and parent, in the simple pleasures. I’ve never actually had a conversation with my parents about the scale of my ambitions. I’ve talked about it with friends, but that’s cheap tawk that’s more about signalling a position than about getting stuff actually done. The next person I’ve talked to about these things is my boss, and he’s a guy with real skin in the game- making stuff happen, creating real value for people.

Grand ambition is fine but you have to be pragmatic enough to figure out how to implement it. Otherwise it’s like talking about how much you want to travel overseas when you don’t have enough money for the bus fare to the airport, and you don’t even know where the airport is, or what bus will take you there. That’s a pretty adequate description of my life the past decade. “If only I had the money, I would go see the pyramids!” I tell my friends. And they nod sympathetically, and then tell me about their wishes and hopes. It’s a form of mutually validated delusion- we go nowhere but make each other feel better. At least we’re not alone, eh? In the mean time some other kid is working his butt off, saves money for airfare and just freaking travels. Tawking about the future is a sort of escapism from the present. Peacock feathers. Posturing. A little talk is good. Elaborate, tedious talk… That’s not just wasteful, it’s outright toxic. It burdens you with expectations that you’ll never be able to live up to.

So if you find yourself in such a situation, and you dislike it, you leave. You extricate yourself from the elaborate mesh that you’re intertwined in. This can be really messy, painful, ugly. But it might sometimes be the only way you can actually get what you want in life.