The Examined Life by Jamie Soo Siew Yuin

The decline of leisure in the life of a student is prominent indeed as with the decline of leisure in the lives of everyone for that matter. For progress, perspiration is the price to pay. With the test date of the October SAT I looming up, there appears to be much turbulence which have students of the American Degree Foundation Program running higgledy-piggledy in their heads while determining to ensure, with much difficulty, that their calm external composure does not desert them.
With me, it is always the case. Be it major national examinations or minor school ones, my study area will be a vortex where books, papers and other paraphernalia will be strewn, encompassing and encircling my desk. A general in my own rank with 11 years of test-sitting experience under my belt, I have won battles against irksome biological terms, triumphed over calculus questions, each capable of beheading us and each more vexatious and violent than the last. On the other hand, I have yet to quiver under the clutches of English, a subject most students in their secondary school would scoff at and deem redundant to study at that time. True it is that at that time, no amount of studying English would have helped; however, now, I fear I need all the help I can get for studying for the SAT is something unique and dissimilar compared to the other subjects. Students are hurled back to basics, back to the basics of English grammar and building up of vocabulary.
It is not that studying for SAT irks me, though at times it does drive me up the wall. Conversely, a few years back, I am daunted by the very notion of when all this will ever end - when all this will finally come to a halt and we can enjoy life. But then, I think I have come to know now that it will never end. To quote my mother, “People work so hard, they don’t even find time to get sick.” Indeed, people cannot bare to fall ill, even a slight indisposition will jeopardize the enterprise of larger dealings.
Back to the topic, I feel that all my futile complaints are simply a by-product of societal progress. Things never stop because if you rest, you rust and for progress to occur, the only way is to pay the price of perspiration and to ensure that you are not left behind. All of us have truly paid the price for prosperity to the extent that sometimes when I am pensive, I question myself for the need of all these “unnecessary” hard work.
Although not a country which practices capitalism in its economy, Malaysia, along with the rest of the world, has been influenced by capitalism more than it knows. American capitalism has flourished in the more covert form of neocolonialism via cultural domination. Simply by watching Hollywood movies or following the much publicized lives of its celebrities, we are influenced to work hard in order to gain that level of material achievement as well so that we can enjoy life.
As a result, self-progress has brought a dramatically increased standard of living, but at the cost of a much demanding work life. True, we have access and the option to eat more and satisfy our palate, but are we not burning up those calories when we work? We have high quality color televisions, compact disc players, and high-fidelity audio technology systems that we work hard to earn for, but at the end of the day, we need them to unwind our stressful lives at work. We may seem well-off to take vacations, but we slave ourselves throughout the year that these times of relaxation have become indispensable to our sanity. In a whole, the conventional wisdom that progress has brought us more riches as well as more leisure is only partly justified. I feel it is never going to end because we are caught up in a wave, an unending circle in which we want to enjoy material things, so we work hard; we work too hard and we feel the toil; the material things we have now is not enough to satisfy us because we have been suffering in work and we now need more expensive gadgets to appease our psychological protests and needs and wants.
So, it is justified, that the decline of leisure in my life as a student is only just the beginning. Because I want to succeed in life by being accepted into a good university, I have to study hard. Ironically, it appears I have no say in the matter for everything is pre-planned and sanctioned without my own approval. However, I accept my place in this world for I am not fully controlled by a remote. I do have a choice to embellish my otherwise dull life by living it to the fullest and I have a purpose that is to achieve all that I want to gain to make this world a better place for posterity. “I have a dream,” Martin Luther King Jr. once said. I have one too and it most certainly does not involve me enlisting in slave labor for more than 30 years of my life and fade out like a distant candle without a purpose; just watch me realize it.