In Search of Happiness

Life and How to Survive It
Below is a speech to the graduating class of 2008 at NTU convocation ceremony last week by Adrian Tan, a litigation lawyer and the author of The Teenage Textbook. Read it! It’s hilarious but very meaningful. 

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.

You’re going to have a busy life. Thank goodness there’s no life expectancy.

There was a monk who retreated into the mountains for meditation. After years of contemplation, he finally realised something: that he really does not know anything. So he went back to his village and from that day onwards, whenever he was asked, his reply would always be, "I do not know."

So, the monk had the well-known habit of going to the temple in the morning. One day, he met with the local policeman, who for the sake of teasing the monk asked him where the monk was going. As usual, the monk replied, "I do not know." The policeman was angry at the monk, feeling that he was played upon, and forcefully took the monk bak with him to the station.

Along the way, the policeman told the monk, "Well, you could have said that you were going to the temple, things would have been easier for you." The monk replied, "Look at where I am now. Am I not right to tell you that I did not know where I was going?"

Good story… Now answer these questions: what are you going to do tomorrow when you wake up? Are you sure? Are you even sure that you will wake up? Will you even see tomorrow? What will happen to you 1 hour later? 15 minutes later? 1 second later? We do have plans, yeah, but many times they do not turn out as what we have predicted.

This is what I have learned for the past week. I really do not know. I made plans, I worked hard to make sure they work, but there is always something that happened that is just beyond my prediction, beyond my - imagination even. That shocked me and forced me to change my plan on the spot.

For example, on Wednesday morning, I finished making the ppt slides for Mass. I saved it. But during Mass itself, apparently the file contains the unfinished version of the ppt. Strange. my computer did hang along the way, and apparently the file stop saving since then. i only realised this 5 minutes before Mass. Shocking… panicky… Luckily things turn out smoothly.

Another one: I cannot access my friendster from room. So yup, I’m in the library, trying to read my FYP paper (ELF-WHY-PEE / Final Year Project / Finding Your Partner) typing my blog. Hehehe, both are still "journals" right.

Another one: a friend. Thought could be trusted fully. Thought unconditional friendship. But then, misunderstanding, miscommunication, and apparently things that are done are with strings attached. Luckily things are resolved now. Though things will never be the same again. Forgiven… forgotten? How to forget something?

People change… we’ll never know. Once I judged a junior as smart-aleck. In the end, that person is the one that helped me. I was thinking in my heart: "Forgive me, I was wrong to judge you 2 years ago."

So yeah, i told myself: "Be patient with everything, be ready for anything. Do not expect. You’ll never know."

Same with my FYP…

So… sometimes, when good things happen to you, be thankful for that moment, coz you’ll never know when it will be taken from you. When bad things happen to you, be thankful too, coz it will make you stronger, also be patient coz one day, it may be a blessing in disguise… Again, we’ll never know…

Same with people… accept the person at the moment, accept, don’t give verdict, don’t expect to change. You’ll never know what will happen…

Pace.

Finally I’m back…, after a (too) long holiday home for 2 months (shall never do it again). I left for Indonesia just 2 days after my Attachement ended and back in Singapore again just 1 day before the school starts.

And abrupt it was! With very limited (and expensive) internet connection back home, I practically didn’t settle any work back home. So there was I, the boy who was very pampered for the past 2 months at home, woke up at 5am on sunday to catch a plane to Singapore, took an MRT back from Changi to Boon Lay, carrying a 25 kg of luggages (after you go to Indonesia, you’ll know how much 30$ actually really worth), tahan with my dusty room, and deliver stuff that my sister asked me to bring from home. I ended that frantic sunday at midnight, feeling like vommitting (perhaps being too tired), hoping to wake up early in the morning to settle: my subject registration, my final year project confirmation, CSA’s venue booking, etc.

I was scared.

And the first of school was actually very interesting: suddenly I felt being like a freshman, new and unfamiliar to school (thanks for moving up the canteen and taking away my favourite POSB ATM), i felt very vulnerable, like a small boy, scared to meet people. For the first day since a very verly long time ago I felt totally not confident. In the evening during a meeting, I was totally quiet. I thought I lost my command of English!

The beauty of it was, during this troubled time, I turned back to what I believe in. For my case was prayer. I began to see small miracles again. The subject registration was smooth, the venue booking was prompt, I began to appreciate my friends again (every single one of them) and the activities (I used to call them bussyness) that I have. I began to be thankful. Not to mention of course my productivity increased.

This what I called the beauty in vulnerability. When you are not sure of what will happen, and you leave it in Good Hands, after you have done your part. When you look at mundane things with new eyes. When you start to appreciate every single small things. When you dare to take that first step walking on water. You become a beautiful creature. Now I sort of understand when Jesus (allegedly) said, "Happy are those who are gentle, they shall have the earth as the inheritance,… Happy are the pure in heart, they shall see God." My take on ‘earth as inheritance’ is that it has been there all the while, only when you become gentle at heart, you began to see all the small blessings in your life, and begin to claim that inheritance. Basically the whole  earth.

So as I begin to get back on my feet and lost my vulnerabilty, I want to retain that "Frist day at school boy" (strangely). Minus the worries, minus the fear, keep the faith, keep the vulnerability, keep the innoncence, keep the gratefulness.

I feel that when I become too confident, I become an ass hole.

And I learn one more thing: In life, it is actually easy to take the best option, and thus wait for the result, knowing that it was already the best option taken. But this process takes a very very long and tiring process of research. You can’t do it for everything in life. So sometimes, you have to be contented and brave enough to take the option that is not the best. I call it resilient. Taking not-the-best-option in life and thankful and brave enough to live out the consequences. It’s beautiful, my friend.

So okay, I’m back, hopefully I always keep that first day experience in my heart as I live out my last year in NTU, my last month as exco in CSA… Blessed are the gentle, blessed are the poor in heart… Adversity does brings out the best in a person.

A short update of what happened for the 2 months: punching bag of sands, got thrown with 3 fingers by an Aikido 4th Dan Sensei: Imanul Haqim, ate over 6 type of fish (miss my mum’s cooking!), read lots on Indian spirituality, prepared power point slides for my mum’s lecture.

Alright, shall write more later, Peace be with you all.