学步园

I must say
thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication
and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a
wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without
fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean
and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in
every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a
living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by
practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other
hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong
they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is
perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a
litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And
so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already
won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is
considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of
you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy
the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for
you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The
end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big
lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue
studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so
on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think
there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of
learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat
customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is
that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is
gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early
twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old.
That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all
understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m
here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your
life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as
the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and
Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those
countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football
teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having
their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more
likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a
life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years,
while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into
account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here
you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go.
Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the
papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or
quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very
disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to
tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s
calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being
average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to
working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as
graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are
so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is
expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If
you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life
according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average
people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of
education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be
average.

What you should prepare for is mess.
Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not
fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no
control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour,
moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect
anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today.
At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are
physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably
looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all
downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It
is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free.
Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are
free.

The most important is this: do not
work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature,
it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which
means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill.
But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit
by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A
rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception
that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They
tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering
away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless
and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that
work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht
frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter
nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you
hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest
comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to
get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over
again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it
often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love
language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I
didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved
writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do?
You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard.
By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want
to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you
will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you
should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge
and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that
will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise
with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you
will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a
second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write
it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things.
The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the
closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even
conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or
equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth,
without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the
value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know
it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the
mirror.

I have told you that your life is
over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I
now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know
anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human
race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That
hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused,
murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have
to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely
because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy
to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions.
Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That
cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you
are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that
you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this:
fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise.
If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by
anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd
for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without
deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a
microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier
to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only
one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind
of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There
is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a
better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better
ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We
celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is
therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person.
Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a
crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and
blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every
storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is
less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the
heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not
reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire
you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes
to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body,
completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you
are reborn, all the better for it.