After Klopp's departure

Jurgen Klopp is leaving Liverpool. People will talk about him as one of the great Liverpool managers of all time. His place in history is secure. There have been good Liverpool managers in the past. Roy Evans, Gerard Houllier, Rafael Benitez and Brendan Rodgers all managed to mount serious challenges to the league title under their watch. But shortly after, they faded away and their reigns ended with the team going downhill. (Roy Evans was basically fired: he was supposed to be co-manager with Houllier but what was really going on is that his spice boys were being dismantled, and he had to leave in order for Houllier to finish the job.)

I wonder sometimes at what happens when a great manager leaves a club he's successful at. I'm trying to count the number of times it's happened in English football. It was a big thing when Kenny Dalglish left Blackburn, although that was the last time he was ever thought of as a great manager. There was Arsene Wenger, who left as a legend, although his reputation was going downhill because for quite a few years, they weren't able to spend as much as they could have. The failure to win the league in 2016 was a watershed event (and even if they won it that year, they probably wouldn't win again for a long time because that was the start of Man City getting Pep Guardiola and beginning their imperial phase of having a stranglehold on the premier league.

Alex Ferguson actually quit just before the treble winning season, and he also announced that he quit at the beginning of the 2001 season. 2001 was the beginning of his fallow 2001-2006 period, when he was still relatively successful, but only won 1 league title, and during this period, Arsenal, then Chelsea were the top teams in England. But he clawed back the mantle of the greatest team in England with that great champion's league win over Chelsea in 2008. And it was remarkable because that year, Arsenal and Chelsea also had great teams. But Man U and Liverpool were facing the same fate: Liverpool was under the ownership of Hicks and Gillette, who would prove to be lousy owners of the club. And Man U were doing well in spite of the Glazers, who were basically there to strip the club of its assets and capitalise on their popularity.

There was Jose Mourinho, one of the great managers during the first 10 years – maybe even the first 15 years at the top job. He won the UEFA cup and Champions League with Porto, then built Chelsea into a great team whose success would last 15 years. He only lasted 3-4 years during his first stint, but that team would bear his DNA: they were a team that ran on financial steroids, but still saw themselves as underdogs. They had great spirit, but could be emotinally toxic.

Jose Mourinho could only last 3-4 years at a club before he became toxic enough to lose the dressing room. The exception was when he left Chelsea. Apparently his relationship with Abramovich had broken down They had interim managers: Avram Grant did well enough, in spite of his lack of credentials. Guus Hiddink had a great reputation but was never going to be one of the premiership's greatest managers. Ancelotti was a great manager, but he was more of a cup manager, although he did win the league with Chelsea. And Roberto di Matteo happened to be in the right place at the right time to inspire them to win the champion's league.

Chelsea managed to continue their success after Mourinho left because they had a good system in place. The dressing room was good, because the core of their team could always be counted on to provide role models for the team. Mourinho had to go the season after his 2017 league title, because the team was going downhill at an alarming speed, and because he had lost the dressing room. But one wonders if he could have reconstructed another Chelsea team to challenge Man U during Alex Ferguson's last great team, which had Ronaldo and Van Der Sar in it. Because he had gone to Inter Milan and achieved miracles with them again: he took a team that was already winning Serie A every year, to an even greater glory.

That said, the one thing that Mourinho never managed to do was to take a team that he himself had built, and tear it apart and build it back up. Ferguson was very good at this: he built at least 3 different great teams. People wondered if Klopp could do this, because he left Borussia Dortmund when it was going downhill. But he managed to prove that he could rebuild. This team, without Jordan Henderson, Wijnaldum, Mane, Firmano and Fabinho in it, have shown that they can challenge for the league title.

Pep Guardiola does it so seamlessly that you don't notice that there's any discontinuity at all. But of his great 2018 team, Kompany, Sterling, Gundogan, Laporte, Aguero, Fernandinho, Gabriel Jesus and Zinchenko are gone. Cancelo, Mahrez and Benjamin Mendy have come and gone. And I can't think of anybody that they've missed.

Pep Guardiola won league titles every year when he was in charge of Bayern Munich. He was a great manager, but he had only been a great manager when he was working within a great system. He could have primed Barcelona for great success. They had a good youth system. But he left the job after just a few years – the Barcelona - Real Madrid rivalry was too much for him, and as Xavi said, being a Barcelona manager really takes a lot out of you.

Some pundit mentioned that one big factor in this is: did these guys leave a great team behind? Jose Mourinho's Inter Milan were a great team, but also one that was old, and needed to be refreshed. Soon after he left, the chairman Moratti sold the club and the old Inter Milan was gone. Juventus then started their stranglehold on the Serie A.

Alex Ferguson, in spite of his legendary accomplishments, did not leave a great Man U team behind. None of the replacements for his class of 2008 were really up to the mark. He was restricted from buying great players under the Glazers. He was forced to play Wayne Rooney, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes long after they should have retired or stepped down to a mid table team. The last great player he signed was Robin Van Persie, but that was a stop gap to buy himself a league title so that he could go out on a high. He got the last great season that Robin Van Persie had in him.

When he left, not only was he not adequately replaced, but the previous CEO also replaced him. Not only were Man U not able to spend as much as they previously were able to, but they didn't spend it wisely. You can't say that they were stingy when they spent so much on Angel Di Maria, Paul Pogba, Fred, Anthony Martial, Casemiro and Antony. But they didn't buy well. They didn't have a great way of playing football. There were a few good runs, but they always reverted to being mid table.

And they also had managers who were not great. Alex Ferguson left Man United when a great tactical revolution was under way. The game, from Guardiola onwards, was a combination of high possession, pressing and intense tactical discipline. Man United did not master this new game, unlike Klopp's Liverpool, Tuchel's Chelsea or Arteta's Arsenal. They brought in Ralf Rangnick, the inventor of pressing, to try to change things, although he had never proven himself to be a top manager at a top club. What Rangnick did do was to come up with a list of players that could be purchased, and it turned out to be a pretty good list. Erik Ten Hag was more interested in buying back his old players, and unfortunately he has a very mediocre squad now.

Man United could have had a great decade. This was the era of financial fair play, and when they were still the most popular club in the world, they could have outspent anyone. But they didn't deliver on the football front.

Guardiola left behind clubs in pretty good shape. Barcelona managed a few more years of success. We have no idea whether the Barcelona job killed Tito Vilanova, but it couldn't have helped. Tata Martino was not regarded as a great manager, but they won another treble under Luis Enrique. Subsequently, Barcelona made a few very bad transfer decisions, and they managed to lose that famous Champion's league semifinal to Liverpool, and that is why they have not won the Champion's league since 2015, during an era when it seemed that they, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich would have a complete stranglehold on that competition.

Likewise, his Bayern Munich team continued to be great for a few more years, and won several league titles after Guardiola left. They even won the Champion's League under Hansi Flick. That was the peak of the reputation of German coaches, when it seemed that with Klopp, Nagelsmann, Flick and Tuchel, German coaches were the future of football.

Wenger didn't leave behind a great Arsenal team. He was hobbled by what he could buy during his last few years, when he finally stopped being able to qualify for the champion's league. He had been one of the greatest managers during the first 10 years of his reign, but he stopped being able to take his teams forward, and the emergence of Pep Guardiola meant that he couldn't even pretend that he could do tactically sophisticated but beautiful losers.

Around the time when Arsene left, there were 3 players on very high wages: Mesut Ozil, PE Aubamayeung and Alexendre Lacazette. The players during Unai Emery did not form a great team. Kia Joorabchian had too much influence on the transfers. But since then Arteta came in, and he's greatly improved the team, together with Edu, who managed to get a lot of good players into the club. He was so willing to get some unwanted players off his books (including Ozil and Aubamayeung) that he went to extreme measures to force them out of the club.

We no longer remember Kenny Dalglish as a great footballer and manager, even though he could claim to be both. Kenny's time as a player unfortunately coincided with a strange period in English football history, the 80s. The first half of the decade, they were unbeatable, and by 1984, they had won 7 out of 8 European cups, the greatest domination of the competition by English teams we had yet to witness. However, the stadiums were rotting and the football was dull. English football had a well deserved reputation for hooliganism. Kicking England out of the Europe did not help – even if it were heartwarming that Bucharest, Porto, Eindhoven and Red Star Belgrade could win the European cup during this era, this was the era where the underdog could triumph by being ultra defensive and waiting for penalties.

Kenny Dalglish's time at Blackburn and Liverpool took place amongst this backdrop. But he was also part of a Liverpool team that had dominated English football as much as Man U had done in the 20+ years between 1991 and 2013. Kenny Dalglish was remembered for a long time as the guy who won Liverpool's last league title for 30 years, even though, in hindsight, this was a lot like Alex Ferguson's last league title – not a great team, and a one on the downward slope. He would be remembered as the manager who oversaw the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, and his effort to provide comfort to the victims' families would see him fondly remembered. But the emotional turmoil was such that he could not carry on. After his last season, he finished second in the football league.

Graeme Souness was the person who dismantled the Liverpool legacy. People no longer speak of his time as a manager. Under him, he allowed Alex Ferguson to steal the mantle of England's greatest club. But his reign at Liverpool was so bad that Leeds, Blackburn, Norwich, Aston Villa and Sheffield Wednesday all at one time or another managed to finish above him. His successors managed to make Liverpool a competitive club again, and maybe it was hard on the Spice Boys to have to be compared unfavourably to the great Liverpool sides of the 80s. But this was a crucial period: Alex Ferguson, then Arsene Wenger had raised the bar of what a great club could do so high that Liverpool would take a really long time to catch up to that.

Perhaps one of the failings of Souness and Evans was that they never came to terms with what was expected of a great footballing club. Serie A in the latter half of the 80s was revelatory. They had some of the richest clubs in the world, and also Arrigo Sacchi had revolutionised how football was being played. It took a few years, but in the 90s, the Italian teams were dominant in the European Cup / Champion's league. AC Milan won 3 titles and Juventus won one. The “English style of football” no longer won competitions. England's premier league was probably destined in the long term to become the greatest in the world, but Man United's 1999 treble was the first indication that this would happen. Football in the 1990s in England was entertaining to watch, but the best players went to La Liga and Serie A. There wasn't enough attention paid to fitness and tactics. Alex Ferguson's Man United could dominate the league because their competitors were Newcastle, Blackburn, Chelsea and Liverpool. The spice boys probably had good players, but they were not consistent enough to win the league. They had a very good opportunity in the 96-97 season, and the “Fergie's babes” team was still developing under the tutelage of Eric Cantona. But they blew their chance to do it. Newcastle had a few foreign flair players, but Kevin Keegan was probably not the greatest tactitian in the world.

That said, the football was open, played at a fast pace, and very entertaining. The players still had the freedom to be party animals, and many of them could enjoy their celebrity status. They bought flashy cars, and bought into the chav / laddish culture that was prevalent during the “cool Brittania” era.

Kenny Dalglish was probably a very good manager for his time, but for whatever reason, his quest to succeed Kevin Keegan didn't work. He finished Newcastle in 2^nd place, and unlike the previous season which was also a 2^nd place, that was regarded as a success. But he started dismantling the Newcastle team, and after one lousy season, he had to be dismissed. His lack of success at Newcastle, and later as director of football at Celtic, would probably be held against him as being a great manager. Later on, he would be manager at Liverpool again, if only to ensure that there would no longer be any more clamouring for him to be the manager. While he did sign Luis Suarez and win 2 domestic cups, he also signed Andy Carroll for way too much money, and he did not improve on Liverpool being a mid table side. The fact that Brendan Rodgers was able to immediately improve Liverpool would also be held against Dalglish.

There would also be other sides who had fairly good managers. Sam Allardyce is a pretty good midtable manager, other than his time at Newcastle. Whatever happened to Bolton, Blackburn and Everton after he left those clubs would be a testimony to the work that he did.

Another such manager in this tier would be David Moyes. He did well at Preston, getting them to their first whiff of the premier league in many years, but ultimately being defeated in the play-offs. Everton were regularly the “best of the rest” in the premier league. They didn't do so badly after he left, but then came the Moshiri era, and the less said about that, the better.

So it was quite unexpected that the defining rivalry of our time in English football would be Man City and Liverpool, when for years it was Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal. It's very hard to gaze at the crystal ball and see what the future holds. The future still looks bright for Arsenal, even though nobody really knows when they'd next win a football league title. Jurgen Klopp would leave Liverpool, and nobody really knows where they'd go from here, although the way things have turned out from the Brendan Rodgers era onwards, one would think that they'd still be qualifying for the champion's league regularly at least. Man City's future is equally uncertain. Pep Guardiola would leave after 2025, and who would take over from him? The premier league has quite a good roster of coaching talent. Unai Emery, Thomas Frank, and Eddie Howe. There are question marks over Graham Potter and Pochettino although Chelsea football club is a poisoned chalice. There is a chance that Ange Postecoglu and Roberto De Zerbi could be great managers. 

Sean Dyche, David Moyes and Marco Silva look like steady pairs of hands. It's hard to predict what would happen to Liverpool. I did forsee that Guardiola and Klopp would do a good job, although I didn't predict that they would turn into all time greats.

One reason why it's hard to predict the future: it's hard to predict the next great manager. I remember that I didn't see it coming when Arsene Wenger won his first premier league title. Pep Guardiola wasn't the favourite to win the 2009 champion's league because people expected Alex Ferguson to win. I didn't see Unai Emery and Eddie Howe doing as well at Aston Villa and Newcastle as they did. Conversely, when Felix Magath came to Fulham or Egil Osen went to Wimbledon, I was surprised at how badly they did. Or Fabio Capello at England. 

Idleness

 There was a time when it looked as though the world were built on idleness. Leisure was some kind of goal to achieve. When I was young, we ended up living in a nice townhouse. I thought of school as something that I just had to get through, so that I could live my real life, which was most likely a life of leisure. We were in good schools, but back in the day, I just did enough to keep my head above the water. Back then, I thought that I was smart enough to get away with studying less than other people, but now I think that I'm the guy who probably wouldn't grasp something the first 9 times I read it, and suddenly on the 10^th time, I would grasp it completely. It created some kind of illusion that I was a difficult genius. Which was terribly unfair, because, when I looked back on it, the struggle was quite real.

A lot had to do with us having a headstart in life. Some of us were given the time and space to do well in the school system. When I look back on the school system now, so much of it was about gaming the system and getting the foot into the door for better things. I think about having a privileged childhood, and receiving benefits that other people would take a lot of effort to earn on their own. We were encouraged to go to university, because a degree would confer upon you a foot in the door, that if you didn't have that degree, it would be hard to earn.

Also, I think about the kind of future that people thought they were going to have: the internet future was supposed to be an idyllic one: one where a lot of your menial tasks were done by computers.

I remember that when I was in my 20s, I became a bookworm. I read a lot of books - not voraciously, because I was never that good a reader, but a lot of books. I was entirely not discriminating about what I read. There were even times when I read whatever was in front of me, whatever I could find from used book bins. And as a result of that, I have quite read quite a few books purely for the sake of reading them... maybe I did that to while away the time? In middle age, this expenditure of time started to feel a little unconscionable. 

I started this practice when I was in Snowy Hill. I think that I bought into the idea of the leisurely scholarly pursuit, of walking around a beautiful campus with gothic architecture. Maybe this was some sort of dream, I don't know if this dream still exists. Did this dream turn sour? It was one big reason why I went to "Mexico". I liked the idea of dark academia: of being a wizard who enjoyed flipping ideas around in his head. I always thought that I could have it both ways: I could live and work in this enjoyable environment, and I could still be very useful to the world. But it doesn't work like that. 

Now I see that around the time that I had decided to move to "Mexico", the world was about to change. I think about the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and it changed the western world. Big megastores closed down - Virgin Megastores, Borders. Now I marvel at how there were some businesses that operated: Starbucks operated cafes which charged you more for a cup of coffee, but they gave away - for free - a public space for you to hang out. When real estate becomes more expensive, the public space turns out to be the most expensive part of the deal. In many ways, virtual reality is a failure, because you cannot replace the sensation of being live and present in some kind of a public space as an experience. 

In 2011, there were a few changes afoot, and taken together, I'm starting to realise that they are as profound as the mid-nineties dawn of the internet age. Social media came up. People stopped accessing the internet through laptops / desktops and ended up accessing them through handheld devices. Handphones turned into "devices". Shopping at shopping centres went down, and instead we had online shopping. There was the rise of video streaming. The rise of Facebook and the downfall of Blogger - meant that the internet ceased to be the exclusive domain of bookish people, and the social dynamic completely changed. 

All this meant that the world of my young adulthood was starting to crumble. Gone were the days when I could just spend one whole afternoon in a library or bookstore, and kid myself that I was "getting ahead in life through knowledge acquisition". Life became more active and interactive. Being a knowledge worker was less of sitting back, reading books and contemplating the universe, but it became something more active - coding, investigating, learning crafts. It became more hands-on. 

Something truly significant was the fall in music as an art form. It is crazy to think about places like HMV, Tower and Virgin records, which were basically large cathedrals dedicated to not just music, but music in recorded form. I remember that when I was a kid, there was this big craze over MASK and Transformer toys. And maybe for 2-3 years I was obsessed with collecting those things. But then there was one December Holidays when I bought quite a few of those toys, and then I realised that I was reaching puberty, and I would no longer be playing with them. I had to throw them away barely a year after I got them. That was the first time I realised that acquisition of material goods was kinda crazy. Recently I went on a long binge of collecting CDs. And I'm starting to wonder if I'm going to get over these crazes. 

Music is quite a leisurely activity. People listen to music, and they don't do much. They don't help the economy much: you could buy a CD, and spin it for 50 times, if it contains your favourite song. And then you'd make very little money per listen. It is not economically productive. The incredible amount of time and effort that goes into music production is something that would make economic sense in a bygone era, a very different era from ours. 

But these days, it's been replaced by something even worse - at least something I like less. There's spotify or Apple Music or whatever music platform. And the platform has taken over as the focus of the listener. People actually will say "I'm listening to music on Spotify". They used to say "I'm listening to Michael Jackson" or "I'm listening to Green Day". Could you imagine people saying "I'm listening to the CD Player" or "I'm listening to a Warner recording" or "I'm listening to Deutsche Grammophon"? It's crazy. 

On one hand, this idleness is taken to a crazy level. People will play computer games to immerse themselves in virtual worlds, and this is one level above listening to music - at least with music you know that you are still in the real world even though psychedelic music pushes that to the limit. Elsewhere, you have people on twitch livestreaming themselves playing computer games. How many orders is that removed from reality? You are vicariously watching somebody escaping reality through playing computer games. But it works, it's cheap to produce, and it generates ad revenue. And that's compared to the arduous work of creating 1 hours' worth of music, together with all the work that goes into crafting the perfect sound combinations. But music was meant to be spiritual and uplifting, even when you think about the unsavoury connotations with rock and roll or jazz. Whereas I don't really know what the point of Twitch is. Unfortunately we're living in a world where counting eyeballs on the product is considered of much more importance than whether the "content" is any good. 

There is also this thing where the product has to be validated by saying that it took a lot of effort to produce. Hustling now means going to the gym to craft the perfect body that more people want to spend idle time gawking at, never mind that this is profoundly unintellectual activity. 

I acknowledge that a lot of music is in a way idleness, because the "work" of crafting the perfect sound is so removed from the nitty gritty of everyday life. Writing a novel is also very removed from real life. Whereas being an influencer forces you to relentlessly focus on the return on investment. Everything has to be tailored to the algorithm: any video that has thousands or millions of views will have one or two product placements, and will nag at you to like, subscribe or set up the notification bell. Content is tailored to clickbait or search engine optimisation. Perhaps it is the business-mindedness of it all which is so offputting. 

Music is decorated time. And that's why we have sex and drugs and rock and roll - sex and drugs are also decorated time, so it makes sense that this is a trifecta. Music, wandering around, idleness, dark academia, dreaming, relaxing. These were the guiding stars of my youth, what I sought after. I once thought that I could be a "content creator" and that would count as being a productive member of society. 

It's a sign of the fucked up world we live in that in many ways this is no longer desired or possible. That is because when you measure things, you actually "unmeasure" other things. The system will change so that it will optimise what is being measured at the expense of all the intangibles. 

But it's unsustainable to be always going after these things. Art and beauty is nice, maybe even great. It's not growing up. It's some kind of matured adolescence. It mostly doesn't bring home the bacon. It's not making a living. The prospect of being able to go to a place like Snowy Hill is some carrot you dangle in front of a kid to make him follow the right path in life, but when that guidance is removed, what have you got? 

One of my old bosses was so exasperated at me: you love knowledge so much. But why do you not pursue things like technical knowledge, engineering knowledge. Why do you like music and literature so much? It was so jarring to hear him put this across so starkly. That was the world we live in - one that denigrated the humanities to such an extent. Yes, graphic design for marketing and publicity was fine. Creating jingles was fine. But creating fine art? Great works of music? Having literary ambition? God have mercy on your wretched soul!

Maybe that's what people would call the "God-shaped hole". I recall somebody preaching to me about Landmark forums. That was when I was maybe around 30 years old, I said, confidently, I've figured out the meaning of life. It was a lot of hard work, but I managed to do it. I'll be fine. But now I'm not so sure. Maybe that's why people advice you to prioritise money over love: love will come and go, but money is something that's more tangible. 

There's also something else that I might want to think about: that is the idea of permanence. When I was 18, I had just graduated from school. I had spent 12 out of 18 years - nearly my entire life up till then - being a student. In many ways that was the only reality that I knew, and that would be the last time I would know any form of permanence. But I still clung on: I picked the college of arts and sciences, and I went to Snowy Hill which was more than 100 years old. I imagined myself learning the wisdom of the ancients, that would never be changed by age. But while we may not be entering the age of the singularity, we're definitely entering an era where time is speeding up. 

I thought that I would learn basic principles and I would not have to learn them again. Well, working in tech is a constant hamster wheel of learning and relearning. I dreamt of an adult world that looked like a more privileged version of childhood - basically it was childhood with more privileges. Suddenly it's a lot of headaches and responsibilities. I thought that knowledge and beauty would make me happy forever - well, no, if you can't manage to make a living. And the joy you get from these things might last 20 years, which is a long time, but is not forever. 

There used to be a vast divide between the "developed world" and "developing countries" - no more. Being a part of a developed world is no longer a birthright, but it is conditional and it has to be earned. The "wall" that MAGA people talk about is the "wall" of the imagination. It's a wall that separates the privileged from the under-privileged. Some people want it up, and others want it down. 

(Some parts of rich countries now look like the third world, and some parts of the third world now look gentrified and gilded. And the West is in trouble, because it truly doesn't understand the Global South. It doesn't understand the kind of hustling that comes with playing catch-up with the more developed world. They don't understand the acceptance of inequality, that bread and butter issues take precedence over the bill of human rights, they don't understand that society is composed of more traditional forms of kinship. )

And some part of me will always want the luxuries that the West used to have, but are now being removed in this newer, more hypercompetitive world. 

In this new age, the hustle and bustle of the business environment is always there. The race against time is always going on. The world is made of systems whose main goal is to snatch away from you whatever little you still own. There was a time when I did figure out that wealth was tethered to luxury, and also tethered to the luxury of time. Wealth was tethered to a more liberal form of thinking, a more relaxed and contemplative manner. Youth and beauty were also forms of wealth. But we don't have those things anymore, and they are ebbing away. There are plenty of rich people out there who are nevertheless slaves to money and time. That is not really wealth. 

Zodiac Killer

I've come to realise that for me to “return” to the factory, I would have to get over 3 obstacles. The first obstacle shouldn't really be an obstacle, but it is. It's having my head in the right place again to try finding myself a job. I really should only have been unemployed for half a year, 1 year. They took me back, and only now, looking back on it, do I see that circumstances were favourable. They were in the middle of doing a project that would need a person of exactly the skill set that I possessed. I was a very qualified candidate.

The second obstacle would be for me to complete that project and convert myself to permanent status. I would have to undo the years of neglect and damage I did to my career and psyche in order to get myself back on track. And in some other way I was lucky. I had supportive people around me. I didn't have people who fit me to a “T”. I would never have jobs that were as easy as my first stint at the factory, or my first few years at Mexico. Some years were just important: years that ended with a “2” were important to me, one was the official start of my adolescence, one was the official start of my work life, one was the year I would make that transition from Singapore to "Mexico", and 2022 would be the year where I would make the transition to the permanent job.

I saw this parallel with when I landed in "Mexico": I would have to get admitted to uni, get that degree, then I would have to get that job. But after getting the permanent job, I did not go one further and seal the deal. This last thing I had to do was to make that transition from surviving to thriving. To take it up one level. And that is the challenge that faces me now. 

I was talking with a guy who was there during my first stint. He finally figured out where he had seen me before. He did mention that an old colleague, a PhD from China, was still going on and on about “trying to improve xxx process”. It reminded me of Captain Ahab who spent his life obsessed with white whale. 

I told him I also did optimisation too but eventually I gave it up. You can't waste too much of your life on doing just one thing. I had a comfortable life, and I could have ended up having that comfortable life for years, but I gave it up - at least I wanted to explore the wider world for a time before I went back. 

And that's the one thing that returning to work has taught me. Are you content doing that one thing over and over again? Are you content to just learn whatever you need to learn to do that one task, and then just try to make a living trying and failing to do just that? Because that was what I thought I could do, what I thought I could get away with. My first job was just like being that guy in Moby Dick – I would go after squeezing out a bit of improvement in operational efficiency. It was hard to peer through all the complexity and make a head or tail about what was going on.

Then I got started on my software engineering job, and I was handed a task that was supposedly hard to do. First, I worked mostly with my team lead, who was more than happy to have me on, because being a team lead of one more guy made him feel a little more important. Then the team lead left, and I reported directly to the boss, who was the founder, owner and also paymaster. And he found out that I was going round and round in circles and going through the motions. That probably didn't help me much. The truth is that we're past the point where software engineers are so scarce that any little expertise they could offer was treasured. We're into the phase where anybody who's not a rock star is weeded out.

I'm just very lucky to have worked in IT and tech in the go-go days, when having a bit of talent would just allow you to coast through life. I've been very lucky for the first 40 years of my life, and there's quite a bit of trepidation about what the next 40 years would be like.

So there's one truth that it hurts me to say this. In IT and tech, housekeeping is 80% of the job. It could well be the case that that's true in any job in the world, and maybe that's why there will never be anything glamorous about working life, ever.

The other thing is that the days of being able to do one thing, to learn one thing and apply that one piece of knowledge that you have over and over again – those days are gone. I thought that I could do that. I think that's why I studied mathematics and arts and sciences and politics and history. I thought I could learn certain rules about the universe, and then use that knowledge over and over again. That is certainly knowledge that will forever be relevant, but I will always have to learn and relearn. I will have to think about the meaning of being productive, and that's something I've struggled with since young. Not in the production of ideas, because I've always been very good at this. But in getting off my ass and doing things. And having concrete measures of your output.

Now that I've gone back to work at the Factory, I was talking again to a guy who worked there, and we knew people from back then. I thought of how I spent my youth, and there was this deep melancholy. I think you'd get it from some movies – there was this movie, “Past Lives”. I don't know how I would have perceived it if I were still in my movie watching phase, but as somebody who has lived two lives in the US and in Asia, there were things I could relate to. There was a review of “Past Lives” which pointed out that the emotional wallop at the end of the movie came about because there was this great weight of knowing that another life, another existence was possible – you just didn't choose that path in life and therefore you never got to see it. Midlife crisis is all about understanding that life is finite. It's about knowing that if you didn't go down that path, then you would never be able to live through it. I don't know how I would have reacted to “Past Lives” if I were to watch it as a young man who was going through his movie phase, but it reminds me of this passage in Edward Yang's great “One and a Two” where the middle aged guy bumps into his old flame and thinks about what would have happened if he had been with his crazy passionate girlfriend instead of his wife. They go on a date together and reminise about the old days, and then plenty of old emotions and old resentments get brought up in a scene that I found astonishing for its emotional intensity. I don't know if “Past Lives” was like that. There was this great cathartic scene at the end, but the lady in the middle knows that she has already chosen her path in life, and that her fate is sealed.

And there are also epics like "In the Mood for Love" where the guy reaches middle age and sees the memories of the object of his desire from his youth fade away. I had a pretty comfortable childhood and probably would have loved to have that lifestyle forever: be surrounded by books and music forever. But people will “grow up” and the outside world will intrude. They'll ask you pesky question about the state of business, transacting with money. I watched with amazement that people will happily discuss things like buying cars and houses with you but when you talk about ideas and books, they'll run away.

But I can't be thinking about ideas and books all the time. I think, at the time I was leaving for Mexico, I was bound for bigger and brighter things. I would be moving onwards, forwards. Now, I'm not sure that's the case after all those years in Mexico. That I was transformed into this rock star programmer. It was a good thing, and an interesting experience. But I have to ask myself - what was this glorious future that I was hankering after, and what has come of it? Other than the standard “getting older and wiser”? It was a relative age of innocence. We knew that the effects of climate change were starting and maybe even accelerating. But it was an age of innocence, of techno-optimism. It was the dawn of the social media and iPhones age, before we understood that that was the path that would lead us to Donald Trump and Brexit. It was before we knew that the Arab Spring would end up in ashes. And it was when China was still behaving like a reasonable (at least to the West) country, before it started throwing tantrums about not getting its way.

So when I look back upon my youth, would it be me going round and round in circles? Would there still be a great epic waiting to be written? I see myself going round and round in circles, because I never developed the mentality that I had to have a goal in life and to move forth towards it. I did that for a few smaller things. But maybe not for the large things. Maybe it was that learned helplessness that brought me down. It was something that was pleasant, but I don't know if it had meaning. When I go to the mall after a whole day of working, it's a great relief. But I don't know if it's a waste of time, or it's something that's necessary for me to keep on living. I used to despise my mother for going to the mall so much when I was a kid. I used to think: is that what you're going to be remembered for when you die, going to the mall? But now I see that it's a form of self therapy that I could not do without.

The last thing I have to do in order to seal the deal... this is something that I have yet to do. Maybe the ability to do it is there, and maybe all the coping strategies that I have at my disposal will be there for me. I just have to conquer it.

Having the Team Lead as my colleague was quite fun, but when was I going to achieve having a life partner I could share things with? In my 20s, I always felt that I was not ready. In my 30s I was a refusenik. And in my 40s, I'm scrambling to get back the career that was handed on a plate for me.

End of the Affair

Scrum master could be quite a braggart. Maybe she was an egoist, or maybe she just had a healthy ego. But she bragged about wholesome stuff: about staying up late, or being scolded by bosses. 

Maybe she was just like Jay Gatsby – easily impressed by the big glamorous stuff. Bit by bit, I was getting withdrawn from her. First, there was a reorg where our team was broken up: she was still nominally in charge of the project, but now she was the outward facing manager, and somebody else with more technical competency would be managing the software development. Then I would be posted out of the department. I had the choice to join the IT department, but ultimately I decided against it. I wasn't going to be the data analyst in the IT department. I wasn't going to continue in the same department if I wasn't going to be alongside her. I wasn't going to see her every day 

There was this thing where she got promoted and moved cubicles, from one in the middle of the aisle to one at the side of the office. I think getting the corner seats is always a symbol of seniority. She was graduating, and she was going to join the ranks of the junior managers. I don't know if she's being overestimated because she's pretty. She's a good listener but I don't know if she's really brainy. Because some people are just good at being mirrors, reflecting the other guy back at him, and then it's easy to fall in love with yourself. 

Then there was this time when I got her to talk about her new cubicle. It turned out that later on, she hit up another one of our team mates – basically the kid sister of Tech Lead. I looked at her a little, and started realising that I'm not very high up in the pecking order when it came to her. It's true that she has every reason in the world to want to win over somebody who's on neutral ground between her and Tech Lead. And she might not be bothered with me because she's already won me over, and I already have one foot out the door. She's always wanted to be part of that gang, and she wasn't. Whereas there would be some stuff that I wouldn't really want to confess to members of the opposite sex, regardless of how much I like them. 

Tech lead wasn't promoted this year. She was promoted last year, and she did make a push for it, but not this year. I didn't think she deserved 2 promotions in a row, but it's just a matter of time before she moves a bit forward. Scrum master was promoted, and tech lead probably thought that she didn't deserve it. I clinched a permanent position, which is something like a promotion. And it turned out that 2 of the people who worked hardest on this project didn't get the promotions they deserved. 

When I look at her, if nothing else, she will teach me one lesson. And that lesson is what “normal” people are like. On one hand, she is not “normal” and probably will never be. She has OCD. And yet she's like a few other people who are known to have OCD – extremely meticulate about caring about their appearance, almost some kind of a genius at being good looking. (Think David Beckham, Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake). And they're generally nice. (But I know one OCD person who isn't really nice.) 

I saw her whatsapp avatar. It's an anime image of somebody gazing into the distance. And somehow there was another friend of mine who also had a similar avatar, a status of Jesus looking out into the distance. There is this soothing calmness about both of these people, like they're drawing you in. They just seem spiritually aware. They're remarkably unneurotic. 

Sometimes I think back on that magical one or two months when I first started having a crush on her, that flighty, woozy feeling of limerance, what I thought falling in love was like as a teenager. I thought about how gratified I was in that moment, and how, for a while, I thought that I would never feel that way ever again. And maybe I'm older, wiser and calmer this time around, I didn't try to make it last. You know that it will come and it will go and one fine day it will go out of the window and never come back. Everything looks different. Everywhere you go, the ground seems to be covered in this magical dust-like substance. Even the most desolate parts of the town seem to be imbued with magic. And she came from a relatively remote part of Singapore. I was all at sea, compared with her: my employment situation wasn't stabilised. Maybe I also looked at her that way, that my gaze was one that was imbued with a bit of desperation. Maybe we had gotten through a rough patch of not delivering the project. 

But a few more stilted attempts at conversation would finally put it to bed: we clicked when it came to work, but there are vast, vast cultural differences which are just impossible to negotiate and overcome. That scrum master is going to be such a mainstay of the cultural scenery of the department in the future is basically a given. She used to be surrounded by girls, and it wasn't hard to hang out with her at her desk: but now she's surrounded by boys. If she was an ENFJ like Obama, she would remind me of some of the “presidential playlists” that he would send out. And they would look like hallmark greeting cards. They would sound sensible. They would be masters of the slogan. They would talk about vague and uplifting sentiments and a lot of people would surround them and repeat, “yes we can” but they would also gloss over the specific details or points of contention. She was a master of the UX. She was good at being the master of ceremonies. 

She made an impression on the IT vice president: she could project herself. Did she play the game? People who make it to managers project an aura of confidence and reassurance that everything was going to be alright. Would I even be capable of this? 

When I started having a crush on her, I saw her as some kind of angel, a guiding light, whose counsel would be driving me forward. But I had to reconcile that to her being some kind of figure of authority whose word would be respected, in spite of all her flaws as a manager. She would paint a picture that would be nice and appealing to the managers, but it would conceal a lot of flaws and defects that are underneath the surface. This was the side of her that would be harder to love. There was the side that it would be frustrating for me to communicate with, and it was probably what drove tech lead up the wall. She probably didn't do a lot of stuff to get plucked out as a manager by the higher ups. But she had one big advantage: she looked the part. She was well groomed and dressed well. That gives you a surprisingly big advantage in our society. She was good at listening, even though she wasn't that great at understanding. I was the other way around, which probably explains why we gelled. 

I had aimed to have some kind of a friendship with her. I don't know about her personal life. I don't know if I succeeded, and I wouldn't know what kind of friendship that would be. I do detect that her interest in me would wane once we were no longer involved in the same project. She doesn't have personal relationship with guys, I noticed: just two of them. And those two would be what I consider to be members of her tribe. I get this feeling that I'm not part of it. As much as I'm generally happy to be solving her problems and she's generally happy to be solving my problems, we don't have a social relationship, and it's hard for me to suss out what that social relationship would be like. She was the most open to me when she was complaining about tech lead, but I didn't like that conversation. You should not talk about another person's bad points because it could make yourself look bad. But it did signal to me – she was more keen on being tech lead's friend than mine. But that's the deal – I've allowed myself to receive so much help from her that I really don't have locus standi to complain about her writing me out of her social life. And there isn't really a lot of room in her social life: she's the kind of person who has sorda good relations with so many people out there that you're not going to have that special relationship with her unless you're really thrown together. 

There was this time I might have called her out to lunch with her to celebrate me obtaining the confirmation of a permanent position. But she requested to ask the boss along, and that was quite the bit of a cold shower. And she somehow had an easier rapport with the boss (whom she had known for longer) than with me. 

I would really have to figure out what it means to be a friend to someone – anyone – before I even think about being someone's boyfriend. 

As for myself, I can remember times in my life when I've managed to exude confidence and charisma. There have been people who have considered me funny and quirky. But I seem to find it hard to be a nice person these days and I got to figure out how I can get that back. I seem to have lost some kind of a hard won balance that I used to have in the past. 

I've been grouchy of late. I know that on some level, she had been some source of emotional support. She would just decide that something had to be done, and I would just light up at the thought of doing it for her. And it would just fulfill some kind of need or something, because more often than not she would make it fit into something. But I no longer have that, I'm in some kind of wilderness now, and I have to pick up the pieces and move on. 

I joined the project, and worked on it for 6 months, and had minimal involvement with scrum master. Then scrum master took over the project, and another six months passed, with her nagging at me here and there before I realised that this was a woman I could fall in love with. And after that I only have six months of working with her before it becomes decreed that we would have to part. I would have to decide whether to join her department, which was IT, or my own department, which was data science. And I opted against joining her IT department. The IT department was a Chinese speaking place, even though all the meetings were conducted in English. That would be a handicap if I couldn't communicate to the developers in Chinese. The data science department would speak English, be more acquainted with the latest technologies. 

Socially, if I were to be in the IT department, I would probably not be working on the same projects as she was. I would be on the data science team, but supervised by IT people who might not understand some of the nuances of my job. I would have to work under conditions that I didn't like - for example, having an IT environment which for security reasons would not allow me to do a lot of things I might have wanted to do. But one of the biggest perks was that I would be working in the same office as her. That wouldn't be a perk at all: I'd have to be yearning to be nearer to her, and we might not be assigned to the same work. And she would be surrounded by a lot of other thirsty guys who may or may not have crushes on her. It would be a situation that I would find quite unsavoury. It would be some kind of suffering. And that's why I have to walk away from her, and leave only my memories behind. In the end, it's that old cliché: 不在乎天长地久,只在乎曾经拥有. 

Scrum Master

Quite a few things happened with the crush situation at work.

I tried guessing her MBTI type. I guessed ISFP, mainly because she was dealing with UX, and because I was projecting on her that she was a very artistic person. Turns out not to be the case. She actually asked me for my MBTI type, without me having to ask her for it. She was an ENFJ. If you know the MBTI, EXXJ types are considered to have leadership qualities.

And I didn't declare myself as an INFP. That would have made me quite compatible with an ENFJ. Instead, I'm an INTP.

There was another Herrmann braindominance test, and it turned out that both her and I had similar profiles: we were both equally split between blue (very logical), yellow (creative and visionary) and red (feelings and people oriented). And we had less of the green quadrant (rules and routine). I looked at her, and she looked at me, and we were like, hmmmm..... But these similarities are overblown. The default is that people are balanced, so it's not really that much of a similarity if both parties have 3 colours. But that was pretty exciting to know .... 

We had a project that we did together. And it turned out that I had two weaknesses. One of them was that I wasn't very well organised. The other was that I wasn't good at presentations. She was good at both of these things, and it was just amazing how we meshed together. She didn't have the intellectual rigour that I brought to the table. But the way that we were able to cover for each other's weaknesses was just so alluring and sexy. And furthermore, she was a ticket to getting permanently confirmed on the job.

It makes a lot more sense that she's an ENFJ. She's a natural born politician, and had a lot of charisma to get things done, and actually cared enough about people to make people love her back. I could have gone the route of pestering her all the time. But I just wanted to get to know her better.

I think that she had quite a big social calendar. And the only reason why she had time for me is that I was her teammate. If we didn't end up working with her, I might not have had a chance to even get to know her better.

If a lady is as attractive as she is, the consequences of that attractiveness will leave a deep mark on who she is. She might even not want to have a steady boyfriend, because so many guys will be after her, and going crazy over her, that being forced to choose would be quite difficult.

Her being able to get her way a lot of the time will warp and shape her perception of the world. She is a good and kind person compared to other women who are as good looking as she is. But there will always be blind spots.

I would have to think hard about the exact nature of my relationship with this person. They say that if you have a great fortune, you don't own that great fortune: it owns you. It's the same if you not only have an attractive face, but an attractive personality as well. I have a good IQ – not exceptional, but quite good. And that good IQ has ended up shaping considerably who I am as a person.

As good as she was a man manager and being well organised and presentable, she wasn't the best when it came to IT. The one on our team who was good at running an IT team was another young lady (call her tech lead) who eventually grew resentful at her, both for not being smarter than she was, and for getting the leadership role without being the most knowledgeable person. So in the last few months, a considerable amount of tension had developed between them. And sometimes I wonder if tech lead can tell that I had a crush on scrum master.

I often felt that scrum master was a bit like Snow White: she was nice to people, she was down to earth and remarkably unfussy about who to hang out with, and people either loved her or were quite jealous of her.

I think there were a few guys who were clearly ahead of me in being interested in her romantically: and they were part of her “tribe”. I didn't see myself as being part of that tribe, so I guess I could rule myself out. I've also come to realise, from previous experience, that having a significant other like that does not come cheap: you're supposed to be smarter and better than 100 other guys, and always knowing that your position as her man is never ever secure.

I would have to be content with a consolation prize, which is that we get along great, and she's done a lot for me. There's a line that I know if I cross it, that relationship would end, and perhaps even end badly.

I've tried to “mediate” between the scrum master and the tech lead, and it served the dual purpose of being able to understand the social dynamics at work much better, and it also served the purpose of me getting to know the scrum master better. Well, she's not a deep thinker like I am, who's obsessing over all minutia. Actually she probably obsesses over different minutia than me. She likes cute humour, and I've tried to show that side of me to her. The way that she's always immaculately dressed, and her sharp fashion sense – well I think nobody's as talented as she is in that way.

She doesn't always have a smile on her face, but when she does, it's the kind of smile that looks like a summer day. I realised that she doesn't really do sarcastic or maybe mean humour. Guys do it, and guys like me do it because I lead a life that has a lot of unhappiness in it. Her life is not like that. She will care for me, but that is because she cares for everybody else. So it's a little crazy to want her as a girlfriend, because an exclusive relationship is one which goes against her instinct to care for everyone.

This isn't “ugly beauty” we're talking about. She isn't somebody where you have to look very hard to find the inner beauty. It's all there, in front of you. This is somebody who you're hoping that her inner self would match up to the promise of that shiny surface. She doesn't need snide or sarcastic humour to shield her from the harshness of her daily existence. The ENFJ is the protagonist: more a hero than an anti-hero. To busy saving the world to be indulging in any form of naval gazing and rationalising. There is a directness and wholesomeness about her that's quite refreshing for me, and makes me wonder what life was like if I never had any inner demons to battle.

A love or a crush has always been some kind of a city on a hill for me. I know how to love from afar, but I don't really know how to love up close. She was a glittering tower of light for a while, but what would happen next? Because there were times when I thought about what I looked like. If I were to exhibit boorish behaviour: if I were to scold my parents: if I were to do something that wasn't at my best: if I wasn't totally engaged in the moment.

It isn't that hard to be attractive to women. Merely being able to understand them puts you ahead of 50% INFPs and ENFJs have chemistry. If she were merely a pretty face, I might not have bothered. But it was a slow burn – first 6 months, I didn't work with her. Then there was 6 months of working together without any extraordinary attraction. Then by the time lightning struck, there were only 6 months worth of the project before we had to leave. And neither of us may not want the whole world to know about this crush. I care about her enough that ... if she's already going steady with a guy, I can't just overturn the apple cart, that would be selfish. It's a little kinky to be tied to a chair and just sit back and let her turn me on every day.

As the days pass, I have to live through the whole experience in order to make sense of it. There was that crazy crush, but could I turn it into a friendship? Well actually not, because for us to meet up after this experience would start raise questions about the nature of our relationship. If scrum master and tech lead were friends, we could take the whole team out for a meal, but that's off limits at the moment. I had to consider the long term impact: she initiated me into my second stint at the Factory, she was kind to me, we had a good, maybe even happy working relationship. And she made me seriously consider the next steps in my life, which were to find a life partner. Those are the main things. The crush is something that's almost trivial and unremarkable in comparison.

Ergodicity of Football

Ergodicity is the idea that, given enough time, a system will go through all the possible states. I used to wonder why football fans drop out after a certain amount of time. That's because football is ergodic: given enough time, a lot of improbable things will take place. Some of the most exciting results in football are in the rare events that pop up every now and then, although when you've followed football for long enough, you start to realise that rare events aren't really that rare, and in fact pop up pretty often. And maybe realising that was the key to me getting less interested in football as time went on. I could say that the peak of my interest in football was during my early working life, but as time goes on, it becomes a little dreary. 

Here are some epochal changes in the state of football over the years

1. Manchester City has won the Champions League. That was the holy grail, and Pep Guardiola has messed up in the Champions League so many times after winning it twice in his first 3 full seasons as a fully fledged manager - never winning it at Bayern, and messing it up in his first 5 or so seasons in Man City. 

2. There have been trebles in 2009, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2020 and 2023. 6 of them in the last 15 years, which is totally amazing because there's never been another time when so much power has been concentrated at the top. The most powerful clubs in the world dominate in terms of fandom, scouting systems, marketing, TV money and business, so that all the stuff on the pitch, like playing well on match day sounds like an afterthought. 

3. Chelsea has finished at the bottom half of the table. This season has been a shitshow, the first truly post-Abramovich season. The distasteful association with Putin aside, you can appreciate his era as one where 

4. Newcastle are back in the champion's league. This is the first time it's happened in more than 10 years, during which time their fandom has suffered. Now this is due to their unsavoury association with the Saudis, but it happened without obscene amounts of money being spent and that should be heartening.

5. Leeds United returning to the English Premier League. Now, they've been relegated again, but let's hope that their stay from English football is a brief one. Luton Town, 

6. Liverpool winning the league. I never understood how momentous it was for Man United to win the league for the first time in 26 years, until I saw Liverpool win it in 2020, at a time when Man City was going through a transition. 

7. Leicester City winning the league. This was the biggest of all the black swans. 

8. Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa, Hamburg, Porto, PSV Eindhoven, Steaua Bucharest, Red Star Belgrade and Olympique Marseilles winning the European Cup. No doubt this was during the dull dreary days of European football, where everybody played defensive, attacking players were not protected, football was of a dreadful quality, and stadiums were dilapidated. Still, it's nice to see the underdogs triumphing so often that the traditional powers had to come up with the champion's league format just to make sure that the biggest clubs had their chance. 

9. England reaching a major tournament final. It would have been nice to see them win something, but I guess part of the branding was that they always managed to come up short. Reaching the semis in 2018 and reaching the final in "Euro 2020" which was actually in 2021

10. Leo Messi wins a national cup final. After being runners up in the World Cup in 2014 and the Copa America in 2007, 2015 and 2016, Lionel Messi finally wins both trophies for Argentina.

11. Chelsea wins a champions league. They reached the semi-final or final in 04, 05, 07, 08 and 09 and it was almost heartening to see them win it in 2012. Quite a few big clubs win the champions league after many tries. Man City winning it was seen as breaking the duck after 5 years of failure. Man United won it after years of failing at the group stage. Liverpool winning it in 2005 was a little flukey.

12. The big four was broken up. The quartet of Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Man U dominated the EPL in the 2000s. Then there were other clubs that tried to break up this stranglehold. But the one that really succeeded was Man City. Tottenham managed a few runners up spots under Pochettino but fizzled out soon after. 

13. Man City winning the premier league under those incredible circumstances. And that was the shift of the balance of power: Man United's imperial era, which coincided with the beginning of the premier league, was over. 

14. A period when the Bundesliga wasn't dominated by Bayern Munich. They were called "Hollywood FC" because they were always messing up. Kaiserslautern, Dortmund, Wolfsburg, Stuttgart and Bremen managed to win the Bundesliga during a period when the championship was in flux, but this year, in spite of a strong challenge by Dortmund, Bayern have it sewn up.

15. Napoli wins Serie A. But this is also an era where Juventus dominance is over. Also, there were dark horse victories during my lifetime, with Hellas Verona, AS Roma, Lazio and Sampdoria. 

16. Barcelona and Real Madrid have won La Liga most of the time, but I've also lived through Real Sociedad, Athletic Bilbao, Deportivo, Atletico Madrid and Valencia win La Liga. 

17. Erling Haaland scoring a ridiculous number of goals.

18. Spain wins the Euros, their first one for 44 years. Then they go on to win the World Cup and then a second Euro. It's also the first time an international side wins when Guardiola is managing in their country. (As an aside: Spain wins the World Cup and the 2008 and 2012 Euros when Guardiola is managing Barcelona. Then Germany wins the World Cup in 2014 when Guardiola is managing Bayern Munich. Then England reaches the finals of Euro 2020 (actually 2021). )

19. Man United win a treble. There was a lot of discussion about which treble was "better". Manchester United's treble came at a time when a treble was only won once every 10 years. It was when financial doping wasn't taken to a ridiculous level, and before analytics had given a few football clubs a ridiculous advantage. Man United had been slightly better than the competition in the FA cup and the league. Whether they were better than the Inter, Juventus and Bayern Munich teams they faced in the UEFA champions' league is open to debate. Man City, on the other hand, were a juggernaut who simply swatted their competition aside. 

Another romance about this is the English side winning the competition for the first time since the 5 year Europe ban which led to a lot of dark horses winning it (from Romania, Portugal, Holland and Yugoslavia). Eventually, there would be a period between 2004 and 2012 when an English side would reach the final almost every year. 

20. Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Greece and Portugal winning the Euros. For whatever reason, the Euros seems to be a competition where the dark horses triumph a little more often. The World Cup rarely produces shock winners. 

I've always wondered if I will live long enough to see Arsenal win another Premier League. Maybe when Guardiola's gone it might be possible. 

Rat Race

 Do you remember a time when Singapore was considered a cheap and casual place compared to the US and the West? It seems that things have changed so much.

There are a lot of things that you can no longer have in a shopping mall. Bookstores are out. The only place to browse books is the library and a lot of libraries are being downsized.

I don't know if you're still able to get a copy of Douglas Rushkoff's “Life Inc”, but that was a book – probably just one of many books that drew the connection between the rat race and modern capitalism, and put it all under the same branch of “corporatism”. But we were selling out to the values of corporatism and letting those values dictate our lives.

Corporatism dictates the composition of our shopping malls. Probably in the nattier neighbourhoods, it's still possible to have cheap furniture, hardware, a lot of econ minimarts. But in the major shopping malls, rent is so expensive that you can only really afford these few things:

1. Spas

2. Eating places

3. High velocity discount goods

4. Tuition centres

It's the last one that makes me gag. We no longer have free range childhoods. Children no longer will have the freedom to roam around as they were. The tuition industrial complex has triumphed. When we were kids, our lives revolved around a set of values. It was about proving how smart you were, how much better than the other guy you were.

I sometimes still wonder how much this great game had on our psyches. I saw an advertisement about a new fangled thing, a collaboration between Ecole 42 and SUTD. And one of the features, they said was that the Ecole 42 system is a gamification of programming education. Then it occurred to me: the education system itself is a gamification of life. You make a lot of activities, make it look like some competitive game, in order to get the kids to do what you want them to do. It's always better when you play to win, rather than if you were to regard it as a chore.

And in many ways it was good. But from the outside, it looks very sinister, especially if you as an adult understand that there are alternatives in life, but the kids don't. The first goal in life is to “do well”. That means grades, or ECAs. Or “enrichment”, which means that you are a genius but you actually get to show that you are a genius. Or you get waved on to some entitled station in life, like entry into a competitive university.

So at the age of 18, you don't understand life in general. You don't understand the principles of life. I may not even understand executive functioning. But I understand that there is a game out there, and that I play to win.

The kids are going out to cram school and helicopter parenting. They've only known being cocooned, and being in a hypercompetitive environment. If you have a generation of kids who believe that their only exercise of power is snitching, then you will have a lot of weirdo behaviours. People whose only recourse is to believe that everything in this system is tilted against them, and their only recourse is to appeal to some kind of indignation against injustice. You will have people who don't actually do more than petition for some kind of army of people out there to help them fight a fight.

And so it was, when I discovered that there was the 4^th floor of Harbourfront (the shopping mall formerly known as World Trade Centre) and it used to house a food court, but – I think a lot of high floored food courts are a thing of a past, especially in the CBD – it's now some kind of experential learning centre for kids.

Today's kids go through an experiential learning centre which is partly cram school, partly entertainment, and partly a cult-like est / landmark forum motivational thing. And they're in some artificial environment that can only exist because their parents paid top dollar for it, and it can only exist in expensive real estate because of that. No more hanging out in bookstores after school. No more wandering around record shops, trying to piece together the mysteries of life in solitude.

Machine learning distinguishes itself between supervised learning and unsupervised learning. What we have is the advent of supervised learning. You can't afford to wander all out on your own. You shouldn't be trusted to figure out the big questions. Your job is to hit all the marks, to master reams and reams of context-free and unrelated knowledge which may (but probably will not) serve you well later in life.

And what makes it even worse for kids these days is that .... for me, I knew that I should do well, and that building up a good ECA record is a good thing. But these kids have it all spelt out to them – aim for the Ivy League. At least, give your parents something interesting to talk about. No more kampong football for you. No more Fandi Ahmad and his merry gang of grinning mats lifting the Piala Malaysia for the final time. If you want to play football, you need multi-million dollar facilities and expensive summer camps and you have to play in specially designed cages.

The uses of real estate are a good illustration of the priorities of society.