Shut Up About Avocado Toast

Ruby Thiagarajan

My mother already owned a house by the time she was my age. My father had three degrees and had been married twice. I feel productive changing a photo on my dating profile. I’m us-ing problem-solving skills. I want kids. I’m too bloated to have sex though. I bought an enema kit and bone broth powder. I want my life to begin.

— Nostalgia Has Ruined My Life, Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle

Ever since getting my big-girl-desk-job, I’ve been receiving a newsletter called ‘New Launches Review’. The sender seems to have found my email address through my employer’s website, indiscriminately blasting their property listings to anyone who works for the organisation I work at. The ‘New Launches’ are always pricey private condominiums. One of the latest emails I’ve been sent is for the One Pearl Bank @ Chinatown apartments. The cheapest unit goes for $1.176 million. It’s funny that they send me these mailers knowing who I work for because the stamp duty alone for that apartment is 70 per cent of what I make in a year.

The One Pearl Bank @ Chinatown complex sits on the site of the former Pearl Bank Apartments, a single horseshoe-shaped building that was iconic for its striking brutalist design. When it was originally built in 1976, it was one of the most densely populated residential buildings in Singapore, with 280 units. The cheapest apartment then would have cost $130,000. That’s only $337,665 in 2021 money. For context, the 2023 development will have 774 units, each apartment dwindling in square footage. The smallest apartment in the 70s would have been three times the size of the million dollar apartment waiting in my email inbox. 

Being priced out of the housing market isn’t a Singapore-specific phenomenon. In Melbourne, where my partner lives, everybody we know rents unless they’ve lucked into an inheritance or some other windfall. Those who have been able to ‘get on the ladder’ – an apt metaphor for the endless toil of servicing a mortgage – have just been hit by the first interest rate increase in Australia in 17 years. Perhaps that’s why an Australian friend was so surprised to hear that I was trying to save for an eventual mortgage. He’d never considered that it was a possibility at all.

Despite the global housing crisis, home ownership in Singapore is possible and largely the norm. According to the Singapore Department of Statistics, 88.9 per cent of households are owner-occupied, meaning that people either own their homes or live with somebody who does. The flip side of this statistic is that very few people rent due to a combination of factors: sky-high rental prices, low availability of rental properties, and the relative ease that most of the population faces in buying a house. Most home owners live in Housing Development Board (HDB) flats – government-built housing on government-owned land. Flats are sold under 99-year leaseholds, allowing the government to repossess and redevelop the land at will. Buyers are encouraged to pay for large portions of their property with their Central Provident Fund, a mandatory social security savings fund, in combination with cash, thus lessening the load on their take-home wages.

Singapore is a land scarce city-state and urban zoning is heavily planned by the government. Foreign observers often laud Singapore's housing model, praising it for effectively managing the city- state’s land scarcity problems while allowing so many citizens to become home owners. However, the government being in control of property sales also allows them control over certain key levers. In order to buy a HDB flat, you should generally fall into one of these categories:

  • A member of a heterosexual family nucleus where at least one spouse is a citizen or permanent resident;

  • A heterosexual couple that is due to be married (subject to the receipt of a valid marriage certificate);

  • An unmarried Singaporean citizen of or above the age of 35.

The official government position is that heterosexual (or ‘traditional’ – their word) family units are the ‘building blocks’ of society. This logic is adhered to so strongly by government policy that single parent households were, up until a few years ago, not able to purchase public housing because they didn't sufficiently qualify as a ‘family nucleus’. This perspective rests on the assumption that family configurations are a choice, and that choice can be influenced by government policy. To some extent, this is true. It’s not uncommon to hear of couples who’ve gotten married early in order to qualify for housing, so that they can move out of their family homes. It's laughable, however, to think that being shut out of affordable housing would convince queer or unmarried individuals to willingly enter straight marriages. Instead, the result is a high proportion of young adults who still live with their families.

In his video essay titled ‘The Funko Report’, artist Brad Troemel considers how nostalgia and pop culture consumption are symptoms of a millennial dissatisfaction with modern life. Citing the theorist Mark Fisher, Troemel talks about the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ – a state where we cling to cultural objects that feel well-established or familiar as a means of coping with the psychic and material instability caused by neoliberalism. ‘While you might not know which of your five freelance jobs is going to pay you this month and you might not remember any of the five thousand images you mindlessly scrolled through on Instagram today, you can at least buy a 1950s halftone comic book-inspired Funko Pop as a source of aesthetic stability,’ he notes. In Troemel’s view, fandom paraphernalia function for many as talismans to ward off the pain of becoming an adult. Who wouldn’t want to retreat into childhood comforts, with their predictability and reliability, when faced with this world anyway? All the things that were promised to us as youth – upward mobility, home ownership, career stability – are now all less certain than the perpetual machine of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Elsewhere on the internet, Disney Adults issue their rallying cry; ‘let people enjoy things’. Grown women with professional careers put their Hogwarts house in their Twitter bios. Every ignorant-style tattooist has at least one Simpsons character on their flash sheet. I go to The Projector, Singapore’s one independent cinema to escape the endless churn of blockbusters based on children's toys. My friends and I watch The Worst Person In The World, a Norwegian art house film that proves there’s no expiry date on coming-of-age stories. Our protagonist, Julie, flits through university courses, professions, and relationships, eventually passing her thirtieth birthday with still no sense of being settled in sight. Julie is able to rent an apartment in Oslo even on a retail worker’s salary, but she still doesn't feel like she has arrived. Every time she reaches a new milestone, such as moving in with a partner, it fails to satisfy. After watching the film, my friends and I discuss how the millennial condition seems to be a state of suspension. Are we holding out for something better, or are we in denial that the future we are able to imagine now looks vastly different from the future we imagined as children? Julie’s one big professional success in the film is a personal essay titled ‘Oral sex in the age of #metoo’ that goes viral. It's not lost on this essay writer that the practice of articulating (and monetising) one’s personal life through a political lens is a deeply millennial pursuit.

@cherylfaithh The singaporean dream is out of reach #fyp #bto #realestate #fypsg #tiktoksg ♬ Beep - Andrew🥴

What would life be like if you had stayed with your high school partner? I’d be a military wife. There’s not much that I remember about our relationship beyond the typical first-times and fumbles. He was very kind to me, but we were ill-suited for each other. We had very little in common; he loved English football and Mandopop, while I scoured Tumblr for foreign films to torrent. Despite that, we were set on getting married. We did the math. We started dating at 17 and if we got engaged after I was done with university at roughly 23, our public housing flat would be ready for us to move into at around 28. I’m 28 now.

I recently stumbled upon the old Pinterest boards we maintained. Because we didn’t have much in common, most of our conversations were about the future. We imagined what adulthood would look like and pinned our inspirations one by one. We had a dream of opening a cafe together. Neither of us really got to cook our own meals in our family homes and a cafe was the most aspirational extension of that desire. We pinned recipes for foods we hadn’t even eaten before – risotto balls drizzled with truffle honey, goat cheese pasta, a brussels sprouts salad topped with pear, hazelnuts, and bacon. My boyfriend used Pinterest more than I did and I can still see his other boards where he pinned his fashion inspiration. It’s a very 2012 vision of adult masculinity, all slim cut suits and monk strap shoes. All the models on the board were white. Neither of us noticed it then but I think it’s funny now. I had no concept of what being a grown-up in Singapore would look like. I suspect we both equated maturity with Westernness, looking at the recipes we’d saved. Lifestyle influencers weren’t a media category yet and all our locally produced television were stale and moralistic, shows that depicted a thriving heterosexual nuclear family or whipped up moral panics about ‘loose women’ or ‘broken homes’. At the time, my only references for a young adult life were sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother and New Girl – groups of friends who weren't beholden to their families and were free to try on different selves. It was impossible for me to imagine arriving at adulthood without a partner. Dating around, like they did on TV, seemed fun, but getting married was the most legitimate reason to leave home. I wanted freedom to happen as soon as possible, so I hitched my wagon to his.

At 19, I moved overseas for university. I met all kinds of new people from all over the world and was introduced to them as a fully formed person, a welcome and heady change from the intense social pressure cooker that was high school. One night, I met a Korean boy who taught me that ‘real carbonara’ was made without cream. He cooked me dinner and I broke up with my boyfriend in Singapore the next day.

As I write, I’m visiting my partner in Melbourne. Over dinner with friends one night I mention something kooky my parents did as an anecdote. I quickly catch myself and sheepishly explain that it’s normal to still live with your parents well into adulthood in Singapore. His friends are polite; one of them even offers up a, ‘I know family norms are different outside the West’. I appreciate this face-saving gesture and don’t say that I actually live with my parents because the economy is stacked against young adult independence and not out of a sense of filial duty. In truth, I think about moving out all the time. When I was a student, I lived in university accommodations, share houses, and finally, an apartment of my own. I sprung for the last one despite it being slightly out of budget because I suspected it would be the only time in my life I could afford to live alone. So far, I have been proven right.

I scour housing Facebook groups to see if there is any chance for me to move out of home, but they paint a bleak picture of the Singapore rental market. It’s not uncommon to see landlords stipulate conditions that ought to be unacceptable: no cooking allowed, no visitors allowed, no Indians allowed. I never planned to live with my parents so close to 30, but it seems much more preferable to the alternatives. Every time I fight with my parents, I remind myself that weekly therapy is still cheaper than rent. With the money I save on rent, I can do things like replace my laptop if it breaks or pay for emergency dental treatment. I think I’m one of the lucky ones for having parents I can live with. To date, no Singaporean politician is interested in providing solutions for young adults who don’t. I know people who shuffle from one precarious living situation to the next, accepting absurdly short sublets or leaving their names off rental leases and as such waiving their right to legal protection. Sometimes I feel like a fucking creep the way I analyse the Instagram stories of distant acquaintances. Is that person able to afford rent because she has a great job or is that a relative’s investment property? I’m always looking for evidence that it's possible to trick the system with skill or luck. Anything that isn’t just money.

I’m under no illusion that the situation is better in the so-called ‘liberal West’. Sending a percentage of your income – sometimes more than 50 per cent – to a predatory landlord who wouldn’t hesitate to sell the house from under you for profit is not an improvement. And as the average take-home pay in my friend group hovers around the Australian minimum wage, there’s no reason we wouldn't end up in one of the ‘shit rentals of Melbourne’.

@purplepingers Nothing worse than a real estate agent with two first names #shitrentalsofmelbourne #shitrentals #coburg ♬ original sound - Jordie van den Berg

Which housing system is preferable? One where mobility is possible if you fit the state’s idea of the ideal citizen or one where your identity is respected as long as you have generational wealth? Either way, it seems like the traditional markers of adulthood are not the same as our parents’ generation. Millennials are, on average, staying in school for longer, living with their families for more time, and entering marriage and parenthood later (if at all). The total permeation of technology has completely restructured our relationships to work and leisure. The cultural road maps we grew up with are increasingly irrelevant. Some of us will go ‘trad’ by leaning into conservative beliefs about the way things should be. But for many of us the future doesn't look bright, it just doesn't resemble anything at all. Maybe the cheugy millennials were onto something when they announced ‘adulting is hard’.

Ruby Thiagarajan is a writer and editor based in Singapore. She edits Mynah Magazine and writes about books at Tote Bag Library.