From a tender age, we have been fed the mantra from our parents, “Aiya, study hard hor, next time get good job and earn a lot of money. If not, next time sweep the floor and collect rubbish”. So for our entire schooling life, we were ideologically ‘attuned’ to do well in school with the promise of a “good job” over the horizon, when we get the coveted degree (or “toilet paper”) and the fear of being a poor road sweeper was etched in our then easily influenced minds.
So we slog our guts out in school, burning countless midnight oils, the works. Okay, some of us managed to “do reasonably well” and get our toilet paper. Great, our parents are happy now. Then we realize whatever we got into was not really a “good job”: we start making comparisons with our peers over salaries, complain about sucky superiors, whine that there’s never-ending work and the list goes on and on.
What then, is a “good job”? A typical understanding or definition perhaps from our parents’ time would be working in an air-conditioned environment, getting a decent salary with good working hours. But times have changed; Singapore has progressed into a considerably affluent country, more and more people are getting their toilet papers, the key to a ‘good job’. But in a nation which stresses (too much) on academic qualifications, people become unrealistically demanding or have unbalanced expectations on what these qualifications can ‘do’ for them.
We see the degree as a tangible means to help us get a “good job” and nothing else. Getting a degree is the end and most people complain that they won’t study anymore after getting the much-desired toilet paper. We have completely internalized and bought into what society and the government has been espousing for decades.
The day before I collected the toilet paper and was going to ‘shake hands’ with whoever was going to give me the dummy scroll, I thought to myself, “This is it huh, after more than almost 2 decades of education, this is IT, the glamorous toilet paper collecting day. What’s next?” It was rather anti-climatic.
Most of my peers are in the workforce now and I have heard all sorts of stories about their work life, colleagues etc. All are clearly not indications of a “good job”. Perhaps there is no “good job” to begin with but over time we imagined that it existed or perhaps the dream of getting a degree shattered the day we achieved it.
A more realistic and balanced approach would be seeing a job as a means of not just supporting ourselves and our family members, but to bring positive impact or change to others, be it in a small or big way. Our job is not “ours” per se; it is given to us for us to be good stewards and make a difference to the lives of others. In a sense, though ironic, if we take away the “me, myself and I” mentality in a job, we become more liberated and not shackled by what others say or do.
