A second career

Song Spinning now: Julee Cruise - Falling

After watching the Current Affairs programme "Get Real" on Channel News Asia, I received a harsh reality, a profound confirmation that the future is absolutely insecure and unpredictable. To wait or hope for a rebound economy or go back to the good old days seem very distant; it might not even happen. All the forecasts and news on economic improvement are just news, there's hardly any significant changes down to the microscopic level.

In this episode, presenter Diana Ser brought the audience to the pride of two retrenched, over 40 year old white collar professionals who still couldn't find a job after 3 years despite lowering their salary expectation to just $20k to $24k a year.

These days making a living in Singapore is just going to get harder and harder as jobs are getting scarce and there's intense competition among tons of candidates for one position. As employees and job seekers face the increasing trend of contract positions replacing permanent ones, lower salaries, flexi wages, longer worker hours, cost cutting measures, foreign competition, fewer benefits, piling work load, chronic work stresses and etc. , job security is abscure and job satisfaction is rare.

Taking the analogy extracted from Robert Kiyosaki, this situation reminds me of a treadmill that is going faster and one has to keep catching up or run even faster to get ahead of others. The treadmill will continue to increase its speed, leaving no room for breathers. People who ran out of breath will naturally stop to catch some breath and when they decide to resume their run, they will be way behind those "machines" in front, who doesn't stop to take a rest. Even if you have all the stamina to go on and on,

It can be a dread to maintain this kind of working life just to get by or continue to live on this planet. Suddenly civilisation and globalisation create so much chaos people are going back to pre-civilisation, retreating into their rustic or rural havens for the purpose of finding peace and tranquility to keep up with sanity.

Every now and then you heard about people getting retrenched and it doesn't just happen to the older employees, but to younger ones as well. I came across those in their 20s who were retrenched due to company downsizing and surprisingly they were from MNCs. This proved that both local and international firms are equally vunerable.