A Singaporean In Australia

The old multi-millionaire guy just couldn't forget me. Perhaps he had not receive a lashing from anybody for a long time. So after I told him to fuck off with his nonsense some weeks ago, he would repeatedly make sneaky stabs at me in the group chat. I don't normally check my phone so I will miss bulk of the group chats because I do not have the habit to read previous threads (having a slow phone didn't help). But I happen to see myself mentioned again in the group message preview while I was replying to my wife's message this morning.

That wasn't the first time Millionaire Guy took the effort to tell everyone in the group that I "didn't realise" I made a mistake by leaving Singapore for Perth, insinuating I was stupid as well. I do not know many millionaires so I will not make a sweeping statement. The problem with this millionaire guy is that he thought he had figured out how the world works just because he made a few bucks out of it in his life. Frankly speaking, from the way he carried out online conversations, I saw no major differences between a multi-millionaire guy and a piss-poor bitter old man who curses the government everyday. Only that he puts down the citizens in the same obnoxious manner like a neurotic dirty old man everyone would keep a 10m radius distance from. At least I learnt one thing from knowing him: Money cannot buy one class. That probably explained why the elders of my time urged the young to learn to be a proper person first, so that they would grow up to be amiable, respectable people whether they made it to riches or not. Millionaire guy apparently didn't receive a proper moral education or probably grew disillusioned after having to take care of a "useless dad" for decades. He "didn't realise" (using his words) he wasn't much different than the common Singaporeans that he looked down for lamenting at the government; by cursing his luck having that father who didn't give him a head-start in life. I suppose having beaten the odds after being privilege-handicapped in early life, makes one feel high and mighty. I didn't want to deny the old guy from his bragging rights if he had earned it but I told him flatly to leave me out of the picture.

It was amazing how a guy, millionaire or not, could cast a judgement on a decision of a complete stranger. I believed it was done based on a single yardstick - money. According to him, I left a gold mine to sit on a coal mine. That was the whole idea behind his argument. I'll spare you the details about food business and real estate. It seemed to me even when one obtained a lot of money, he might not necessarily attain wisdom to come with it. Especially one who measures life with dollars and cents only. Perhaps he should have enjoy the luxury of having cancer, like I did, to be finally free from the shackles of the poisoned mind. Perhaps then, he would drop ridiculous idea of starting a Mee Pok noodle hawker stall with the aim of selling 10,000 bowls of noodles a day and enjoy his multi-million wealth with whatever left in his life.

Little did he know I was one of the luckier migrants who came to Perth and found a job with a higher annual income that I commanded in Singapore. I think it is my responsibility to highlight that I was one of the exploited ones in the construction industries. Thus it didn't take a lot to beat my salary in Perth, even after tax. Unlike most Singaporeans dropping their careers with good salaries, they found it hard to swallow accepting a job of "lower status" in Australia, especially so when it hurts when it matters most for Singaporeans - in the pocket. This group of Singaporeans will have to manage their expectations and happiness if they are prepared to leave Singapore. After all, you are gaining a lot more in other the main aspects of life by sacrificing some income. For someone like me who is having the best of both worlds, it is very difficult not to be happier.

Even if I definitely didn't lose out on direct income, Millionaire Guy would cite opportunity losses to make me feel inadequate. I read a study done to investigate why men loses more money in the stock market than women. No, it wasn't about whether women have the ability to pick winning stocks or not. They found that men have the tendency to rue over "missed opportunities" so they want to maximise their presence in the market. Whereas women are focused on the performance of their current portfolio and tends to ignore the "lost opportunities" they did not participate in. I think that pretty much explains why I am completely unfazed by Millionaire Guy's "lost opportunities" talks, based on a weak assumption I would be grabbing those opportunities in the first place if I had never left Singapore. 

Nuts.

As far as I know, the time machine has not been invented today. So life is a very, very linear process that differs very much from the nested loops or forks we imagined life to be in our minds. No, you couldn't have been a millionaire if you have chose to study that degree or married that woman instead. Because you would have made the same decision at that very moment you did before even if you could go back in time. No, you can't possibly tell yourself to change your decision either because if your past-self listened to you, the future would have changed and you wouldn't exist to be thinking of going back to the past to urge yourself to change a decision. So the these ideas of opportunities losses are just playing in our minds to make us rue over a bad decision. But how can we tell it is a bad decision in the first place if there was no telling how it will go if we picked up another option in its place?