Recently I have come across many of Simon Squibb’s Instagram reels, where he interviews people on the streets, asking them what their dreams are. Most of the time, they talk about starting some form of business ventures. But I don’t know. Is that really a dream?
Simon is an entrepreneur, and I respect him for what he does. It’s a good thing to encourage people to build something of their own. I don’t see anything wrong with that.
Except my dream was never to do any modern jobs. My dream is to live. It’s to love and be loved. I want to live as close to Mother Nature as possible. I want to fulfil each layer of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
The fact that we see a surge in the number of people starting side hustles and wanting to be entrepreneurs shows that society is sick. It’s spiralling out of control, down a bottomless crevasse of decline and instability.
The system is collapsing. Why must people go above and beyond just to live a basic life? Why must everyone be so creative and entrepreneurial just to put food on the table?
Have you ever gone on a walk in the woods? The squirrels just forage what they can find, and nibble away at the acorns. When they are full, they don’t hoard the rest of the acorns. Instead they rest and play.
In a previous post, I said that we should create a society where even the lowest ranking members can lead fulfilling and meaningful lives. That to me is way more important than creating a dozen more entrepreneurs.
Perhaps the loss of tight-knit communities has made it impossible to solve this problem. Governments are bound to fail because of the sheer size of the population. There are too many voices to be heard, too many stakeholders to listen to.
Nothing truly gets done. We are all too busy with our own lives, doing what we can to outcompete others.
But that’s exactly the problem. We are raising the bar just to achieve a fraction of what our ancestors were rewarded with. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze anymore.
Here’s an example.
Back then you could just work as a maths tutor by having a simple CV and posting about your services on platforms like Facebook. Now every other high school student and university graduate has vibe-coded entire landing pages to pitch their tutoring services to parents.
Come on now. It’s just high school maths we are teaching. Why are we overcomplicating it?
Do we realise how much mental labour is wasted in building the scaffolding around a tutoring service? But if one person does it, they have an edge. So everyone must start doing it or they risk falling behind, so we are back at stage 0, except we have all wasted time and energy.
And trust me, I absolutely know that there isn’t much to tutoring in maths. It only seems that way to some because of information asymmetry between the tutors and the parents.
Tutors and society over-emphasise the importance of getting a good grade in mathematics, which I have explained time and time again to be not true. Parents, especially the ones that are gullible, don’t know this. They think one must need a ‘qualified examiner’ to teach their children maths.
The thing is, parents are better off spending that money on providing good nutrition for their kids than maths tutoring. And they should understand that any standard textbook is more than enough for any children to succeed in the exams, provided they have the right amount of intelligence and are willing to put in the right level of effort.
Anyway, I am going on a tangent here but if you get it, you will get it.
I always hold the philosophy that the phrase ‘dream job’ is an oxymoron.
No one dreams of working. No one truly wants to work, that’s why you get paid. Because you are doing something you wouldn’t normally do unless you are getting paid.
We should work so that we can live. We shouldn’t live for work. Society glamorising hustle culture is a critical wound, and we must find ways to apply a tourniquet to it as soon as possible.
We have been bleeding for a while, and before long, we will reach a point of no return.
Therefore, one of my dreams for humanity is to help patch that wound, so that even the lowest ranking members can lead fulfilling and meaningful lives.
Other than that, I want to go on a voyage to the uncharted islands, and defeat the heinous sea monsters. And perhaps I will unearth the hidden treasures and Easter eggs along the way. Above all, I so deeply long to do that with someone I can confide in, and with whom ultimately create little versions of ourselves.
That’s my dream. Thank you.
