Commuting in Singapore, insignificance and separation anxiety dissipating


Extras in my world
Every morning I take the first train from Boon Lay station, which is the closest MRT station to where I live on the main NTU campus. The first train leaves the station at 5:36 am, which is early for most people, but I have always been a morning person so it suits me perfectly. It is a little over an hour of commuting from Boon Lay to the Novena medical campus. I was commuting when I lived in Sweden as well, although not as far, and when I first landed in Singapore I applied the same strategy which was to utilize the commuting time for something productive. Audiobooks and podcasts were the two most common ways to absolve myself of boredom. Recently, I noticed that I was having difficulties quieting my mind. Some soul-searching around this resulted in a decision to leave the headphones in my bag during my commute and use the time to process thoughts and observe the new city I had found myself in. The idea was to have no audiobooks, no podcasts and no apps; just thoughts. I visualized myself staring contemplatively out the window as the synthetic concrete landscape wooshed by, similar to the classic movie character who is just about to embark on a transformative story arc that breaks the monotony of an otherwise routine-infused life. That is not what ended up happening. Instead, I have been facing inward, mostly looking at all the people I commute with. When I was commuting in Stockholm I often found myself on the same train as people I had seen before. It was instances of my routine meshing with somebody else's and I came to recognize people who rode the same early morning trains. I did not pay attention to them in Sweden, but I decided to do so here and it has been a strange experience.


There is a young woman I see almost every morning who is about my age. She stands out. Singapore is a formalistic country in many regards. Most people I see are well-groomed and impeccably dressed in collared shirts and dress pants. She, on the other hand, wears casual clothes, her hair is disheveled and she does not wear any make-up. I have seen her once on the way back in the afternoon and she was well-dressed then. I always assumed that she brings her work-clothes in her bag and gets ready at work. I even speculated that she goes to the gym in the morning; but she does not appear to be in good shape. She always listens to music in headphones, occasionally loud enough that I get faint clues about her music taste. Another theory I have is that she really dislikes the crowded trains that you find on the commuter routes during the typical commuter hours and therefore chooses to take the first train, but that it goes against her natural rhythm and she decided to get ready at work every day and sleep half an hour extra in the morning. I have seen her sleep on the train several times and she always looks tired.


Another frequent passenger is a man in his sixties who is the complete opposite of the young woman. He wears tan suits, probably because the pressing daytime heat forbids a suits in darker colors. I am curious about where he lives, because he gets on the train at Boon Lay but he is always there before me. I arrive at the station at slightly different times every day but I have never arrived before him. My assumption is that he arrives at the station by bus and that he has to wait for the train for a while. He is also a sharp dresser. For instance, he often wears a pink collared shirt with his tan suit, which is not your typical color match and which is definitely not what you expect to see on a man in his sixties on an early commuter train in Singapore. On top of that, he is always perfectly groomed. My grooming routine is very basic and takes less than fifteen minutes each morning. I shower, I brush my teeth and I sometimes trim my beard. This man is always freshly shaven and his shirts are neatly ironed. He must get up early in the morning, especially if he has a connecting bus ride to the train station. Perhaps that is not so strange. After all, I get up early too, but I also do not have a family whose schedules I need to match and I can go to bed at 8 pm to be up at 4 am. Other than our mutual inclination for early mornings, we share a different peculiarity; we both observe. Unlike many other commuters this man does not listen to anything in the mornings and spends his time either reading a book or simply looking out the window immersed in deep thought. For some reason I have seen this man more than any other passenger during my morning commutes because him and I always sit in the same part of the train. I wonder if he would be freaked out if he knew to what extent I have been studying him. For instance, two days ago he wore a different watch than he normally wears. I noticed it because he was suddenly wearing a flashy watch with metal straps where he normally wears a different piece with leather straps. It must have been a special occasion, however, becuase the day after he was back to wearing the old one.


Another man who occasionally takes first train is a man of Chinese descent in his fifties who always has a smile on his face. He wears oval, thin-framed glasses on a round head with a neatly parted haircut and like the other man he is always well-groomed, although one morning I noticed that he had missed a spot while shaving behind his cheekbone, right underneath his ear. He looks like a pleasant person. When I first saw him I was a bit put off by the smile becuase it gave him an ambiance of dishonesty, similar what you would expect from a cliché used car salesman, but after seeing him a couple of times I changed my opinion of him. His smile does not give the impression of an insecure cunning, but rather one of content. I saw him smell a newspaper once. That created some kind of connection between him and I because I adore the smell of fresh ink from a newspaper that is still hot off the presses. This man wears earbuds and he seems to be listening to something. My assumption is that he is listening to music because he listens to it while he is reading the paper, which would be difficult if it was an audiobook or a podcast. Oh, and his earbuds are interesting. They are a kind of colorful earbuds you would expect a teenager to wear. His are a futuristic neon blue, and the cord is in a massive tangle. There might be order to that chaos, though, as the tangle makes the length of the cord perfect for having the earbuds connected to his phone in the outer breast pocket of his suit jacket. I am not sure what he does for a living. He gets off the train two stations before me in an area of the city that I have not had a chance to explore yet.



Loneliness in an urban jungle
I often find myself wanting to write about concepts that people have been telling me about since I was a child, as if I discovered them. Repeating these themes feels important once I finally understand what they mean. One of the most formative moments in my life was when I was in my late teens and a younger teenager whom I was friends with was lamenting about some woe of teenage life, whose exact nature I have since forgotten, and I heard the words "I know how you feel" come out of my mouth. I have had that said to me countless times by my parents, by older friends, by teachers, and so forth, but there was always a disconnect between what I was hearing and what it all actually meant. There is a big difference between being able to intellectually understand a concept and understanding it intuitively. People have been writing about the paradox of living in a big city for as long as there have been big cities. There are millions of people around you and yet you manage to feel lonely. I made a journey that is becoming more and more common with increasing globalization; I moved from a mid-sized town in Europe to a mega-city in Asia. The closest person I know intimately lives thousands of kilometers away. When I first arrived in Singapore I felt a strange unease that I could not explain. I felt alone. People greeted me when they should, they were polite to me when they should be and they helped me when I asked for help. They asked me questions about myself and they answered my questions about them. However, I did not feel a connection with the people I was interacting with. They felt like moving pieces of the backdrop of a big city, not as inhabitants of it. I assume that I, likewise, felt like a moving piece of the backdrop for them.

Observing people on the train have made me realize how I fail to notice because I am too absorbed with my life at any given moment. Before I started observing them they were extras in my world, now they are recurring characters that are becoming familiar. How much am I missing in other aspects of my life? In conversations I wait for the person I am talking about to stop talking so I can inject whatever point that popped into my head five seconds before instead of listening. What kind of person would I become if I made a conscious effort to listen? I cannot remember a single conversation that I have had where I listened more than I talked. It would be fascinating to see a friend and decide beforehand to make sure that the conversation was solely about them; to listen to them and try to find out fascinating things about them. Would that be intrusive? I remmeber hearing American magician Penn Jillette on a radio show talking about cold reading and how intrusive he felt when he tried it. However, he was talking about it in the context of charlatans who use the information they glean from their victims to get money from them. What if you simply apply the techniques of cold reading to become a better listener and conversation partner?


This is a double-edged sword. Anonymity is comforting. For instance, the people on the train whom I observe every morning might be bothered if they knew that I was watching them and writing about them. I would be annoyed if somebody ripped me out of my anonymity like that. Before I made a conscious decision to start observing my surroundings I would have never even paid any attention to these people, just like they have probably never paid any attention to me. My world feels fascinating and complex to me; just like I assume that theirs feels to them. It has struck me that any one of them could be having the worst day of their lives and I would have no idea. One of my greatest character flaws is that on a subconscious level I think people care about what happens in my life to the same degree I do. For instance, I recently realized that I was going to be late on a payment on rent because of a Singaporean national holiday that I was unaware of where the banks would be closed. I held off calling the housing office for hours because I was so embarrassed and because I hated the idea that the person I would have to talk to would think of me. At some point, I realized that the person I would be talking about would forget I existed the microsecond she hung up the phone. That was a relief. I was a bit anxious about having to pay some added fee because I was late in payment, which it turned out that I did not, but the worst part of the shame and embarrassment was gone. It would not be a big deal in their lives, so why should it be in mine? Another mantra that I have been told countless times since I was a child is that I should not care what other people think of me. The truth is that most people don't think of me in the first place.


Having spent a lot of time thinking about these people and others that I have been observing during my commute I have come to realize how absurd much of my anxiety is. Any of these three people could have been going through the worst crises of their lives while I have been observing them and I would have had no idea. When I make a mistake at work or in my social life I feel like the whole world is watching me, but of course they aren't. An example is my behavior with e-mails. When I feel like I have done something good I refresh my e-mail client a hundred times per day. However, when I feel like I have done something bad I close down the e-mail client and only check it once per day. As strange as it sounds, I am hiding from my e-mails. I hope that the better I get at implementing this new perspective I have gained from observing people on my morning commute I will be able to stop this behavior. This realization has already been a tremendous release of tension in my life. Worries and anxiety have been creeping up on a daily basis since I started thinking like this, but once I remind myself that people do not care nearly as much as I imagine them to.