Yesterday, my cousin brought me to Pasar Seni, the Arts Quarter of KL, and we ate at this fantastic restaurant called Bartolo, which served Portuguese fare. We enjoyed chicken liver on bread, some kind of tuna casserole and tinned sardines. The food was great, cheap by Singapore standards, but in hindsight expensive for KL locals.
AS I'm now blogging from a Starbucks in Genting Highlands, having decided that my life is already a major gamble with the Singapore Stock market, I decided to park myself and blog from this third space.
Today I just want to contemplate the disappearance of hipsters in Singapore.
The nature of F&B is changing in Singapore, and I suspect a lot of hipster cafes were struggling to survive with the arrival of Chinese eateries. Gen X F&B places have also evolved. I'm not seeing so much avocado toast, but these days I'm seeing expensive strawberry matcha lattes that cost $8. Food-wise, I'm seeing artisanal pizzas and pastas, but the aesthetics of the hipster have given way to the weird psychedelic neon colours of Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
I guess beyond just growing old, and being encumbered with adult responsibilities and watching their careers get torpedoed by AI, hipster philosophy never had a chance because it's inherently self-contradictory.
Remember my contemplation on existentialism; I think Hipsters and existentialists drew from the same fundamental sources, like a Norman Mailer essay entitled "The White Negro". I think the core idea of hipsterism is that if one just lived based on expectations and societal norms set by the mainstream, they are not leading authentic lives, but the result of this approach is very much a joke, because in avoiding the mainstream, they all end up converging on a similar aesthetic in taste, fashion and clothes.
So in this semester, my smarter Poly students decided to ask me to articulate a life philosophy and defend it in a data mining class after the lab is over.
I explained that maybe we should not go full-existentialist like Heidegger.
In that sense, I still agree that life is too short to conform to mainstream values and norms of conventional success. You're not obligated to become a quant just because your most successful cousin is one. But because their parents also mean well for the students, the students should not totally rebel like Millennial Hipsters; they should maybe decide to be successful based on the outcome their parents wish for them, but do it in the way that makes sense based on what's happening in the workforce for their era. The ends might be the same, but the means need to be adapted to the current situation in the workplace.
It might be useful to see this life philosophy like a vector database.
Some stubborn Asian parents want a cosine similarity of 1. It's my way or the highway. There's only one way to be successful — it's hard and rigid. Hipsters, in their dumbass avocado toasts and vinyl music obsession, want a cosine similarrty of -1, ar at best 0 if they can hold a day job.
I'm arguing to my Poly students that it's fair to deviate a few degrees to do something you're passionate about and good at.
How much to conform to mainstream views on success and norms is something everyone needs to constantly interpret and negotiate.
Greeks call this phronesis, or practical wisdom.
I can teach data mining and computer science, no matter how many personal questions you throw at me.
No comments:
Post a Comment