Hey Soul Sister

Hey, hey, hey

Your lipstick stains on the front lobe of my left side brains
I knew I wouldn't forget you, and so I went and let you blow my mind
Your sweet moon beam, the smell of you in every single dream I dream
I knew when we collided, you're the one I have decided who's one of my kind

Hey soul sister, ain't that Mr. Mister on the radio, stereo, the way you move ain't fair, you know!
Hey soul sister, I don't want to miss a single thing you do...tonight
Hey, hey,hey.....

Just in time, I'm so glad you have a one-track mind like me
You gave my life direction, a game show love connection we can't deny
I'm so obsessed, my heart is bound to beat right out my untrimmed chest
I believe in you, like a virgin, you're Madonna, and I'm always gonna wanna blow your mind

Hey soul sister, ain't that Mr. Mister on the radio, stereo, the way you move ain't fair, you know!
Hey soul sister, I don't want to miss a single thing you do...tonight

The way you can cut a rug, watching you's the only drug I need
You're so gangsta, I'm so thug, you're the only one I'm dreaming of
You see, I can be myself now finally, in fact there's nothing I can't be
I want the world to see you be with me

Hey soul sister, ain't that Mr. Mister on the radio, stereo, the way you move ain't fair, you know!
Hey soul sister, I don't want to miss a single thing you do tonight,
Hey soul sister, I don't want to miss a single thing you do...tonight
Hey, hey,hey....tonight
Hey, hey,hey.....
Tonight

Project Baby Week 16: The Mad Xmas Rush

It's the week before Xmas and I have presents to buy and errands to run before our flight next week.  Not to mention things to get for the bitter cold in Germany - stockings for example, thick ones!  I have had to shop reluctantly for stuff that fits my burgeoning mid-section (jeans and pants no longer fasten without making me look like a twisty doughnut) and last week I spent 2 hours going through my closet doing an inventory of what I need to survive winter and the Alps.   

Speaking of clothes, here's stuff from H&M's new Spring/Summer 2011, perfect for me when I'm packing the extra kilos next year. But H&M is only coming to Singapore the second half of 2011 so I am hoping the one at Koblenz or Frankfurt (Daniel, take note) decides to carry the new collection. Oh, and horror or horrors, I am now officially a size 10. Both above and below!

Monday we have another visit to the doc to have a peek at JuJu. Sometimes I feel so normal that I forget he's there. But then I have to gag from the acid reflux and sigh, I remember again. I still have to regulate my liquid intake very carefully, otherwise too much liquid too fast makes me gag and vomit. Totally gross.

I now suffer acute pain in my lower back, right behind my uterus, and it shoots out like a spray of torture bullets whenever I have to get up from a lying down position. Slumping on the sofa causes it too and the only thing that alleviates it somewhat is sleeping on my side. I have to ask the doc about this cos I am now packing only an extra 3 kg, by the time I am over 10kgs I might have to roll around in a wheelchair.

All I can say is this kid better be worth it!

How To Be Happy

On Sunday, I finished reading this book by Jonathan Haidt. In it, he tells us about a lot of good research done in the fields of psychology, sociology and economics which discovered what made people feel happy or gave them a sense of well-being and purpose. He also talked about what he had discovered in his own research on morality. Since Sunday, I have been hit non-stop by many ideas, thoughts and snapshots of all the things that have happened to me, the things I have learnt and the things I've talked about with people in the last 10 years. I was so excited, I wrote an email to my brother-in-law, Tobi, but still I had so many ideas and things to SAY.

This (long) post is about how I plan to become a happier person, and why it is so important for everyone to try to do it, at some point in their lives. I will divide it into two parts: THEN and NOW.

Then:

Some years ago, in 2007, I bought The Happiness Hypothesis while browsing at Kinokuniya bookstore. I read two chapters then I never finished it, it sat on my shelf till last week. I didn't finish the book then probably because I wasn't that interested in how to be happy and what scientists have to say about it. Ironically, I was in a most unhappy time of my life: i was just recovering from a terrible breakup of a 4 year relationship; I was in distress that I would never finish my graduate thesis (I had been working on my Masters research for 3 years); a good friend had destroyed our trust and ten-year friendship and it would be another two years before I learnt that she had betrayed me in the worst, imaginable way; a combination of the above, mistrust and misunderstanding had caused my father and I to be estranged, and it would be 3 more years before we would start communicating again. 

Many studies have shown that adversity helps people become more resilient and thereby more capable of being happy even in difficult circumstances. In other words, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger (and by extension, happier).  I certainly have had my share of misery. But don't get me wrong, my project to become a better person started way before my adulthood. Being "happy" is something anyone ruminates over at some point, and I was certainly put to the test as a teenager grappling with self-esteem issues and later as a young adult struggling with constructing a "positive" identity and self-image. You see, I have a pair of the most cantankerous, negative parents anyone could have - they are cynical, risk averse and not quite open to new things and ideas that challenge their worldview. I do not blame them for bad parenting, in fact, they gave me some of my best attributes: prudence, skepticism and realism.  It's just that whatever it took to overcome my negativity and depression, I had to look for within myself.

When I was 18, I decided to become a "happy and confident person", yes, just like that! So I ditched my glassed for contact lenses, forced myself to get busy with activities in university and avoided my friend who for the past 3 years had done nothing but talk about herself and complain about other people. As soon as I did all that, I began to feel different. As I made new friends and started new plans, I became more confident of myself and that was maybe how I met my first boyfriend who, at that time, was everything I wanted in a boyfriend - goodlooking, sporty and popular.  Of course he was about as deep as a bottlecap, but at 19, you don't really concern yourself about the intellectual aspect of your relationship. I would regret this in years to come, but that's for another discussion.

I was sure I had succeeded at being happy and I had solved the equation to ending all depressiveness. I was wrong.  By 22, my relationship ended, I wanted to kill myself and every day I embarked on self-destructive behaviour (smoking, promiscuity) in order to validate the hate I had for myself and my deficiencies. Through sheer reason and self-will, I decided again to be a better person - out of spite. I would become strong again (confident and happy), successful (get a Masters degree) and special to someone worthier. And I did all that, in fact I did it so well that at 27 I almost went on to do my PhD, almost got married and almost ruined the rest of my life.

Like the Battlestar Galactica rollercoaster on Sentosa, I felt my emotional life spiralling out of control and plunge into hell yet again. I had shown potential academically: I was doing "serious" research in mental health (compared to some of my classmates, I thought condescendingly then), had the opportunity to co-write and publish papers in a psychiatric journal with notable professors at the NUS Medical School, I enjoyed being a teaching assistant and the feedback from my Sociology students reflected my capabilities and popularity every semester, and I was learning like never before, my mind was literally burst open and absorbing like a sponge those years in graduate school. I thought I could do it, that maybe intellectually, I had what it took to be a real researcher, to pursue and produce knowledge, to inspire and teach others.  Emotionally I was a complete fatality when it came to making the ultimate choice -- what do you do when you realise you do not love your fiance the way he loves you, that you cannot be faithful to him and you might find happiness with someone else?

I handled that very badly, you might say it was something like the North Korean crisis meets September 11th. So as my world fell apart at 27, I had to again figure out how to be happy, how to fix the mess, and which way to go, because so many things I had thought to be a given (like marriage and career) had been destroyed. It was nothing I could talk to my parents about, few people knew what had truly happened, and I was riddled with shame, guilt, anger, resentment, hurt and despair. As always, I had the help of one or two people who came into my life at the right moment to help me (finishing Masters and graduating) and support me (seeing the positive and moving forward). This time I was done being the victim and I decided to be happy in spite of the chaos that was my broken relationship with my father,  and the shambles of my shortlived academic life.

So I got myself a job just to be financially independent doing what I enjoyed - teaching Sociology - and ended a relationship that was going nowhere (finally I was able to recognise a dead-end when I saw it and quit). I approached relationships with a new vigor, it was like I was a new person, I didn't care about the guy anymore, what HE wanted, what HE expected of me, I did what I wanted, and who I wanted! It was liberating to be thinking about what made me happy and search for things I wanted to do.  Then I met Daniel and I made two risky choices that would change the direction of my life. First, learning from past mistakes, I decided to be with Daniel exclusively even though when I met him, I was seeing someone else and I found myself in another of those damn dilemmas (trust me, having to choose is not better than having no choice at all). Second, I moved out of my parents' and in with Daniel so that I could live the way I wanted (independently) and away from the stress at home (my father).

Little by little, I became happier as I constructed my life in the manner I had always wanted: doing the work I enjoyed, becoming responsible for my survival and loving somebody who loved me as much as he respected the person that I am. We took another risk last year and bought our first apartment together just before the economy rebounded from the recession. I decided then that it was time to fix the last thing that was wrong in my life - me and my father. I must stress it took me almost 4 years to acknowledge that if anyone was going to make the first move, it would have to be me. It isn't something you can just tell me to do (many people have, and failed), it's something I have to be prepared to do. The turning point was us getting married. And I have to thank Daniel for being the bridge between my father and me, it made it easier since my father now accepted Daniel as a bona fide part of our lives and not some ang moh bum I had shacked up with. Daniel still thinks he should get the Nobel Peace Prize, but I reminded him this is the Gaza Strip, not China after Nixon and Deng Xiaoping. There's still a long way to go.

Now:

I said so much about the past because it was a 15 year journey of searching for happiness, coping with adversity and going back again in search of happiness without committing suicide along the way.  I jest of course, my life cannot be worse than any average person's life with so many starving, diseased and wretched people out there more miserable than I've ever been. However, every person is given what he/she is given at birth and throughout life, and each of us has to make the most of it, for better or worse. I had learnt how to overcome bitterness and unhappiness but I had not quite mastered the knack of finding happiness ALL the time. Is it possible?

Many people think it is. People who deem themselves "holy" or "spiritual" think so, you've probably met people who don't seem to live a single unhappy day. I used to pooh pooh such people, I dismissed them as shallow (how else could they escape the depression that thinking brings?) or naive (see previous) or just lucky (they live "charmed" lives and just don't suffer as much adversity as others). I questioned if happiness was an illusion, as the Buddhists say, pain hides joy, joy hides pain, the palm hides the back of your hand, turn it over and it hides the palm - in the end, suffering and happiness are one and the same. The only true state of being that does not leave you dissatisfied is freedom from all states of mind -- Nirvana, ultimate peace. I really believed that there cannot be a lasting sort of happiness or contentment, because when I was "happy" I was mostly in an unthinking state of "flow", and I got a lot of this the past few years just hanging out with my friends, socialising, holidaying, dancing, singing and drinking. But when I wasn't doing all that, I found myself, from time to time, depressed about the shortness, the pointlessness and the meaninglessness of life.

Back to the book, it finally drew all the parts of my experience of life thus far (which I have just described above) into one stream of consciousness, if you will. Haidt drew much of his inspiration from one positive psychologist, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. His name is a mouthful, but what he has to say about "flow", the state of being completely immersed in the task you are doing, be it dancing, working, talking, playing sport, validates everything I have personally learnt and discovered about happiness. He said, "It is the full involvement of flow, rather than happiness, that makes for excellence in life. We can be happy experiencing the passive pleasure of a rested body, warm sunshine, or the contentment of a serene relationship, but this kind of happiness is dependent on favorable external circumstances. The happiness that follows flow is of our own making, and it leads to increasing complexity and growth in consciousness."  If you want a concise article of his ideas about finding flow, go to http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199707/finding-flow.

Haidt wrote that to be happy one must have love (positive, rewarding relationships) as well as to do work that one truly enjoys and finds purpose in doing. He said that in the latter one can experience Csikszentmihalyi's "flow", and the third ingredient is "spirituality" - the awareness and feeling of something greater than oneself. Some like to call it "god", some like "universe", I personally have not been awed or awestruck by a higher power or had some near-death experience (even though I wanted to be dead at times) resulting in some born-again experience. But I believe his results and research have a point to make about people being happier when they experience this, that's why mega churches that sing, sway and chant do so well, and people who meditate are so much calmer and at peace. But at moments, I do feel this sense of awe, of beauty that is pure and....good. It's when I happen to look up at the trees swaying under an azure sky, and when I look at a particular portrait or landscape (it's like the painter painted an emotion or feeling state into his canvas and pow, I saw/felt it).

So the plan to be happy as much as possible starts here. Rather than focus on the things I want to be rid of (like irritation, and annoying things at work) I am going to do these things whenever I can remember to:

1) Concentrate on whatever I am doing, whether its work (it's not boring, it's not annoying, it's something I can do properly, and properly is how I will do it!) or cooking or washing the dishes. When your mind is focused, it is clear of all nagging, distracting thoughts like how much you dislike what you're doing, and how you wish you were having a nap or at lunch. You make fewer mistakes because your mind is calm and uncluttered and in the end, you might get "flow" because you are so absorbed in it. Time passes faster and soon you're finished.

2) Build and nurture the good relationships I have now, and fix the not-so-good ones. All relationships are important, be they personal ones or social ones, my newest one would be with my kid - the ultimate rewarding relationship!

3) Find the time to do some of the things I have enjoyed in the past - playing the piano, reading (I do it plenty nowadays and it HAS made me happier) and painting (this one is harder cos I work with pastels and it's messy and I have no room in the apartment for my easel and tools). Cooking is really therapeutic when I don't see it as a tiresome chore, especially at 7pm after a long day at work.

4) Do something for others. Volunteering has been shown to boost one's health, well-being and suppress depression. It's hard to find a cause to volunteer for, what with all the things competing for our time and attention during our rare slices of spare time, but I will search for something to do just for the sake of helping someone else out or improving the life of someone else in a small way.

So that's how I think one can start being a happier person. Not by comparing yourself to people worse off than you, or by trying to change bad habits or things you don't like in your life. I've never before tried to focus on the good, positive and rewarding things life has to offer because I spent so much of my life eradicating negativity, rising above misery and failure, and avoiding things I considered "bad" for me. It's time for a new perspective, and now that I am 31, being happy is my new project.

What Babies REALLY Say About The Economy And Society

When my mother-in-law realised that I was going to go back to work as usual (on a 5-day, 8 hour work week) after my mandatory 4 months maternity leave, she was mortified.  It is a pedestrian norm for a new mother in Germany to work part-time where she used to be a full-time employee and practically taboo to chuck your infant in a day-care centre.  Daniel and I found ourselves having to justify my returning to full-time work - we needed the money, we said - but this has been bugging me since: how convinced am I that we "need" the money? I have been conscientiously keeping tabs on my finances, I just took out a new insurance plan with an investment component I barely understand and I take a highly circumspect view of spending. Yet I have not always been a squirrel where cash is concerned.  I began thinking about savings and retirement and oh-my-god-how much money I don't have only after Daniel and I took on a mortgage and got pregnant. All very typical of your stage-in-life of course. We are in our early 30s.

Singapore has the dubious honour of having the third lowest fertility rate (TFR) in the world after Hong Kong and South Korea and a population that is ageing faster than blue cheese in the open. For the past 25 or so years, Singaporeans and its Government have been gripped in national soul-searching, finger-pointing and a blame-game on every purported culprit and proposed solution to the birth dearth. One thing has remained constant -- we still ain't producing babies.

On the part of Government, I give them points for being pro-active and responsive to social changes as many policies have been tweaked and introduced to improve the societal and workplace support for people who have kids over the last few decades. I have it much better than my mother did in the 80s, where she only got 2 months' paid maternity and no child-care or domestic-helper subsidy, yet the tragic thing is, nothing has improved where it should have improved -- our TFR.

Today, I hear a new set of gripes and alleged causes of the low TFR, mostly from well-educated women. They whinge mostly about

- the high financial cost of having one or more children  (drain on their resources);

- the high personal cost to their freedom, mobility and potentially earned resources (there is a curious phenomena of middle-class women giving up their well-paid jobs to become stay-home-mums, which I will discuss under the "Helicopter Parent Problem later in this essay);

- the lack of state support (even though we have one of the best sets of maternity policies in place compared to the ones in other East Asian countries and even some EU countries, people now compare ours to those of Scandinavia, proving once again that nothing is good enough for this nation of whingers);

- the lack of workplace support, i,e, long working hours (again, relative to only certain countries in the EU, which is not representative of Europe and the U.S as a whole).

None of the above is a direct cause to get Government worried about, because these gripes belie actually more endemic and systemic root problems. The French system targets number three and to some degree, number four, and people think that is a panacea for your birth dearth. Not true, French society and their economic and taxation systems are very different from ours and these have something to do with French success with their TFR.  Let me attempt to put all of that in some sort of sociological and economic perspective because each needs to be weighed in the context of Singaporean as well as global realities. My point is: the tendency of a population as a whole to have babies (one or more or not at all) tells us a LOT about its economic and social values. Therefore, if you want to get someone to make 2.1 babies, you don't throw money at them nor do you start giving out free this and free that.

1) It's not money, stupid, it's mobility
When people lament the financial cost of having babies, they are calculating what they perceive as necessary in comparison with a default norm.  This is totally mental, but systemic, going by the billion-dollar industry that thrives on children's health, education and "intellectual" needs. Half of all Singaporeans live with a monthly household income of under S$4000, the majority of this group does not pay any income tax because they make less than S$22,000 a year, living under what most developed nations would call the poverty line. Yet they have more children than the middle class that earns between $4000 and $10,000 that make up the 50th to 80th percentile of household incomes in Singapore.

Point: poorer people do not have fewer children because it would cost them more to raise each kid. They do the exact opposite. Relatively wealthier people have fewer children (even though comparatively they have more resources) because they perceive the drain on their resources where the former group does not. Why?
 

1.1) The Keeping-Up-With-The-Joneses Problem
Robert Frank, the economist, summed it up perfectly when he told us that given a choice, people would prefer to earn $80,000 while all their neighbours and friends earned $70,000 rather than earn $100,000 while people around them earned $110,000. Honest. I'll tell you why this is important to a population officer in our yet-to-justify-its-existence National Population Secretariat: upward mobility.

Upward mobility is the desire (or the ability) to enter the class above your own, and upward generational mobility is the ability to move into the class above your parents'.  To this end, Singaporeans have literally soared upwards during our industrial boom in the 1980s. People don't want to do as well or have as much as their neighbours, they want to have MORE. Not a lot more, just slightly. Now, if your friends started trading in their Toyotas for Audis, you would look at your Toyota and start feeling a little dissatisfied. If all of them enrolled their kids in Montessori, Mindchamps or one of the thousands of private childcare and playgroup centres offering bogus programmes designed to "nurture a genius", you would have to look very far and dig very deep to be happy sending Junior to the PAP Kindergarten. Consumption can be conspicuous (car, property) or inconspicuous (education & insurance plans, holidays and tuition classes) but both forms of consumption stem from a relative desire to be equal or better off than your peers.

I'm talking about the Middle Class that has really every financial ability to pay for 2 children's food, basic education but choose instead to perceive otherwise because they are comparing themselves to an artificially constructed Middle Class Lie that their children require this extra music class and that 9 day holiday to Hokkaido and Disneyland. Throw in a hyper-consumerist culture (open any newspaper and you will find on every other page a spanking advertisement for a newly-launched designer condominium that costs an average of $1.2 million and the latest Mercedes, BMW or Audi) that pervades EVERY stratum of society, yes, this is not only a Middle Class Problem, but an entire society problem, and you understand why people count dollars where their grandparents never used to. The "needs" of today are really the luxuries of yesterday.

A word about the working class: they are not immune to keeping up with the Joneses either. Our post-industrial, consumerist culture survives on people not being happy with what they have currently. If you can't afford a car, your aspiration is to own a little Hyundai or Kia. To hell with the over-extended public transport with its inefficiencies and high costs. If you currently drive a Honda or Toyota, you aspire to drive a VW or a nice Lexus SUV. If you have been living in a 5 room HDB flat and your friends have been selling theirs and flinging their small profits into a private condominium that comes with a half-million dollar mortgage, you would be putting your flat on the market as well. If you wanted all these things, what would you have to give up in order to pay for a second child?

It's not money stupid. You don't give these people a Baby Bonus (of $4000) for doing what their natural instincts are urging them to do anyway. You take away the pressures that stymie and repress these natural urges to have a baby.You do something about a mass media that celebrates millionaires and glorifies consumerist lifestyles. Aha....but you don't want to compromise consumption or GDP growth. So you throw a few grand at each family and pretend to be perplexed by why they still aren't biting. Gimme a break.

1.2) The Helicopter Parent Problem

In America, there is a curious yet real trend of middle class parents (especially mothers) of being pathologically involved in every aspect of their children's existence -- school, hobbies, friends, diet. Sociologists have named them Helicopter Parents. Helicopter parenting is not novel to Singaporeans, it afflicts the middle class working mother more than anyone because she is educated and aspires for her children to be upwardly mobile (see 1.1). Therefore, she views parenting as not a mere role (like working or supporting your parents) but an entire career. Every minuscule development of the child becomes her obsession and she is devoted to every single aspect of the child's life, sometimes stiflingly so. The child's perceived successes  or failures are frighteningly attributed to her own abilities to control and "nurture" them.

What this means for our Population Officer friend is an increasing proportion of parents tallying up a hefty personal cost to their time and energies on top of an already bloated account deficit owed to conspicuous consumption. So when women weigh the costs and benefits of having a child, they now factor in the cost of giving up their jobs to be a stay-at-home helicopter mum. Of course not everyone subscribes to the helicopter way, I must be exaggerating, you scoff. Granted, I have no data to elucidate how many women give up their jobs or think they have to in order to be a "good mother", but going by the pervasiveness of substitutes for good parenting -- I'm referring to tuition centers, enrichment courses, full-time maids, sales of computers,  iPads and other "enriching" toys for kids -- you cannot doubt that the modern parent makes parenting out to be more costly than it ever was in the 20th century.

1.3) The Every-Man-For-Himself Problem

The third argument I make for social mobility being the cause of a low TFR (and not financial cost) is ironically enough our antagonistic relationship with welfarism. Just about every Singaporean from inception is taught that there is no free meal, no handout without strings and absolutely nobody out there who owes us a living no matter come hell, damnation, war or disease. Full stop. There is no unemployment benefit, no minimum wage, no universal health coverage or affordable comprehensive health insurance (state-health insurance is paid for by your own income and is not comprehensive), no pensions or retirement benefit (you pay for your own retirement with your own income into a state-run fund called the CPF)at 4% interest).  Since the Great Brief Recession of 2007-08, Government has grudgingly designed a welfare system with more brakes in it than a Universal Studios rollercoaster. People depend mostly on voluntary welfare organisations and civil charities for assistance, particularly for health-related needs like dialysis and hospice care. State medical facilities are subsidised but not free and neither is education. If you are impressed by our almost universal home-ownership rate, I'll tell you that public housing is subsidised but costs more than private housing in many of the world's most developed cities. How do we pay for all this? How do we live on a median monthly household income of S$4000 before tax and still consume conspicuously, you ask?

By having a pretty healthy savings rate. In a recent survey by HSBC, 31% polled said they are saving for early retirement (early retirement is another curious Singaporean aspiration that puts more pressure on resource accruance and hence cost of raising a child); 67% say their savings plans are a top source of retirement funds; and the top 3 financial products people own are medical insurance, life insurance and cash in decreasing order. Singaporeans are a pretty anxious lot. 

We cannot live like the Europeans, taking annual 6 week holidays and working part time, or spend 120% of our incomes like the Americans because NOBODY IS GOING TO PAY FOR OUR RETIREMENT.  Am I indicting our social safety net or rather lack thereof? Not really. Europe and America are going bankrupt partly because what they are currently producing can no longer sustain what they have promised to provide  people when they age or fall sick. The system we have here is more robust and sustainable, but the consequence for the TFR is an entrenched social value of non-dependency on the state (laughable since Singaporeans have been called the saddest bunch of spoiled brats mollycoddled by their nanny-state) in terms of what people expect to get from the Government. 

Again, let us view this value as a gradation relative to the lower to upper social classes. Insecurity plagues everyone, but I would bet that the higher you go, up to a certain point where financial insecurity tapers off once you hit a certain income level, the more insecure you become of maintaining a certain lifestyle you have attained (again, see 1.1). If there is something that must go hand-in-hand with upward mobility, it's the fear of status degradation -- falling below the class you are currently in. I would hate to have to move into a smaller place in a less wealthy neighbourhood, drive a Korean car where I used to drive a European one or worse, take only one vacationn a year.  In a population of insecure individuals, ever worried about losing their status and acquired lifestyles once they hit retirement, every birth to their family has to be weighed against the cost of their savings and retirement fund.

Aha, but you do not want to foster a "Crutch Mentality" by giving handouts to the unemployed, god forbid we have lazy people who don't want to work squandering away taxpayers' money like the bums in the US and Europe. We don't want to increase taxes either, otherwise all the Americans and Europeans would not want to bring their businesses here and nobody would want to come to Singapore to work - we are, after all, the next tax-haven after Switzerland. An insecure population that doesn't breed is preferred to a lazy one with a  national current account deficit.

2) It's not money, stupid, it's housework

My second thesis against the assumption that financial cost hinders people giving birth is the gender problem. You got it, unequal pay, unequal expectations and all that. Wait, I am no feminist even though I have been lambasting society and the establishment forever on this issue of inequality. Women are expected to do the housework and raising of children despite being an equal contributer to household income. Men do not get paternity leave, which does nothing to change the idea that men's main responsibility is to be the breadwinner. In a toss-up between who should give up their job to be the helicopter stay-at-home parent, it is invariably the woman (there are exceptions but because they are exceptions, they are not worth talking about).

Given this, does anyone realistically expect a highly educated woman whose income enables her and her husband to live the hyperconsumerist, upwardly-mobile (see 1.1 and 1.3) lifestyle to have babies that will exert a perceived cost to overall well-being (see 1.1, 1.2, 1.3)? People don't fight over money, they fight over whom is going to do the housework so that nobody has to stop making money in order to do it, and whom is going to look after Junior so that nobody has to stop making money in order to do it.

2.1) The Division of Labour Problem (gender, maids, nuclear fams)

The Government is not stupid on this one.  That's why we have one of the highest rates of dependency on domestic foreign labour in the world. Poor Indonesian, Filipina and Burmese women clean our houses, bathe our elderly and raise our children while husband and wife work 8 to 12 hour days making an income that isn't even on par with the average American household. Hell, Americans make more money than we do without having to pay for third world domestic help. That is because a) families perceive they can live on one income and b) women there do everything and I mean everything themselves. And c) putting your elderly parent in a nursing home is not a crime punishable by ostracism and shame.

If half of all Singaporeans require dual incomes to meet their survival needs (remember our median household income) then the other half of dual income families believe they need two incomes to meet their consumption needs (see 1.1). If everybody up to the 70th percentile were content to live in a $150,000 public-funded apartment, we would not have a booming property market with steady 10% annual growth. On the other hand, we would also have nobody complaining they cannot live on a single income of S$3500 to S$5000. So half of the problem is economic in nature - people want their nice houses and cars and holidays and designer kitchens - and the other half is societal. Who is going to do the work at home? 

Middle class Singaporean women are not happy having foreign domestic helpers raising their children, yet they can't bring themselves to live in a 4-room, 10 year old flat either. Singaporean women would rather do the child caring themselves than leave it to an unprofessional "professional" child-minder, yet they can't bring themselves to give up one of their two cars and spend less on one income. Singaporean women would love to have that second or third child, but they can't bring themselves to snub their next promotion to a senior management position by taking a year off to raise the kids. Why should they, their husbands are not more qualified or more capable than they are! 

Again, Population Officer, you don't throw in an additional month of maternity leave and pretend that men are not part of the equation when it comes to raising a family. 6 months of paid maternity leave, more"tax rebates" or childcare subsidies will not change people's minds about having one or two more kids. The only thing you accomplish is to reinforce the idea that women still have to do the domestic work, you continue to keep mothers in an intolerable work system that demands long hours and you do nothing to change women's minds about accepting this system. 

If women believe that they can work fewer hours - flexible and part time work - this solves problem 1.2. If men started taking paid paternity leave (say, 3 months while their wives took the other 3), women would not feel like they are targets of gender discrimination or the glass ceiling, which in turn helps them make choices at work to support having another child. If families believed they could be happy on one income - this means Government has to do something about problem 1.1 and 1.3 through policy - they would consider having more children.

3) It's not money, stupid, it's quality time

Finally, no amount of money can pay for the time lost with your child while you are out there in some office crunching numbers or shuffling papers. People don't want to subcontract their parenting duties to third-world labour, as I said in point 2, they do it because they THINK they HAVE TO, as I showed in point 1. It's a dismal, laughable reality, and it's because we like our economic growth and buying new, shiny things so that we can keep up with our friends and colleagues.

3.1) The Productivity-Productive Problem

Singaporeans are not the most productive people around.  Yet we obsess over it. We have long work hours that don't amount to much real value add. Work can be done in half the time, if you look at the way people behave in offices and around the water cooler and pantry. So if you paid someone the same wages, and you let her say, leave 2 hours early or come 2 hours later as long as her work is done and she does not cause inconvenience to her teammates or project, why don't you do it? If a person left work at 6pm on the dot while all his colleagues left at 8pm because they wanted to show their boss (who leaves at 7.45pm) they worked long hours, pretty soon he is going to start staying at work till 8pm. It's wasteful and stupid. 

But Singaporeans do it. Out of social pressure, insecurity, personal ambitions, you name it. While the employer is to some extent responsible for much of the wastefulness and unproductive use of time and resources, the individual Singaporean is too caught up with his own personal needs (see 1.1 and 1.3) to think collectively as a group of workers. You don't have to strike or protest for better working hours and pay, all you need to do is pick an organisation and employer who is reasonable enough about productivity and working hours. If everyone boycotted companies with poor work-life balance, you wouldn't have many companies who can succeed with their existing poor conditions. But people will always aspire to more earnings, higher status and therefore, employers have no incentive to design more productive work systems.

So there you go. It's not really the real net cost of raising a child that has depressed our national birth rate the last 20 years. It isn't even the cost of living or the cost of working (long hours, no quality time), It is the way people behave in relation to other people, what they see as necessary to living a good life, having a secure retirement and being a Good Parent - and all this is flexible and changeble because these needs are as artificially created as the colouring on your ice-cream. 

But changing some of these fundamentals like economic growth and the paternalistic society comes at a cost that people do not want to bear. What then?

How should I know? Do I look like the Prime Minister or his bunch of overpaid millionaire ministers who claim they are the best people to lead this country?

Vacation

Snow, snow, snow.

There will be an abundance of it, and even more when we are in the mountains for wintersport. This is where we will be for Xmas. How do people with no body fat survive? With thick socks and a lot of vodka apparantly.

Except the only things I will be drinking will be devoid of alcohol. Oh snap.

Still, on the scale of all things, there is much to rejoice about in spite of the sub-zero temperature:

• Seeing the family again
• Eating
• Friends
• Looking more pregnant than chubby?
• Cheese
• No housework for 3 weeks
• No aircon for 3 weeks (I think being in 19 degree air-conditioning is 10x worse than being in 0 degree weather)
• Cheese

Lights

The Marina Bay Sands

The Singapore Flyer in the distance

Marina Barrage

Project Baby: Week 15 - Hallo Julien

So finally I am starting to chronicle my - our - latest project: Baby. I am 15 weeks pregnant this week and it has taken me this long to write about it because I have been in the toilet bowl and the darkest, most miserable recesses of my mind since week 7. Coming out of the worst phases of my first trimester, I am pleased to announce that Baby is doing alright, meaning all tests and scans so far are normal, much to my and Daniel's relief. The other thing is - you guessed it - Baby looks like a boy. The doc would not committ 100%, but he was as surprised as we were during our 13th week scan to see a little dangly bit between Baby's legs. So Julien, he will be, until he or she proves otherwise.

Week 4 - September
I was deliriously happy to see two lines on the test stick! In fact, it was only the 4th month we had "tried" to get pregnant, and rather half-heartedly too, because I had to go to India for work (3 weeks) in October and we had purposely chosen a "safe" window to have our Quality Time....but oh my, looks like the reason we had not gotten lucky the past 3 months was because the online ovulation calculator had timed my ovulation a week early and we had been doing it the wrong time all the while! But we were in the club now, and India was out. So off we went to our first Ob/gyn appointment, had a scan and then got married! (this one we planned since June.)

Week 5 to 6 - Spotting
Being pregnant was just fine, I didn't feel any different and I wondered if I was gonna be one of the lucky few who could get away with no morning sickness. My Mum disabused me of that soon enough, she said hers came at week 6 and lasted till week 12. In week 6 I started getting some spotting and the doc checked me over - all seemed okay. He put me on progesterone to boost the development of the fetus. The bleeding went away in a few days.

Week 7 - All day sickness
It finally came. Like a recurrent nightmare happening ALL THE TIME. I was crawling around in bed, scrunched up on the floor in my cubicle, running to the toilet bowl every 2 hours and swearing I would NEVER again have a baby. It's not just the nausea, vomiting and all-day bloatedness that is bad, your whole mental state becomes that of a depressive patient. When I was not shouting at people on the phone, I was thinking of ending it all, period.

Week 8 to 10 - Still all day sickness
Eating too little made me sick, eating too much made me puke. I could not drink any water as it was too bland and tepid and would make me puke. I lived on Yakult, canned green tea, 100 Plus, yoghurt and whatever was on offer at the cafeteria in the mornings. Surprisingly, breakfast was the only meal that didn't kill me after ingesting it. I didn't want to go to work because I didn't feel like getting dressed, doing my face and being in the bloody sickening air-conditioning from 8am to 6pm. Pimples were breaking out all over and in the unthinkable places - like my chest! I looked like shit, felt like shit and did not want to go out, see anyone or be anywhere.

Week 11 - Getting better
I didn't have to take the progesterone anymore and the vomiting was easing up to once or twice a day, usually after a big dinner. My food intake was by no means large, in fact eating the same amount as I would normally eat would be too much for me. I didn't snack, just had two small breakfasts most days, and then normal lunch and dinner after that. My pants and skirts were getting tighter but I had only gained 1 kg. Still looked like shit and didn't feel like putting on makeup.

Week 12 to 13 - Stabilised
I finally stopped vomiting, the taste of chewed and semi-processed food was no more! The NT scan went well and all my blood tests came back normal. I gained another 1 kg and started using a safety pin with my pants. I consented to going out and meeting people again (much to Daniel's relief) but the newest adjustment was alcohol abstinence. That really sucks. I still sip Daniel's wine from time to time though.

Week 14 - It's a boy?
The doc said it's likely to be one, but we shall have to look again next time since Baby is still developing his sex organs. Everyone asked me if I was disappointed - I'm not really, I wanted a girl badly, but I am just thankful it's healthy. Besides, Daniel is pleased as punch. At least I can say all the shit on my face is cos of his testosterone runnign around inside me! I burp a lot after ingesting anything, and gagging is now a regular part of my day, it's preferable to puking of course, but still annoying. I live in fear of a urinary tract infection cos of the reduced amount of water I am drinking. It's really frustrating when I can't drink normally and this puts me at UTI risk. My bladder is starting to feel compressed and my belly is sticking out more, even though I don't look at all preggie, said Daniel. All in, I have only gained 3 kg.