There have been questions around the circumstances surrounding my suicide attempt in 2011, and I hope to clear them here.
As I've shared, just before I attempted suicide, I had worked as a security guard for a few days. What happened then? How did I, a graduate from NTU, end up as a security guard? I'll start with what happened then, because the cause originates from back when I was in Dunman High, my secondary school. Being a SAP school, Dunman High was a meritocratic ideal. We were literally drilled with exercises and exhortations to study harder and memorise more or just simply jia you. When I worked as a security guard, these meritocratic ideals returned in full force through schizophrenic voices questioning my abilities as a graduate from a university, to the extent that my worth as a human being was attacked, because stupid people shouldn't be kept alive and should just go and die. Why do I have such a deep impression of stupid people dying? When I was in Dunman High, after my last school examinations, I was ranked last in class. This would mean I'm the lousiest in class with no hope of proceeding to a good Junior College. How do you think I would feel after struggling for 4 years in a meritocratic institution, trying to memorise every shred of knowledge I'm supposed to? Above all, after I received word of my ranking, all the social support from the teachers seemed to just disappear. No one offered me any help. It's just like I've fallen off a cliff. Of course, this sounds just like suicide.
And of course, now the question is how on earth did I, a graduate from NTU, end up as a security guard? If you are patient enough, you can read my career history from 2001 to 2024:
https://medium.com/@maxloopinmok/about
In summary, I went through almost 26 jobs in 24 years! Why did this happened? The reason only just occurred to me. After the first institutional devil of Dunman High, the second institutional devil turned out to be my University NTU. How could this be a devil? Simply put, the NTU institution is an outcast in terms of location, such that I had to join school and hostel activities in order to have the convenience of staying in a hostel in NTU, so that I do not have to travel everyday from one end of the Singapore island to the other end. My stay in the hostel depends on the number of points I get from these activities, and so, I was misled into giving my all to acquire more and more points, such that I did not spend much time on my school work. Even though I eventually got a second lower Honours degree, what I had gone through did not prepare me for working life. After I graduated, I did not even know what job I wanted to look for and simply applied for anything that catches my eye. Am I really a graduate? Or had I been confused by what I had tried to memorise without understanding in NTU, especially when there was no career support forthcoming during my days in NTU? This was the prime reason why I eventually ended up as a security guard.
I've heard that we have new educational systems in place already, so what I went through should not recur. Will the current education system confuse current students more when different subjects are taught in a way similar to the modular system in the Universities? With the woke culture currently trending in the world, the question should be whether governments are willing to sufficiently support the weak in our society when they realise that they are the weakest in society. It may be easy to blame the strawberry generation, but strawberries are strawberries, no matter how you try to dress it up and fake it.