2025 Week 4: Changes

Here I am with another late dispatch. I put off my weekly writing for so long that I'm catching up on it in Baguio, where Jon and I are on holiday during the CNY break.

The reason for my writer's block is that I am dealing with a lot of Very Troublesome Feelings. I suppose I can pin the blame on (a) anxiety about the job thing and (b) the loss of virtually all healthy routines. These are the more surface issues that preoccupy my attention (inasmuch as I pay any to my mental state, usually preferring to dope myself senseless with online shopping and sex fantasies). As for the weightier, underlying issues, I have avoided thinking about them, to date: these are the by-no-means insignificant status and identity changes going on in my life (job and wedding).

With the advent of my new job I must say goodbye to the life I had built specifically to guarantee my political freedom. I grieve largely out of guilt that I did not do enough with said freedom. I had hoped to use it to fight against labour exploitation and the dreadful creep of capitalism. I tried doing that in different ways: trying to become a social worker, working on book projects that resonated with my ideals, contributing my skills to the workers' co-op, and trying to be a sort of labour journalist (but without the guts to pitch my work to media and thus limited by my personal lack of reach and competence in this field of reporting).

Although the team I'm joining seems pleasingly left-wing, the job description is anything but. So for now it feels like I'm selling out, although because I wasn't doing much in the first place, this feeling isn't quite justified. I wish that I had fought harder for my ideals. I characterise myself as ''lazy'' but really I think I just lack belief that I can make a difference, so I don't even try.

The other Big Change is the wedding. As you know I am not into the concept of matrimony at all - and that's not even bringing in the gendered perspective - but our previous status (legally married for home ownership) gave me a way to avoid thinking about my hypocrisy. However, now that I agreed to take part in a public performance of a private matter I don't even much believe in, I feel like walking garbage. It doesn't seem right to feel this. Maybe it's just that only now am I confronting the decisions I made 7+ years ago. I think my excitement to get a house with my best friend made me blind to any potential complications. 

TL;DR: new job and wedding make me feel dislocated existentially, even if excited and positive about both developments. (cf. Joel: "Don't let a wedding ruin a good soulmate.")

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The high point of my week was helping Candy facilitate a focus group discussion for self-employed people of varying jobs and socioeconomic status. (Ranging from delivery workers to business consultants, but largely skilled demi-professionals, often in the arts. Some of them also noted that content creators were noticeably absent.)

One thing that surprised me was how receptive they were to the idea of a freelancers' co-op, contributing very specific services they wanted from it such as a community lawyer, market research and pricing strategy, and (non-commission-based) financial advice specific to freelancers. I sensed that for many attendees, the main challenge in self-employment was the power imbalance between the independent contractor and the corporate client. The spectre of exploitation is always there. Some are already practising collective action of an informal sort - closed groups for sharing job opportunities and the like. In all they seemed very open to other kinds of social structures that would allow greater collective bargaining power and institutional backing.

I was secretly very very pleased that my work on the thinking-about-freelancing front (well, my rather feeble and unpublished attempts to articulate the struggles and joys of self-employment) had somehow connected to my involvement with the co-op. I went to the co-op meeting on Friday thinking, wow, this has gone from a potentially masturbatory project to something that Singapore actually needs.

MON: Sent home the last of the bunnies (Jill) and went through a round of wedding planning.

TUE: Walked from Macritchie to Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, felt gloomy, cried and did housework.

WED: Freelancer focus group (described above).

THU: Lunch with parents. I took the bus and started talking to an uncle who was once a policeman but left the Force after being made to torture detainees/alleged criminals? I could not understand the full story but was amazed he would share such chilling things with me, a stranger. 

FRI: Co-op meeting (above).

SAT: Reading Radicals and visiting The Utopia of Rules exhibition. After that I went to my family's reunion dinner at National Gallery which was probably more byzantine and weird than anything at the exhibition.

SUN: Cleaning and tidying the remnants of bunnies. Looking through old photos for wedding PowerPoint, which you can imagine put me in an emo state. Dinner at in-laws' (whom I very very recently started to see as my surrogate parents).

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That's it for now; my next update will be about Baguio which ought to be slightly more cheerful.