Working life makes you stupid

The past couple of weeks, I've suddenly been feeling a great urge to relive my pseudo-intellectual university days: reading political essays, learning philosophical concepts and getting passionate about social justice. On top of that I've also been yearning to read more non-fiction about anything at all -- science, anthropology, art, etc.

Part of it I think is just an innate need to keep my brain at work. I've always liked learning new things. You know that "Oh" moment that starts in your head and flows warmly down to your toes when you find out something you've never known before, and it's something substantial and significant, like "what is DNA made up of?" or "How did the East Asian economic crisis happen?" and not like "what is Maslow's hierarchy of needs?" or "why is Madonna important"? Well I got that feeling while reading some of the latter pages of Introducing: Evolution recently and it made me realise just how long it's been since I last got it. I want that feeling to keep recurring.

The other part I think is the upcoming IMF-World Bank meetings. After one year of lapsing into a mind-numbing working-life rut during which I've slowly forgotten or stopped being angry about unfair trade policies, neo-capitalism, fast food and the idioticisation of society by the media, I've suddenly realised that the world's financial leaders are coming to Suntec City and this will be the closest I've ever come to taking part in the resistance and after years of building up rage against the machine, it would be extremely stupid to let this moment pass by without taking any more notice than I have to for work's sake.

The other day during lunch with my colleagues I commented that it would be a sad day for the world if the IMF-World Bank meetings were not greeted with protests. My colleague Simon replied that if there were no protests, however, it would show the world just how efficient Singapore is. I responded that, to the contrary, it would show the world how oppressive Singapore is. He said that protests were bad, because violence tends to ensue and people get killed, as they did at the last IMF-World Bank meetings in Hong Kong. I said, well, people are well aware of that possibility when they come out to protest; you don't have to take part if you're scared of getting injured or killed -- it's like participating in extreme sports. You have a choice. Having that choice is what's important.

After lunch, when we'd returned to the office, another colleague, Alice, who was also at the same lunch table, sent me an SMS that read: Simon is a right-wing conservative hack.

And that's also the kind of thing that makes me want to be a bleeding heart leftist liberal hippie all over again.