The lecture hall yawns like a tomb, half-empty and humming with fluorescent dread. I climb to the top row—safe from the teacher's hawk-eyed gaze and the risk of human interaction. My headphones blare K pop tracks, but even it can’t drown out the click of my grades loading: 4.0. I heard someone’s footsteps come closer and closer to me. I glanced up pausing my music to see my friend stop by and ask “Wanna come over to play pool” his words dissolve into a flowchart: Attend = Fun. Skip = work time. Risk = Being unproductive. Then he asked "are you good?” I said “I’m fine” “You don’t look fine” he said “I am” I replied but internally I just wanted to go home to get some rest and escape from the constant pressure of teachers and peers expecting nothing less than perfection from me. The constant feeling of either meeting their expectations or falling short, never surpassing it.
As class was about to start I decided to just go for a walk and told my supervisor I had to go to a club meeting. Outside, the escalator groans like a conveyor belt to nowhere. I imagine it spitting me out into a life pre-scripted by course selling finance bros on instagram—Goldman Sachs. Ferrari lease. Penthouse with floor-to-ceiling windows and a soul vacuum-sealed in a Hermès tie. Looking at my brother’s acceptance letter into the aerospace engineering program with a shadow of my dad wearing a rolex. While mine wears doubt. As I carve timelines in my retina: Age 25: VP. 30: Partner. 35: CFO. Each number reflects at me like a Caesar waiting to be killed by a thousand cuts. Retire? Never. I need to be richer, more efficient, better.
Some days I look back and remember the text that dad sent on my 14th birthday saying that he is proud of me. Those very words are all I wanted to hear from him – like parched earth aching for a single drop of rain. Emotions? The very thing I was told not to have whenever I had a temper tantrum and was further nailed down when he was teaching me to trade. My friends orbit me like constellations—close enough to blur the loneliness, but their light is cold, artificial, only looking for the warmth to sustain their life. Meeting someone new has turned into categorising them and putting them in the useful or useless category with numbers ranking each of their skills like player stats in FIFA/EA FC. As I was walking back to class I heard a ding and a vibration in my left pocket. I pulled out my phone to see “Did you finish the proposal yet?” I inhale, exhale, and code my reply: Yes.