Rising against all challenges or floating through life?

 

What kind of life would you prefer to lead?

One possibility is to lead a life of challenges and obstacles, then grow and become a better person as you slowly overcome them.

The second possibility is a blissful life with few obstacles, and you float through your personal existence carried by a cloud.

Some folks pick the first because life seems like a roller-coaster ride, and it is an exciting choice. You are constantly being challenged and become a better person over time. But as I hit my 50s, I just want the rest of my life to be as blissful as possible, so I will pick the second scenario as far as reasonably possible. This is why I tell my friends that my preferred existence is to float through life on a cloud of dividend payouts. Then, my friends inspired me to prompt for the AI photograph shown above.

But sadly, we can't really control the circumstances of our birth or what kind of cards are dealt to us. My Malaysian Chinese pals start the day at 4 a.m. just to travel to study in the same secondary school as I do. These days, in the institution where I teach, colleagues half-jokingly tell me that the Malaysian Chinese and foreigners are the most punctual, with the most latecomers coming from Tampines.

So, if you are going through life blissfully at this moment, it's better to start planning for a change in your personal situation because change is inevitable. Very few of us will go through life without encountering problems. Sometimes, you get restructured, or your kids turn out neurodiverse, or an elderly parent develops dementia. 

 

The "cloud" needs to be built with meticulous planning. So, even in good times, you need to "shake the box" and conduct "business continuity planning."

When circumstances are comfortable, you must actively find ways to improve and develop capabilities to deal with more significant problems in life. Financial education is an obvious answer, but some universal skills and talents will be helpful regardless of circumstances, like public speaking, entrepreneurial knowledge, psychology of personality, peak performance, and, to this day, some self-therapy skills. If your kids are happily enjoying a stable family environment like me, then find ways to stretch them. 

I've had a really awful 49th year. There is a Chinese belief that all 9th ages are challenging years. At 19, I was languishing in NS. When I was 29, my IT department was outsourced from P&G to HP. It was almost like a fall from Heaven. When I was 39, my career dramatically exploded when I got into two consecutive toxic work environments outside the private sector and pulled the plug. Now, at 49, my Graves disease returned, and I developed double vision and needed prism lenses. My business is still going through a bad patch, but I'm ramping up other sources of income through adjunct teaching work with very mixed results. 

In every scenario, my investment income came to the rescue. Luckily, I'm positioned well in the financial markets, and I expect a rigorous recovery from REITs as rates begin to fall. I can't even imagine how my private property can increase in value with loan rates falling across the board in Singapore. Changes in the LTV are justified in preventing a housing bubble from forming, but it will stop real estate prices from rising steadily. 

But more is needed. The year that follows is always about learning new things and reinventing myself. If my investment training business folds, I need to expand my capabilities, so I need to get back to school to get an ACLP to see whether there are future opportunities to train adults, this time aided by Skillsfuture credits. 

A cloud of dividends can take you to many places, but sometimes it's ok to get your shoes on the ground occasionally if only to build a bigger cloud.

Does being in GEP raise the odds of attaining FIRE?

 

Of all the reforms proposed by PM Wong in this year's National Day Rally, the changes to the GEP system are the most polarising. Some GEP alumni on social media did not like the changes because they felt that leaving their primary schools allowed them to find a new group of friends they could fit into. Another group alleged that they were bullied so severely in the GEP program that they welcomed the new system to allow gifted kids to stay in their original primary schools.

Who is right? I don't know. 

But I might have an idea of who is wrong. 

GEP alumni should not be entitled to think that the government owes them a personal clubhouse to protect them from the world. Folks like me would have benefitted dramatically from friendships with GEPpers if I had had access to them earlier, so they should not have been taken away from us.  

Given that taxpayer money is being deployed to give them special treatment, the GEP is clearly a pipeline for the government to mould leaders in the future for the greater good.  If there is a secondary objective, I guess the aim is to create a superior breed of high-IQ citizens via assortative mating. The strategy must have worked, as the average IQ in Singapore is about 106, but worldwide numbers are about 97. The third reason is that all societies need to prevent the rise of anti-elite, intelligent people who can weaponise their intelligence to engineer a societal collapse. Therefore, GEP as a safe space for special needs students is an incidental side effect of the government policy.

But what do I know?  I'm not really here to engage in intellectual masturbation on this blog because I think there's undoubtedly a group of folks who blow a more giant load than me. 

I'm here to address a more straightforward question - does being GEP help attain FIRE?

To answer the question, I will divide the population into three groups, Normies—average Joes who probably have better things to do than read my blog. GEP-adjacents - like myself who passed a round of GEP testing but were not smart enough to enter GEP, and the GEP itself, Goh Keng Swee's attempt to make Plato's Republic a reality by breeding a future generation of Philosopher Kings to rule the country. 

To create a more straightforward analogy, 

• Normies pleasure their partner with their fingers. 
• The GEP-adjacent, maybe with just one standard deviation above the median IQ,  pleasure their partner with a feather. 
• GEPpers, with two standard deviations above the median IQ, use the entire chicken. 

If we observe the other folks known to have attained FIRE, I do not see the same gifted traits of my GEP pals, who have strange, quirky obsessions, hobbies, and complicated fandoms.

• Normies may write a love letter to their partners on WhatsApp. 
• GEP-adjacent may use Shakespeare's Sonnets somewhere. ( I did use 116 on my wedding album sadly, no one caught it )
• GEP will compose a poem partly in Klingon-Quenya-High Valyrian, apply a hash function to it, and then send the garbled text to their partners ( Ok, I'm kidding, but if a girl does this, she's a keeper )

I'm not seeing that weirdness on folks who think being cool is counting their dividends this quarter on their blogs. 

FIRE is the opposite of giftedness. It requires the obstinacy to shut off from consumerism and invest using simple means, often involving dividends, which is frequently not novel enough for brilliant folks.

But I suspect the FI forums might have many GEP-adjacent members. Moments ago, someone shared some questions about Physical Olympiads on the SGFI Telegram group. But this is the SGFI chat group, not the Dividends Investment group, an entire of good-natured uncles and foodies. 

Like Warren Buffett said, anything above an IQ of 120 is wasted if someone is looking at investments.  

Today, I had the pleasure of giving a finance talk to Sec 4 students at Raffles Institution; they asked me whether they should dedicate their careers and investments. I told them that if they did so, it would be a severe waste of the government's investment in them. 

They should be doing complex surgeries, saving lives, fighting complicated litigation cases, and engineering large M&As. 

However, dividend investing can be used to make money for them while they hyper-focus on their professional careers. 

What is a PUA kind of workplace

 

Since leaving conventional employment over 10 years ago, I have been fascinated by modern developments and ideas about how local workplaces have evolved over the years. I will write about something new I have learned about the world of work. 

So, this particularly toxic work culture belonged to a financial institution that has been paying solid dividends into my pocket for quite some time now, and a friend who worked there described how their middle managers are trained to handle their subordinates.

According to my friend, the management culture wants its employees to always be filled with self-doubt. Sometimes, managers criticise their employees' grammar, accusing them of using English worse than a primary school student. Other managers will criticise your approach to work—if you devise some initiative to do something, it will always be wrong, and a better approach will always be shared with you. 

As it turns out, the people from the PRC were the first employees to figure out something was wrong. They said that this is called PUA work culture in China. It is a management philosophy derived from pick-up artist books like The Game by Neil Strauss. In these books, there is a technique used by pick-up artists called negging, where a pick-up artist approaches a woman in a singles bar and then criticises her continuously to lower her self-esteem; the idea is that it's easier to get a one-night stand with a woman who thinks lowly of herself. 

My friend is naturally furious that he is being manipulated by middle managers at work. So, he now asks me whether dividends and passive income can be used to wage war in the office, given that he's no slouch in the passive income department. His idea is to fight back to challenge any middle manager who questions his ability - he is, in my view, correct to believe that any supervisor who is decked head to toe in designer suits and Rolexes is no match to a dividends-earning Uniqlo uncle who is ready to make a case to HR. 

Of course, I was flattered by his suggestion, but I told him to think twice before doing this. The logic is that many Gen X workers may be collecting rent and dividends from multiple sources, and if we are too eager to fight in front of HR, it will create a disincentive for such banks/MNCs to hire a 50-something-year-olds in the future because they might be secretly a landlord. 

This can make ageism worse in Singapore. 

I offer an alternative. 

If you can already identify that someone is deliberately trying to lower your self-esteem, you've won half the battle because you know it's not a performance issue. Secondly, as you can live on your dividends, you can start playing a nefarious game of your own because every month you earn an income is a month you pick up a few victory points and can continue playing this game until the next 360 appraisals. 

The game is simple. 

(1) Challenge yourself to block criticism, preferably with a proper tech tool. The most common criticism is concerning grammar. Would it be possible to pay for a Grammarly subscription and then chain ChatGPT and Grammarly together to write your documentation. A paid version of Grammarly can even teach you a thing or two about Grammar rules. Make your manager fight Grammarly, not you. 

(2) Distract him with a glaring flaw. Sometimes, there is no AI to help refine your work, so there's no way to escape criticism, deliberately make a big glaring flaw and be ready with an amendment. Your manager may be so pleased with himself that he will approve your second draft. 

(3) "Greyrock" your manager. Sometimes, your manager wants to elicit suffering, pain, and drama because they are attention seekers and inspire fear. The defence is to adopt the personality of Grey Rock and be pleasant but bland so that the manager will pick on someone else. 

(4) Be careful and document everything. If the manager makes a contrarian suggestion about how you can do your work better, he will eventually contradict himself. Then you can bring up the contradiction in front of other staff. If you do this in front of your supervisor, you might have to start brushing up your resume. 

Of course, if all else fails, you can invoke HR and fight like my friend suggested, and if you lose the battle, turn to Glassdoor to air your grievances. In this case, he can even attend the AGM as a shareholder. However, you need to ensure that you do not commit defamation while doing that. I think the better winning move is to collect 12 paychecks just to mess up your manager in the next appraisal exercise. 

Techniques like malicious compliance and passive aggression can help you see how long you can play the game with your manager.  You can Google them.

Finally, middle managers should worry about folks quietly accumulating dividends in the background. While passive income is small, the employee is ideal - he will accept a lot of iniquity in the workplace because he still needs a job to get even more dividend income. 

But suddenly, once a threshold is crossed, he can be a living nightmare once there is evidence of employee abuse. 

As such, employees who are always dressed in designer gear and have the best holidays are safe because they are stuck with golden handcuffs and will be obedient in the workplace. However, beware of the guy who eats chai png every day and spends most of his time in libraries. 

You will not know what kind of a monster he can become once he is financially free.

 

Re-evaluating everything about our lives.

 

This may be one of the most brutal National Day holidays I ever had to live through as I attended two wakes - one for a secondary school classmate who fought cancer and another for an ex-colleague who suddenly passed away. I thought perhaps for my own mental health, I highlighted some of my thoughts on this blog, just to get this out of my system.

a) Signal that middle age is coming

One of the surest signals of middle age is when you get fewer wedding invitations and begin showing up for more wakes. This should be a sign to change your approach to life. Some would go through a midlife crisis, and others must think much deeper about their relationship to work. 

b) The purpose of wakes

While it might sound morbid, I suddenly have some insight about funeral wakes. 

What is a wake for? Wakes cannot be for the dead as they don't even know you are there. While it might be for the loved ones to grieve, your presence can't improve the situation.

The wake is ultimately for the attendees to find closure, determine what happened, and whether the family can move on. In both wakes I attended, it was a way for folks who had long lost contact to get together again to catch up on what had transpired. In many wakes I attended, my friends made a promise to meet up under much happier circumstances. 

c) Shifting from achievements to joy

The hardest part about both wakes I attended was that both deceased were 49—the same age as me. Did my friends find any joy in life? Or were they still in the throes of seeking achievement in life? I highly doubt that Singaporeans my age have started to smell the roses. 

Everyone knows there will come a point in life when you take your foot off the pedal and start seeking more pleasure and improving relationships at home. But no one knows when the right time is to do that because we don't know how many good years we have left to live. 

I've been off conventional employment for a decade. I sometimes question my decision to drop a decade of earning power to build a portfolio career that paid a fraction of what I used to earn. 

After this week, I don't think I have any regrets anymore. 

d) What gives you happiness

Only three things cause happiness - oxytocin, serotonin and dopamine. Secretion of these chemicals is not fully under our control. 

Before middle age, we try to sacrifice short-term happiness to bring long-term satisfaction. In the process, we give up some health and mess up our lives a little. If we are lucky, we get some money in the process. In the middle, we are not too ready to take our foot off the pedal, but the search for long-term achievement and satisfaction reaches a state of diminishing returns. 

Some of my pals can't quit their jobs, but some practical fixes suit middle-aged people.

If we can't pick up more positives, we can aggressively eliminate the negatives. It's a concept in IT Security; we can reduce the surface area of attacks. 

I advised a friend recently who had an old friend who had recently grown bitter and made every social encounter quite unpleasant. This friend liked questioning her spouse's achievements or showing off what some rich people were doing, and it's been happening for years.

In Singapore, we have normalised this behaviour (because of Chinese New Year ) until we have grown to accept it as part of our social lives.

But Gen Z knows better. I've always wondered why we don't turn to a younger generation for their wisdom?

I explained that her friend feels insecure and has chosen nasty, defensive behaviour to amplify my friend's insecurities. This is a red flag in Gen Z relationships, and she needs to re-evaluate it for her own mental health. I then told her to consider "grey-rocking" the relationship—another innovation from Gen Z where you behave like a boring grey rock to disinvite further attacks from narcissists. 

The problem with us Gen Xers is that we do not have the psychological vocabulary to recognise people's attempts to inflict trauma on us. Gen Z has all sorts of wonderful lingo like gaslighting, cookie-jarring or what a situationship is. 

At this time, we're still in the middle of the seventh month Ghost Festival. 

We can get back into regular programming soon on this blog. 

 

Thinking about the state of humanities and social sciences education ( ex-economics )

 

Not too long ago, NUS revealed that their enrollment in the Arts and Social Sciences enrollment has dropped by about a third. You can read the finer details here. This has caused some consternation online, which is no dissimilar to the shenanigans when it was said on mainstream media that the arts were non-essential during the pandemic. 

The question is how serious this is. Are Singaporeans abandoning the arts and humanities en masse, being more attracted to qualifications that can land better paying jobs?

It isn't simple, as the intake of humanities majors in NTU and SMU was not hit so badly. The main reason is that NUS decided to merge the Arts and Science faculties, so students of the combined school had more flexibility to choose their majors. Naturally, the folks with study loans obviously want something that can get them higher-paying jobs, so there will be a bias towards more quantitative subjects. 

So, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

This is a good thing that will elevate the status of the humanities or social science major. 

At the broader level, I think modern societies need to understand what happens if they overproduce Arts graduates and the industry fails to absorb them and provide them with good jobs. Arts and Law graduates are articulate enough to form a counter-elite. This is the subject of Peter Turchin's book End Times. It talks about how counter-elites are the seeds of political disintegration in societies in the past, like the Roman Empire. I suspect LKY was quite cognisant of this when he started limiting the number of Law graduates decades ago. 

As it has become harder to get into the College of the Humanities and Sciences, the arts graduate, regardless of major, would have at least ABB for A levels, so they would have some general intelligence to make them good hires. At least during my time, I know that FASS top students get selected into government departments like ISD, which is supposed to provide wonderful sinecures and pay their officers well.

I was fortunate to know many intelligent humanities graduates when I was at NUS and subsequently in SMU law school. I learnt a lot more from them than my peers in Engineering school because they employ different mental models to attack some of the common problems we face as young adults.

But I feel sorry for them as they must transcend the stereotype of the "Arts slacker" in the 2000s, the folks who barely made it into NUS, so they had to settle for any faculty that would accept them. The stereotype is that many end up selling insurance or squeezing into NIE to land secondary school teaching jobs after getting knocked up early in life. 

So, with a minimum grade of ABB, the Arts slacker is now an endangered species, if not extinct already. 

In fact, it would be fascinating if you met an individual who did well in the A levels and volunteered for a so-called "useless" subject like English Literature or Philosophy. In the past, this may have signalled laziness or incompetence, but now it can be a mark of higher social and economic status or very high personal agency—this guy does not care about what you think about his degree major! And that's cool!

Formal education may not be the best answer for many mere mortals like us who need a practical professional degree to attain FIRE. But there's nothing stopping you from giving yourself some humanities training after office hours. 

• Will and Ariel Durant have a great book called The Lessons of History that helps laypeople appreciate history and how to appreciate change in societies. 
• For literature, you can try How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster.  
• For philosophy, you can try The Philosopher's Toolkit by Peter Fosl and Julian Baggini. Do not go for that book for poseurs called Sophie's World. 

In tandem with the shrinkage of the Arts faculty at NUS, they should apply less pressure on the professor to publish but instead create micro-credentials in the humanities and social sciences so that older mid-career dudes like me can explore and appreciate the humanities at a later stage in life. 

I need technical skills at an earlier stage in my career, but as I reach mid-career, I may want to discover some knowledge of what makes us human as well to round up my professional credentials. I visited Istanbul last year, and my trip would have been richer if I had understood the history behind the Fall of Constantinople. Some of the harder war games I play exist in a historical period involving states like Pomerania, and I may have to wage war against the Burgundians.