Singaporeans Lack Social Capital because FOMO

This is the third rendition of my Singaporeans lacking social capital series and I’m going to talk about how Singaporeans can solve these issues, and how we are actually in one of the best positions to solve them.

FOMO: degrees, jobs and income

Through my twenties I knew some peers who are smart but are extremely unemployable. You could tell they aren’t suited to be wearing suits and ties, droning away at a corporate job. However they never took to the skills route but instead invested time into being grab drivers or trading low value labour for income.

That’s because high impact skill acquisition requires delayed gratification. For eg. if you’re smart and are exposed to the right information, you can learn a high impact skill such as search engine optimization six months to eight months minimum. However, it still requires delayed gratification.

This is also related to my 2nd rendition where I criticized how capital on a family unit level is over allocated to formal education as opposed to skills and ‘social capital’.

I am happy to go without income for months (and have been there) when I need to pivot my projects that requires a) some time for me to learn a high impact skill b) some time for capital allocated wisely without blowing up the company’s bank account.

Instagram Culture and FOMO

This brings me to my next point of FOMO. I never gave much of a f*ck about grades (probably a defense mechanism to academic failure) during my teenage years. It didn’t bother me if I was last in class. I still believed I’ll eventually be successful in the long run if I focused. I had the self esteem. In my unpopular personal opinion, FOMO is the root lack of self esteem.

FOMO leads to chasing social status symbols such as grades, cars, instagram photos, food photos and etc. You got to fit in. Since I didn’t care much from day one. I was mostly impervious. I cared mostly only about the direct results of chasing women and making money in my twenties. I didn’t care about most things in between.

If a Singaporean fresh graduate is able to delay gratification and work on start up projects from graduation date to thirty instead of chasing a ‘stable job’, he/ she might see expotential pay offs in the further future.

I also didn’t care much about building up a fancy resume. As far as I am concerned, if I can generate revenue and be a value add to my own projects, I am much more hireable than some random business graduate with a fancy degree.

Middle Class Singaporeans actually have the best platforms

I stayed in a HDB the majority of my life and my family went bankrupt once. I still consider my family middle class despite being able to live in a condominium as of the last 4 to 5 years. My Dad’s a fishmonger and my Mum’s an airfreight manager whose academic qualifications never went beyond secondary school.

Even when I was staying in a HDB, I still believed there was a safety blanket.

I can name you countless examples of risk takers with lesser economic blanket than I had. If I failed, how bad can it be? I can stay with my parents. They are out of debt (read: HDB prices ain’t ridiculously priced during their era) and as long as I am prudent and don’t get into ridiculous debt I am fine.

Somehow, it’s on my generation to take on risks and promote a culture of risk taking.

However, instead of risk taking, we continued to eat up the prestigious ivy league qualifications chase hook line and sinker.

Trade Offs

This brings me back to my point about FOMO. I knew from a young age that being put into some cubicle isn’t going to work out for me. Oh, trust me… I knew.

To attain social capital there are inherent trade offs.

You can’t FOMO yourself into commiting into relationships, internships, degrees, resumes and sources of income.

I took this to somewhat an extreme by spending time in three different Universities in my twenties by attempting more than the required graduation modules out of sheer curiosity. I took modules from coding, music, neuroscience to financial reporting. Some had nothing to do with my bottom line grades or graduation time length.

I also didn’t mind not doing internships to trade my resume into some large company. I preferred to spend my time on small one man team projects during my first two years in University. I did a bunch of freelance work and attended informal business programs. I never desired to intern for some big company. I hated the whole office cubicle life of showing up to office in a suit and tie with it’s creeping facade of self importance.

Ultimately, these temporary impacts of trade offs can be lessened if Singaporeans had more ‘social capital’ as opposed to ‘social comparison’.

Social Capital

Singapore doesn’t have systemic problems of cognitive ability, human capital and economic infrastructure. However, it has problems of social mobility.

The is partly contributed by the Singaporean narratives of success symbols such as getting good grades to become lawyers, bankers, engineers and doctors.

If I was attempting to achieve humongous economic success the first fifty years of governance in a post industrial world, yes that’s the blueprint.

However, with the advent of the internet and technology. It’s not structure and/or routine that’s going to deliver economies of scale. It’s creativity and “out of the box thinking” (as cliche as this sounds).

To put it simply, if you knew how to code, taking up a real life side project with a couple of friends is a better idea (this is a demonstration of social capital) instead of obsessing over some arbitrary internship and/ or scholarship.

The hardest thing to change in a country is culture. You’ll need time, governmental machinery and a lot of explicit and/ or implicit persuasion. If a young graduate sternly believes that getting straight As or doing X number of internships is more important than attempting real life side projects with his peers… then this persistent culture of FOMO is merely going to cascade.