At 2am yesterday, my sister's alarm kept ringing. With a headache pounding hard, I nudge her awake to off and remove her alarm. This whole process continued every 5 minutes, with exchange of not-so-nice-words, until she got irritated, woke up with bloodshot eyes said something and went out to the sofa to sleep. She was obviously tired, but she did not remove the alarm to remind herself to wake up, for she has to reach school at 4am.
Has our society gone crazy with work? Our government is always telling us to improve and upgrade ourselves, like during the 1970s, where there was the restructing of our economy from low-skilled to high-skilled as seen by the doubled increase in wage. This is in line to compete with our neighbours who are catching up with us in the low skilled jobs. We then found another niche, the manufacturing industry if I am not wrong.

Today, our education is aimed at the development of the "whole person", who is a critical, creative thinking life-long learning students. This means that not only do we have to be academically strong, we now have to participate in other non-academic to show our active participation. We even have a system of rating our CCA!

So when my sister has to reach school by 4am for her external cirricular activities, it's normal. The school gates were even opened for them. Because it's one of the elities school in Singapore after all. What's surprising is that no one protested when the unholy timing of 4am was suggested. And she's only secondary 3 in the chu chu train programme (IP).

So tell me, will we be so burried in studies and our external extracirricular activities in the future, that sleeping 2-3 hours is normal? Not like it is absurd to sleep at that time and wake up at 6am now anyways. Will we also end up like Japan in the future, with high suicide rates because we simply cannot cope with the high stress? I don't doubt that the day is far.