Feedback

While scouting for feedback on who reads this blog, as per my previous post and takchek's point 1 in his latest post, I was emphatically informed that this blog sounds like a Singapore Angle clone.

*aghast* No way....

Break.

My home printer has died on me after 12 years of service (may it rest in peace), and I'm also struggling to balance some things in my personal life. Writing here will be put on hold while I scout for a new printer.

That said, I really don't know who reads this blog, actually. =)

Life Transitions

Disclaimer: This short note is to enhance general knowledge and should not in any way be taken as professional advice specific to any individual’s unique situation. Contact points for social services are available at your nearest Family Service Centre on an islandwide basis. Please feel free to call or walk in for assistance, you are always welcome to come by and talk with us.

The life course perspective looks at the brief lives of human individuals, using time as a linear dimension. It emphasizes the diversity of life experiences that individuals go through. At this point we will take a look at its major concepts.

A life event is “a significant occurrence involving a fairly abrupt change that may produce serious and long-lasting effects”. A mid-term change in class teacher may be a life event for a child. Other occurrences will be life events for a young adult who is a college student. Having life events is normal. (point)

A transition is “the change in roles and statuses” that occurs as a result of life events. Transitions are also normal. The developmental change in an individual who moves from school/part-time work to full-time work is one such normal transition. (line)

A turning point is a special life event or transition that produces a “lasting shift in the life path (also known as life course trajectory)”. Life events and transitions become turning points when they “close or open opportunities, when they make a lasting change on the individual’s environment, or when they change a person’s self-concept, beliefs, or expectations”. (point/line)

The life course trajectory is, as said, a life path. It is a “long-term pattern of stability and change in a person’s life, and usually involves multiple transitions”. Trajectories can be drawn up for work, health, education, and family, and these in total make up the individual’s life. (line)

(Quotes from the above are from the first chapter of Dimensions of Human Behaviour: The Changing Life Course, 2nd edn, by Elizabeth D. Hutchison. Sage Publications 2003.)

What distinguishes the life course perspective from the well-known psychology theory of developmental stages is its focus on human agency in making choices, the deliberate acceptance that chronological age is not necessarily an indicator of life stages, the other deliberate acceptance that the order, length, and pace of life stages are not universal though they can be broadly generalized, and the importance of linked lives (family, social networks) in affecting an individual’s life paths. What it shares with developmental theory is its acknowledgment of time as a common leveller. You can’t run away from time, both say.

Or so you think.

*

I think that Singapore has lost this sense of time. We grow up, learn our maths and our sciences, learn our languages and mother tongues, get streamed, pursue some form of further education in yet more specialized subjects, get a job, buy a house and thereafter seem to do nothing at all but wait for death. In these stark terms of economic production we pursue the eternal; by describing the modern history and the future of Singapore as one of overcoming constant economic struggle, our linear dimension has become wealth instead of time. This has become our Singapore Story by default, our living legend endlessly reproduced in all our unthinking workers’ lives.

Now, dissatisfaction may be part of the human condition - “the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted”, says the character Dream in Neil Gaiman’s famed Sandman collection. But how dissatisfied can you get with a life’s time, when no one ever outlives it? :) We can only make the best of what comes. There is something very reassuring about knowing that some things shall eventually pass, in the dimension of time.

We grow up, get educated, get a job, buy a HDB flat, and then die.

Is this Dream the choice that you have, with all your heart, made? Or have you just gone with the flow?

“We are particularly prone to ignore information that is contrary to our hypotheses about situations. Consequently we tend to end our search for understanding prematurely. One step we can take to prevent this premature closure is to think about practice situations from multiple perspectives.”

- Gambrill, in Hutchison p. 84

Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You

Will it change the world? Of course not. Will it change anything? Not directly. But is it worth three hours of your time? Yes, definitely. Bloggers often feel themselves to be at liberty to pass comment on political issues and politicians. They do have, and must have, that liberty. But I cannot help but feel that their commentary and criticisms would be taken so much further, and would be delivered/crafted which so much more insight and clear-mindedness, if they were willing to step up and say these things openly and face to face with the person/policymaker they are criticizing, so that the latter will have the right of reply and also so that you, as a commentator, do justice to your views. [...]

A reply means it is a conversation. [...] It does not mean that I am converted to their thought - often I come away with new points of disagreement. But my perspective is always developed, because it has ventured out of its safety zone, and dared to engage. If we become blase and disinterested, distancing ourselves, then is it really the government's fault when we complain of an affective divide?

- Gayle Goh

Mr Wang, Gayle, Rambling Librarian and Bernard Leong have written about this. Not.

It seems to me that there are two issues here: one, talking about the blogosphere in the mainstream media (MSM), which has been cautiously disparaging of 'the new media' at best and virulently abrasive at its jealous worst ('blogs are worse than porn'). And two, the opportunity of having a face-to-face conversation with a Cabinet minister. Gayle's position, if I have not misunderstood it, is that the advantages present in the latter outweigh the pitfalls of the former. Mr Wang's position is simply the uselessness of the latter. (Although he was the first to get the ball rolling. He maintains this view in comments to the post though, at time of this post's writing.) Rambling Librarian says the personal disadvantages he perceived in the face-to-face conversation outweighed its advantages. BL takes a more convivial tone in saying that "the discussion before and after the actual event was actually more interesting" and goes on to hint of the advantages of a face-to-face meeting in his chatter about "surprising excerpts".

So I'm not sure how to title this post, since everyone has begun by talking about very different things. I could turn this into yet another insipid post on the joys of civilised discourse, but the question is: How does meeting someone in person enhance respect for the other?

(I wholeheartedly support Gayle's take on it, by the way. If that makes me '[bursting] with emotion', so be it.)

This isn't an easy question to answer. The Singapore government has often been accused of being a faceless monolith. In fact there is this joke going round about how the Feedback Unit was renamed REACH because its original acronym cut a bit too close to its actual response to citizens. But my cynicism digresses.

As a general rule, it is a given that we don't rob or kill people whose viewpoints and hopes and dreams and actions we know, as compared to those we don't know. (Some of us still do. But it's considered a disease.) Well, it's much harder to coldly kill someone we feel has a wholeness of his own and yet a shared humanity to ourselves, even if it is only something as irrational as having eyes, a nose and a mouth. One only has to look at Mickey Mouse's cute neonate features to understand that humans are very strange. Alternatively, nobody loves a sea urchin but harp seals (oh, so adorable!) were a hot environmental cause a few years ago.

So what makes George Yeo less credible than a harp seal? Is it because he lacks "wholeness of his own self" as a Cabinet minister? Do you think that for any person in a value-judged profession, his professional identity must necessarily have eclipsed his personal one at all times? Even if it is this profession.

"I make no apologies that the PAP is the Government and the Government is the PAP."

- PM Lee Kuan Yew, 1982
via Singabloodypore

Perhaps the story from this is that politicians are people too.

P.S. At the time of this post's completion, Michael Palmer has replied to Mr Wang to apologize and invite him to re-post his comment that was, I quote, inadvertently censored on his p65 blog post.