Life & Handphones...

Tonight for the first time I saw the Nokia 8800 handphone outside of the shops. Quite a rare sight, given its $1.4k price tag. It kindda stayed in my mind, after which I was observing the myriads of handphone models on display on the bus ride home… Each displaying to a different degree the kind of choices it owners made, some due to choice of features, most due to budgetary constraints, and some even due to a lack of proper consideration.

Lame as it might seem to some, I guess it suddenly struck me that life is pretty much like that sometimes. We have the few amongst us whose life seem to be the perfect example of what we want – the Nokia 8800. The epitome of success, with its all encompassing features squeezed into a very compact and aesthetically pleasing shape. Class, elegance and sophistication all rolled up into one. And every common man (well, almost every la…) aspires to that, forgetting that given its rarity, it actually is what’s unreal, as compared to what the rest of the real world actually carries around. (After all, real people carry cheap handphones that are scratched in one corner and cracked in another, just as real people life lives of insufficiencies and inadequacies...)

Ain’t that what we all are like in life? With the measure that been dealt us in life, we each are allotted our own ‘handphones’ – some are flashy, some are plain. So often we won’t really use a feature in the handphone, but we’d much rather have it in the phone if possible, thank you. After all, we all want our phones to be as close to the Nokia 8800 as possible, don't we?

So it is with our lives.

We are so eager to equip ourselves materially and technically (piano... ballet... third, fourth and fifth language… courses on everything under the sun…), that we seldom pause to think abt what we really want to do with it, except that we don’t want to lose out to others. So if the package deal offers me a Bluetooth headset that comes with the phone, I’ll gladly choose that over the other phone at the same price which doesn’t have the same feature – even tho chances are I’ll use the headset once and never touch it again cos I can’t figure it out.

We’re such funny beings… by nature so keen to avoid losing out that we end up being dictated by what others have – we’ve gotta make sure we don’t end up disadvantaged by them. Whatever happened to living life being true to ourselves, and being who we want to be? I’ll tell you – we’ve ended up just wanting to be better than others.

So my choice of handphones in many way reflects the way I choose to live my life. My own paper chase today is the result of the same mentality. What the heck am I doing with a degree in management, I don’t know. Just that I’m told in today’s society, you’ll lose out if you don’t get one. I got myself a driving license only to end up with a self-imposed ban on driving. I’m always told to go take up courses in IT, in another language, cos it helps improve and upgrade me…

I’m left wondering – improve me from what to what? Am I a worser person for not having a cert in another language, or not having a mind of my own (or a life of my own, for that matter)?

So why the paper chase, to be brighter and more successful than others? My Motorola v3 phone works basically the same way as my old Nokia 6100 (which cost a fraction of the price), so after the initial hype of it wears off, I’m wondering how its really “improved” my life. I get the odd perks from girls who ogle at the phone (instead of me, ironically), but not much else.

Working and studying has proved more hectic than I imagined myself to be coping with. News that Gabriel has already quit studying really isn’t the kind of motivation I needed. So the temptation is great to just get a job, and try to be like one of those stories that always get thrown at you, of someone who had nothing, and worked his way from the bottom to a management position through hard work.

So as I think abt it, the only reasons that keep me in my degree would be

1. So that my future girlfriend’s mom won’t harp about how her daughter’s apparently marrying down.
2. Did I mention how its probably easier to get a girl if you have a degree?
3. So that its an option if I really do consider going into seminary next time.
4. So that I possess a bit more credibility when I speak, in a very materialistic world that judges a man by his worldly achievements.
5. Because it actually does help me to think… and I’m learning some stuff that I’m interested in knowing more about.
6. Just to appease my whole family who’s so hung up about the fact that a member of the family actually failed to secure a degree.
7. Still trying to prove a point to myself. I’ll tell you again when I’ve figured out what point I’m trying to prove. Something abt how I’m not an abject failure.

Well there you go.

One small qualifier… I’m not against personal upgrading. Henry wouldn’t have been where he is today if his parents hadn’t forced him to cultivate a skill that would eventually become his passion. None of us got to where we are without hard work in something that we’ve all come to be adept in, that we’ve come to enjoy.

But surely everything needs to possess a degree (pardon the pun there,) beyond which it just becomes a mindless chasing after useless things. “A chasing after the wind”, as the Bible likes to call it. I hear of kids going for financial planning courses, etiquette lessons, drama and singing classes, on top of the traditional and customary ballet and piano lessons… all this on top of tuition for any and every lesson in the curriculum in school… and I’m wondering if we only have ourselves to blame when we see our kids turning worldly wise way before their time, when their innocent childhood is snuffed out by the age of three with the worldly wisdom that says we need to prepare our children to be the best next time, so that they can make something of their lives.

Kindda like forcing all the features into a handphone, paying $1.4k for it, and getting a phone that we end up pretty much using just like any other – only that its a lot more brittle.

I wonder if I’d grow up to be half as jovial as I am today (or at least when I try to be)… if I was born in the past 5 years…