Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988). He
was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This
was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.
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.
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Ok, this is better. 
