DON'T WORK. BE HATED. LOVE SOMEONE.

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Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.
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I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

PASSENGERS

From "14 Love Stories":  In "Passengers”, Luis Katigbak turns an ordinary bus ride into an eternal trip, multiplied across multiverses in a quantum reality, where existential musings gently offset the sentimental side of love.


PASSENGERS


By: Luis Joaquin M. Katigbak



You liked bus rides. I remember that much. I thought you were nuts when you first told me that, all economics reasons aside, you preferred riding buses to taking taxis. I chalked it up to your sheltered upbringing- your overly protective parents had not allowed you to take public transportation until you were 20 years old. I supposed that, even after four years, the novelty had not worn off yet.



Taxis afforded us a bit more privacy, I reasoned. We could sit confortably, snuggle a little, and not worry about the conductor not giving us change, or someone squeezing into the seat with us, or having to jostle our way through a people-packed aisle when it was time to get down. “But it’s different,” you insisted. ”Yes,” I agreed, “and in this case, ‘different’ means ‘better’.” For that remark, you accused me- not without justification or amusement- of being small-minded and smug. It took me while to realize that you were right and I was wrong. As per usual.



As I write this, I have to wonder- why do we remember the things we remember? Not that all I’ve retained of our time together are bus rides and bite-size arguments. My theory is that people, emotional masochists aside, tend to just recall things that won’t sting too much, that are easier to think about or explain, given time and distance.



You know, once in a while, I’ll start to remember something; a scene will start to fade into view. An evening in a dimly lit club, with a live band and oblivious waiters. An afternoon in a vacant office, sunlight slivering through closed blinds. A morning meeting in a Mini Stop. But before the two of us walk into the frame, before the audio comes on or any sort of action begins. I’ll stop. I’ll shut the film reel in my mind, because I know that watching those particular memories is not going to do me any good. Quite the opposite in fact.



But I can think of you and me on a bus and it doesn’t hurt, it’s even pleasant, to remember you sitting next to me, occasionally resting the side of your head on my shoulder; to remember the chill of the air conditioner, the juddering motion as we sped through the evening, the look-at-me graffiti scrawled on the seat in front of us, the grime-blue and sick-green bus tickets folded and jammed into the gaps of the same seat, even the incessant and annoying pseudo-techno medley that almost always serves as the official sountrack for Metro Manila buses.



I recall how the urban landscape blurring past our bus window would give us endless fodder for conversations, inane or otherwise. Remember that little store called "Manly-Mart", in Cubao, just across the Araneta Coliseum.  We wondered: did you have to be Manly with a capital M to shop there? Would they bar scrawny nerds at the door? Or was that where one went to purchase men? Then there was the time we were stuck in traffic on East Avenue, and you told me the day you visited a friend who was confined at the medical center there, about the feeling of desolation the place gave you- the depressing green tiles on the hallways, and the constellations of cigarette butts that you could see from your friend's hospital room window, spread out on the blackened rooftop of a lower floor.



And one time, instead of the usual techno-dreck, the bus we were riding was playing 80's hits on its sound system. This started us on a conversation that encompassed our high school years (the unsurpassed cruelty of cliques and certain teachers), our most embarrassing hairstyles ever (frizzy and poodle-like, in your case; a mullet, in mine), and of course, music. "Turn Back the Clock," that sappy nostalgic tune, started playing, and I got absurdly sentimental. It occurred to me that even though we had been going out for a few months, we didn't have 'a song' yet to call our own. I remarked on this fact. You remained silent. And when I remarked upon your silence, you said, "I'm holding out for a better song."



I could hardly blame you. Unfortunately, it was too late; the concept, and the moment, stuck, and from that point on, whenever we heard "Turn Back the Clock" somewhere- in a mall, or on a classic flashback nights on the radio, we would look at each other and grimace affectionately.



And almost always, on these us rides, I will tell you about my latest daydream, my latest idyllic scenario involving us. I was always dreaming up situations and set-ups where our being together was not so difficult, where your parents did not hate my guts and regulate or meetings every step of the way, where your friends and mine were more understanding and accepting of what we had, where our lives seemed to be heading in the same direction. Foreign lands, desert islands, even alien planets or other time periods might be involved in these scenarios. you said that you always liked hearing me describe them, and I was only too happy to oblige.



Of course, our city being the sprawling cutthroat traffic-tangled mess that it is, there were times when we just couldn't get any sort of ride at all- times when taxis would speed by, ignoring our energetic gesticulations, times when the buses were stuffed to bursting with wriggling commuters. During such times, I would wish I had a car. Not that I would even have known how to operate one. "You should learn how to drive," you once told me, "so you can pick me up, and I can wear short skirts when we go out..." You leaned a bit closer: "Short skirts," you stressed.



"That's a good way to get killed," I said. "Distract me while I'm driving. Like you're not distracting enough in jeans."



"You're sweet," you said punching my arm. (I miss the way you used to do me violence: punching my arm, pinching my cheek, pretending to strangle me. I suppose if I thought about it deeply enough, these gestures might seem more disturbing than endearing, so I'm happy that I didn't.) "But really," you said. "are you ever going to learn how to drive? You're almost thirty."



I gently reminded you that I was several years away from turning thirty, and I called into question your arithmetic skills. I received another punch in response, just as I thought I would.



I wonder if you'd be amused to learn that I know how to drive now. I drive a beat-up box-type Lancer that's almost as old as my sister, who is now entering her freshman college year in La Salle. Barring unforeseen circumstances, I don't suppose I'll ever ride a bus in Metro Manila ever again. To me those careening hunks of metal no longer represent cheap rides to Galleria. No, they are now The Enemy, who must be outmaneuvered, outfoxed, overtaken.



Sometimes, though, when I'm on the road, I'll pass an air-conditioned southbound bus, and wonder if you're on it. I just know that one of these days, I'll be drifting, and wondering, and that same bus I was wondering about is going to take advantage of my being distracted, and slam into me and crush me like a beer can.


When that happens, I can only hope that you actually will be on that bus, and you'll rush down, and when my blood slowly stained the asphalt underneath me, you would support my injured neck and I would sing you a few lines of "Turn Back the Clock", and tell you my latest daydream about us, the one where we meet again decades from now in an old folks' home or a free Tai Chi session at the park, and we'll both be gray and forgetful, so forgetful that we won't be able to remember why we broke up in the first place. And we'll get back together, our passion more fiery than ever before, and disgust our respective grandchildren with our uncontrollable public displays of tongue-kissing. "It's easier when you don't have any teeth any more," we'll explain.



Yeah, I know. It may be time to seek psychiatric help.



Anyway, Would you even still be riding a bus, these days? You always told me about how you wanted to buy a pickup truck with automatic gear-shifting once you had the money. I wonder what you'd be doing, if you're still doing freelance film editing, or if you ever got that producing gig at that local cable channel. That's one of the things that bothers me the most, not knowing what's going on in your life. Not that I should care anymore, I suppose.



Believe it or not, I finally got a regular job. I finally put my Chemical Engineering degree to some use, sort of. I was hired to work on the supply chain of a big multinational company that manufactures such life-essentials as potato chips, paper towels and deodorants. My position requires that I travel around a lot- to meet customers, to discuss their orders, to inspect the workings of factories and to attend seminars and such. I've been to Thailand, India, and Singapore, and that was just this year. I have eaten at the McDonald's franchises of seven-plus nations. I've seen the Taj Mahal. (It's not so great).



It's never quite real to me, all this going to foreign lands to meet with various important people to discuss armpit roll-ons. I hope my immediate superior never learns how truly detached I am from what I'm doing. She sees each inflated order as a challenge, each tiny loss of market share as a personal affront. I can't say I feel the same. You know what I do like about my job? The airports, and the plane rides. It's nice to buy magazines or books you wouldn't normally buy, just because you see them on the shelf of an airport newsstand, while you're waiting. And it's also nice to be a passenger again once in a while, to let somebody else worry about how to steer, how to get me where I'm going.



It was on a trip to Singapore that I picked up this issue of 'Discover' magazine, and read about Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal. It seems that- based on the idea that an array of separate big bangs erupted from a primordial dense-matter state- Rees proposes that our universe is but a small , isolated corner of what he terms the multiverse: an infinite variety of universes, each with its own distinctive characteristics. "For example," the article said, "one universe might feature six dimensions, another universe could have ultraweak gravity."



If there is an infinity of universes, I thought, leaning back in my padded airline seat, then there might be an infinite number of worlds that are just like ours, save for some detail niggling or important, like a lost president or a different-colored sky. I closed my eyes. Anything one could imagine might be possible. I thought about you. Given an infinity of earths, all the daydreams I ever made up about us are true, somewhere.



I thought of our time together, of how brief and bittersweet it was. I didn't tell you something important, then. I guess it's too late now, but it's something that occurred to me only after we parted ways- when I was with you, I was content to just sit back and enjoy the ride, as it were, because the ride was so pleasant. And maybe that was the problem. Neither of us ever learned how to drive, if you'll forgive the analogy. And I'm not even sure if we got on the right bus, if we were headed the right way. We were happy enough to be traveling together- to be passengers- and we never figured out who or what was driving.



But what does it matter? Maybe that's all we're meant to do, enjoy the trip while it lasts. Maybe luck or faith are the only things that keep us from delays, transfers, fatal crashes.



What if, against all the laws of probability, you happened to be on that plane bound for Singapore too? What if you had walked up the aisle taken the seat next to mine? What if you had asked me, then and there, what my last fondest daydream about the two of us was, what fresh possibility I envisioned that day as I sat in that plane and looked at the clouds through a little round-cornered square of glass? This is what I would have told you:



There is an endless road somewhere, and on that road speeds a hand-me-down rattletrap bus on an endless trip, and somewhere near the back of that bus, you and I are snugly squeezed into one of the two-seater benches, with you next to the window and me next to the aisle, holding hands like schoolchildren, talking, occasionally smiling at each other, looking like we will never let go.