The ravages of disease has burnt off many of our old ways and will bring new things to come. My generation saw the death of the home land-line telephone and the office fax, ushered pagers in and out. I am the very first generation of digital natives, when I joined the workforce, emails are already a way of life, but the generation before me still needed superiors to approve before emails are sent. It is during my young adulthood when credit cards become an essential mode of payment. My generation saw air travel become banal and commonplace. Now, a new age dawns on my generation due to Covid.
I have always placed a premium on space and bought the biggest home that my money could afford. During this season of WFH, I have a private study the size of a proper bedroom to carry out my work. There is enough room for a single sized mattress where I lie on whenever I need a nap or when I am on war-mode. It gives me the peace and privacy to facilitate maximum concentration and creativity. Not everyone is as fortunate as me, I know of people who have gone into the lockdown without as much as a study desk, citing lack of space as a reason. Reluctant resignation to shrinking home sizes is a development of our society for the worse. It represents several steps backwards whereas our country should be advancing with time. After covid, the importance of residential size would be reinstated. We would look at pantries masquerading as kitchenettes with disdain. We will frown on bedrooms of substandard sizes. We would write off homes lacking home office space with disdain. The absurdity of shoebox-sized apartments will become glaringly self-evident. We do not want to be struck by cabin fever when a next lockdown occurs. If it has happened, it will happen again.
Society would place more premium on home decor than ever before, as this is where we will spend a lot of time. For those of us who can afford it, we would aspire to a hotel-like experience at home by upgrading our home-ware. We would demand more of practical and technologically fanciful kitchen gadgets, as home cooking and baking enjoy renaissance. We would increase purchase of exercise-from-home equipment.
The way in which our recreation takes place would change. Cinema theatres, already a sunset industry, will die out, consolidate or reinvent themselves. Netflix, already a killer of networks, will reign supreme. We would become more sceptical of gyms, at least, among those of us who are not die-hard or hard-core. As these lock-down days convinces us that life goes on and perhaps even better when it is spent inside the house, we would exercise greater selectivity in the places of recreation places we go to, whether it is a cafe or a restaurant. The F&B industry has to offer more in terms of experience and ambience than ever. Staycations would no longer make sense, as we have had a taste that sedentary recreation can well be conducted at home. The foreign tourist will no longer be greeted wholeheartedly as a welcomed wanderer, but will be viewed with a degree of wariness.
I sigh to contemplate that my generation has seen the last of the physical handshake. This social etiquette will be relegated to antiquity. I wonder what the masters and mistresses of etiquette would re-introduce in its place.
We would become more suspicious of other physical beings, and rightfully so. I may belong to the last generation to see air travel as casual and frequent. Days where public transport is necessarily crammed and passengers press onto one another, squeezing shoulder to shoulder may be gone for good. Post-war, betterment in medical care had made the world oblivious to the threats posed by crowds in terms of sanitation and disease-control. Now, we are regaining our awareness that the stranger in proximity is a risk. We realise that commuting is itself a wasteful drain on energy and resources and will seek to minimise it.
As WFH forces all of us to work remotely, it becomes clear that technology can supplant physical presence in many situations. Office space face a dire existential threat. Video conferencing software will become a permanent fixture in all work settings.
On the other hand, physical spaces that support the new virtually-conducted economy will flourish. Data centres will thrive, logistics centres and providers will continue to boom. When we realise that we can shop from home efficiently and securely, e-commerce is killing physical retail. Physical retail must attain e-commerce outreach as a matter of life and death.
Shopping centres have to re-invent themselves to offer that can neither be remote nor conducted at home. As department stores fade away into history, shopping centres will host services like physical massage therapy, beauty services (nail, face, spa), hair grooming. They will house shops selling high-end products like jeweller y, products that are best experienced in a tactile manner such as skincare, toiletries and cosmetics, or intimate items such as lingerie. F&B, which have grown in presence in shopping malls over the past decade, will increase its dominance. One thing I am truly looking forward to see is change in the dining format in shopping malls. Due to high rental, tables in an average F&B outlet are situated unacceptably close to one another, flouting desired standards of personal space. In many entry level eateries, customers are giving tiny stools to sit and discouraged from lingering. When department stores die out, the additional space could be used for enhanced F&B experience.
Covid tilts us towards a Brave New World scenario by accelerating death of the hard currency. I call it ominous because it is supplanted by digital cash, which leaves us open to surveillance. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I fear the dark. When the eyes are hidden in the dark and you are the one out in the open, you become the prey. There is nothing in the least interesting about the mundane things that I spend on. From my recent purchases, anyone spying on me can only conclude that I am one very basic Singaporean woman. Over the Covid period, here are the list of things I bought online:
- skipping rope for home exercise
- Sulwhasoo skincare products
- vitamins from iHerb
- two jars of chocolate spread
- a pair of binoculars to admire the scenery from my window
Yet, wouldn't it be nicer if no tracks are left behind?
Friday, May 8, 2020
Thursday, April 9, 2020
the Black Swan wears a Crown named Virus
World-shaking disaster has swept us up. A black swan that wears a Crown named Virus is on the loose, ravaging nations across different continents, seeking whom it may devour. From the isolation of my home, I record the following thoughts:
1) Society is only as strong as its weakest link
Bangladeshi or Indian laborers in Singapore are people seen but never looked at. They are just there to do jobs that no one else wants to do. Terrible socio-economic factors have driven them from their homes to seek employment overseas, and it is assumed that being here is already a privilege enough for them. From a benign perspective, they add interest to the multi-cultural landscape with their presence and activities in enclaves like Little India. From a less kindly view, they are people whom we wish not to share public transport with, for fear of their odour (after being out in the elements doing hard labour).
Nobody cares about how they live. As long as no one is starving or unclothed, nobody cares if their living conditions is cramped or rather dirty.
Now, our collective attitude to this segment of society is wreaking revenge on us. Covid19 is rippling through the foreign laborer community creating the biggest disease cluster. If we die, you die, so says Covid19.
You give me poor living conditions which foster the spread of disease while you live in comfort, now it is time for payback. You exploit my cheap labour, taking disproportionate socio-economical advantage at my expense, now is time you pay the fair price.
2) Are we at the precipice of war?
Singapore went into lock-down on Tuesday, 7 April 2020. We were ahead of the game in the early phase, with people going to work and roaming the streets as if it were normal. We were praised worldwide for our elegant approach to the pandemic. Cases were isolated, closely traced and monitored, which engendered confidence of control.
Around mid-March and early April, it emerged that things were worse than it seemed. First, infected overseas returnees brought a wave of bad news. This was followed by the surfacing of foreign laborer clusters. Soon, it became apparent that the severity of the epidemic has escalated. The country shut down to enter into what it calls a Circuit Breaker phase. In effect, it is a soft lock-down, with only limited types of movement permitted. New restrictions are being introduced on daily basis since the start of the Circuit Breaker.
Commercial buildings are deserted and forlorn. Hotels close, shrouded in darkness. The MBS casino that overlooks the Singapore river is a canvas of black, which has never happened and we hope never to see again. Streets are empty, with the number of flouters even fewer than what can realistically be expected. In contrast, private homes hum with life, with the windows of residential buildings glowing in various hues of orange, yellow and white. I have never seen a scene like this in my lifetime. An ominous undercurrent stalks the awful quiet that we have descended into.
My home is well-positioned on a high floor that offers 270-degrees view of the western part of the country. I bought the place exactly because of its high perch, yet I have never ever bothered to soak in the view. Now, under house arrest like the rest of my country, for the first time ever I truly stopped to watch. I sat by the floor to ceiling window, observing the traffic on the Ayer Rajah expressway with keen interest in the traffic volume in times of shut-down. I see cars on the road at 1 am in the morning. Where, I asked myself, are these people going? Other people's lives have always fascinated me. Now, this attitude is colored by sadness. The sight of every empty public bus stirs up unease in me.
I live in a state of chronic low-level anxiety. Reading the news and following forums fill me with alternating pangs of dismay and indignation, but I continue to obsess ceaselessly about the latest developments. I feel helpless as I am buffeted by the tidal forces of global change. Will the world devolve into a Cold War over the Covid19 pandemic, or worse things that shall not be spoken? What kind of political and economic change will this pandemic unleash on me, on us?
3) Out of sight, out of mind
It is during these times when one realises that such a huge majority of things we do is in order to be seen. Being vain by nature, I enjoy fantasizing about clothes and shoes and bags, cosmetics and skincare products and facial treatments. I enjoy dressing up, being out of the house and going to town. But now that we are all under house arrest, none of these things matter.
I told my dermatologist that I would be deferring a treatment. Why, I told him, should I glam up when there is no one to look at me during this terrible season? This pithy rhetoric is so coldly cynical yet throbbing with truth. Glamour ceases to be when the audience recedes; those who chase glamour are destitute when eyes turn away.
4) My little investment portfolio
I have built up a little portfolio over the past months which has contracted in value as the global stock market took a plunge. Every single investor out there has been similarly impacted - we are all in this together. I am not extremely disturbed, but my assumptions about the definition of long term has been shaken. Life is long, the world is big, who is to say that assumptions stay? Yet, assumptions are all we have, with our only mitigation being a concurrent consciousness that assumptions can be overturned anytime.
I am trying to stay sane by giving myself as much structure as I can; I am not ready to aim for upbeat, sanity is all I ask for at this moment.
But my mind is a stray beast with an appetite for news of gloom and doom. And this stray beast thrives in an atmosphere of physical isolation.
What will become of me in the days to come, of us, of Singapore, of this world?
1) Society is only as strong as its weakest link
Bangladeshi or Indian laborers in Singapore are people seen but never looked at. They are just there to do jobs that no one else wants to do. Terrible socio-economic factors have driven them from their homes to seek employment overseas, and it is assumed that being here is already a privilege enough for them. From a benign perspective, they add interest to the multi-cultural landscape with their presence and activities in enclaves like Little India. From a less kindly view, they are people whom we wish not to share public transport with, for fear of their odour (after being out in the elements doing hard labour).
Nobody cares about how they live. As long as no one is starving or unclothed, nobody cares if their living conditions is cramped or rather dirty.
Now, our collective attitude to this segment of society is wreaking revenge on us. Covid19 is rippling through the foreign laborer community creating the biggest disease cluster. If we die, you die, so says Covid19.
You give me poor living conditions which foster the spread of disease while you live in comfort, now it is time for payback. You exploit my cheap labour, taking disproportionate socio-economical advantage at my expense, now is time you pay the fair price.
2) Are we at the precipice of war?
Singapore went into lock-down on Tuesday, 7 April 2020. We were ahead of the game in the early phase, with people going to work and roaming the streets as if it were normal. We were praised worldwide for our elegant approach to the pandemic. Cases were isolated, closely traced and monitored, which engendered confidence of control.
Around mid-March and early April, it emerged that things were worse than it seemed. First, infected overseas returnees brought a wave of bad news. This was followed by the surfacing of foreign laborer clusters. Soon, it became apparent that the severity of the epidemic has escalated. The country shut down to enter into what it calls a Circuit Breaker phase. In effect, it is a soft lock-down, with only limited types of movement permitted. New restrictions are being introduced on daily basis since the start of the Circuit Breaker.
Commercial buildings are deserted and forlorn. Hotels close, shrouded in darkness. The MBS casino that overlooks the Singapore river is a canvas of black, which has never happened and we hope never to see again. Streets are empty, with the number of flouters even fewer than what can realistically be expected. In contrast, private homes hum with life, with the windows of residential buildings glowing in various hues of orange, yellow and white. I have never seen a scene like this in my lifetime. An ominous undercurrent stalks the awful quiet that we have descended into.
My home is well-positioned on a high floor that offers 270-degrees view of the western part of the country. I bought the place exactly because of its high perch, yet I have never ever bothered to soak in the view. Now, under house arrest like the rest of my country, for the first time ever I truly stopped to watch. I sat by the floor to ceiling window, observing the traffic on the Ayer Rajah expressway with keen interest in the traffic volume in times of shut-down. I see cars on the road at 1 am in the morning. Where, I asked myself, are these people going? Other people's lives have always fascinated me. Now, this attitude is colored by sadness. The sight of every empty public bus stirs up unease in me.
I live in a state of chronic low-level anxiety. Reading the news and following forums fill me with alternating pangs of dismay and indignation, but I continue to obsess ceaselessly about the latest developments. I feel helpless as I am buffeted by the tidal forces of global change. Will the world devolve into a Cold War over the Covid19 pandemic, or worse things that shall not be spoken? What kind of political and economic change will this pandemic unleash on me, on us?
3) Out of sight, out of mind
It is during these times when one realises that such a huge majority of things we do is in order to be seen. Being vain by nature, I enjoy fantasizing about clothes and shoes and bags, cosmetics and skincare products and facial treatments. I enjoy dressing up, being out of the house and going to town. But now that we are all under house arrest, none of these things matter.
I told my dermatologist that I would be deferring a treatment. Why, I told him, should I glam up when there is no one to look at me during this terrible season? This pithy rhetoric is so coldly cynical yet throbbing with truth. Glamour ceases to be when the audience recedes; those who chase glamour are destitute when eyes turn away.
4) My little investment portfolio
I have built up a little portfolio over the past months which has contracted in value as the global stock market took a plunge. Every single investor out there has been similarly impacted - we are all in this together. I am not extremely disturbed, but my assumptions about the definition of long term has been shaken. Life is long, the world is big, who is to say that assumptions stay? Yet, assumptions are all we have, with our only mitigation being a concurrent consciousness that assumptions can be overturned anytime.
I am trying to stay sane by giving myself as much structure as I can; I am not ready to aim for upbeat, sanity is all I ask for at this moment.
But my mind is a stray beast with an appetite for news of gloom and doom. And this stray beast thrives in an atmosphere of physical isolation.
What will become of me in the days to come, of us, of Singapore, of this world?
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