"Self-centred, self-indulgent and spoiled," says one 45-year-old who confesses he is perplexed by the way we young punks think, talk and teel. "Impatient, ambitious -- and confused," says a 27-year-old who begs to differ.
At the Coffee Garden at the Shangri-La Hotel, where a bunch of us, mostly single, 20something and hungry, are having coffee, adjectives fly back and forth as we try to pin ourselves down in an easy-to- understand sound-bite: complacent, competitive, pampered, sheltered, hardworking, resourceful, demanding, opportunistic ...
Materialistic and ambitious make the list so many times that the waiter hovering nearby starts to wonder if those are dishes we are trying to order. Somehow, the capsulisation of the MTV gang does not work. Because, far from being a money-minded monolith, we are a diverse group. Most of us do not believe in getting an MBA from the Donald and Marla Trump School of Business.
But, with rising costs and increasing competition, there are some of us who feel compelled to race ahead. And this is the group that stands out like a pimple on prom night. "It all boils down to survival," says Wooi Hock, a 27-year-old engineer who takes his work so personally that he had made it the main barometer of his self- worth. "And I'm not aiming for mediocrity. I want to excel. Besides, if you don't start outrunning other people while you're young, you can forget about doing it later."
So he is kicking up so much dust beneath his Nikes that he is almost unrecovnisable behind a cloud of ambition. Ideally, he would like a low-slung sports car, a downtown apartment and Weeboks and Baby Guess? for his unborn children (he is still single), but for now, an income that would allow him to move out of his parents' flat, where there is only room for him on the living room floor, will do. So he pulls 12-hour days at work; on weekends, he works on starting his own business.
And he avoids pubs and discos so his money does not disappear in a haze of techno-music and bacardi cokes. And he complains that his biceps, triceps and deltoids, and family relationships are getting glabby because he works so hard he cannot find time to go to the gym or take his parents out to lunch.
In the meantime, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong says young people have yet to find a mission. In the background, older people (that is, anyone above 40) shake their heads and worry for the future of mankind.
"You kids are lucky," they say, sitting in flats, cars and corner offices that they already own and are not likely to give up. "You didn't have the riots, the uncertainty, the instability." And they are right. Unlike the four 20somethings in Scorpion Orchid, a play set in the '50s that closed the Arts Festival last week, we never had to run around riot-torn streets with angst-filled souls trying to figure out the meaning of life. (And that is not to say that their agnst ever made them discover the meaning of life.)
When we were children, adults fed us the promise of a good life on an almost silver spoon and told us that if we brought home a good report card, got into the right school, had the right job, everything would be perfect.
In the meantime, they painstakingly built a hermetically sealed, germ-free world, giving us a near utopia with clearly defined boundaries. As we grew up, we were told to follow the rules, compete, excel and now, conquer the region, be bigger, better, faster. So that is exactly what we are doing. We are still bringing home that ol' report card -- only this time the tests are tougher, the stakes higher and the results more public. The passing grade: the car, the property, the promotion and maybe a club membership.
And it only gets harder. Since 1970, the price of private property has increased 23 times. Even after adjusting for higher wages, prices have increased five times. And do not even mention the cost of cars. Those have taken off faster than a Maserati with a police car on its trail. While we are wondering how to cough up a mere downpayment for an apartment, bearing in mind that singles our age cannot buy Housing Board flats, older people are chucking their flats aside for bigger ones, queueing up to give up their money. So we feel trapped and confused, like a firt-time investor caught in a market correction holding a truckload of stocks bought on contra. Of course, all this gets tiring. Quickly. And we start wondering what everything is all about, pondering away at hawker centres, tennis courts, in the office canteen or at upmarket coffeeshops consuming massively unhealthy amounts of caffeine and sugar. And then we realise we cannot read the future in our coffee beans -- unless we start a chain of Coffee Club- like outlets.
So some of us decide -- to heck with the money, we will go with our passion, as Haresh Sharma, 29, resident playwright of The Necessary Stage has done. "So I'm not awash in Armanis -- come to think of it, I don't even own Benetton or Esprit. But I'm not stuck in a rut and I'm very happy with what I'm doing," he says.
Some of us do something in between, like 27-year-old Brian who works for six months, saves and travels for the next six. "Hey! don't print this," he says. "Otherwise everyone will discover how great it is, start doing it, and the economy will go into a slump." Some of us learn no new secret; we go back on treadmill, set the speed, time and distance and hit the "start" button and sweat it out like we always did. Some of us end up as confused as before. Most of us just carry on, trying to fit some meaning into this madness.
After all, this is also the generation that wants to live for more than their jobs; a group that is energetic, informed and is set to conquer the world. "I don't understand this delayed gratification thing," says Chee Kong, 27, a TV producer. "There's so much out there that it's a waste if you don't get as much of it as you can.
"Because if you don't grab life by the throat, life is going to grab you and push you down."