[This was an essay that I submitted as an assignment. And yet it meant more to me than one measly academic requirement.]

A Very Personal View

My “today friends” talk about movies, TV shows, love lives, and funny everyday events. All the while, I vacantly stare upward at the rotating ceiling fan. Not quite noticing the concrete and metal, I try to envisage the world as Neil Armstrong would have seen it from outer space. I’d then switch to how Henry Kissinger from his political lens, Milton Friedman from an economist’s point of view, or Michel Foucault from the social scientist’s perspective. Then, I’d even try to think how Will Wright, Chris Taylor, Phil Harrison, Tim O’Reilly, or Steve Jobs would see this world we live in, as a place of opportunity from the bountiful future.

There is a seemingly invisible barrier that separates me from the rest of my “new friends” here in college, and I know that it is there. I sometimes cannot relate with the topics that are discussed, since I have not watched, heard, seen, or thought about that certain something that is on everyone else’s mind. If I brought up what was occupying my mind, my “friends” would just nod their heads, admit they cannot relate, and switch the topic back into something most probably unimportant however it interests them.

Here is my dilemma: how can I justify bringing up topics that I feel are revolutionary to a group of people who choose to be apathetic and myopic? Can I accept the fact that maybe these “new friends” that I have are predestined to be complacent and that I cannot do anything about it? Can I bring myself to shake these young men and women from their blissful stupor, even though it flies against the face of etiquette; in respecting a person’s decision to be blissfully comfortable with the status quo?

It wasn’t always like this. In high school, my “yesterday’s friends”, though a relaxed and even more entertaining bunch, were much more motivated and ambitious. Needless to say, we would spend most of our lunch breaks talking about geopolitics, advanced technologies, and the future. After graduation, some of my old friends emigrated to study elsewhere. Mostly alone, I then comforted myself by the thinking that college—the Ateneo in particular—had a greater density of intellectuals, so my thinking would truly constructive. I had hoped to find a think-tank, but as it turns out, my thoughts have become my own burden. It had become a silent mark of alienation and difference that put me in an inescapable ideological exile; a technocrat amongst epicureans.

“Despair” fits as the description of choice for what I am feeling. Gnawing at my subconscious is the thought that I may well be rendered impotent by the end of my stay in college due to the intellectual stagnation and lack of ambition that has swallowed up the college campus. Also nibbling at my innards is the likelihood that the rest of the wide world shares these attributes. One must understand that any effort to change a setting for the better can be easily undone by any level of resistance by the greater majority, especially if the majority were a self-indulgent mob. Democracy is its own demon when the mean and mode citizen is of dubious worth.

The basic fact of life is that when complacency and stagnation are widespread, you either change before it is too late, or one courts disaster. The problems of the status quo are numerous, and definitely insurmountable by the efforts of any group of people unless they can muster and motivate enough of their fellow humans to act. I could write a complete essay enumerating the problems that we face. For the sake of this essay, I think it will suffice for me to say that we have problems of the environment, of intercultural tolerance and openness, of resources, and of resource inequalities.

Those are, however, very macroscopic global issues. There are also more specific difficulties that face the Philippine youth (if not now, then in the near future): stiff employment and capital competition from the Chinese and Indians. Kids on this side of the South China Sea most often fail to consider the challenge posed by a more globalized employment market, and thus the ambitious dreamers of China and India have not only their competitive (wage) advantage, but also a more philosophical/ideological/cultural advantage of entrepreneurship and hard work.

So then what are the chances that this generation of people would make sure that there will be a future for the unborn? What are the chances for my “new friends” to live in enduring and virtuous prosperity in a hypercompetitive future when they cannot even find it within themselves to overcome arbitrarily-tagged “obstacles” such as schoolwork? How will the majority of today’s Philippine youth cope against their cheaper and more motivated counterparts from China and India? I honestly think that I do not think most of them can.

It has been said that the path to virtuous and enduring success requires teamwork, but if my peers cannot rise above their own shortcomings, then who can this country rely on to lift it above mediocrity? Who then shall make the difference so that we will live to see a brighter tomorrow (if we would have one at all)?