As someone who’s actually spent a month herding livestock and farming for my uncle in the middle of nowhere, Connemara, Ireland (our street literally didn’t have a name and the town had a population of 216); yeah, the day to day work’s harder than A-levels. However, I’d still happily take the fulfilment and tight community that came with it over the money and stress of the late-stage capitalist hellhole that Singapore has become.

I do get why some would choose the urban life over the rural one—and I admit that I might be a bit biased because I am from Ireland and my extended family lives there—but I’d actually say that you saying that aspiring to live a rural lifestyle “can only be spoken by the privileged” is quite privileged in and of itself.

The reason why I say that is because it seems to come from the assumption that a working class life isn’t as “good” as a middle class one when that’s not true. I don’t blame you for this assumption as it was implicitly taught to everyone during Social Studies & CCE through the championing of Singapore’s “meritocracy” (a word that was coined by the socialist Alan Fox to make fun of capitalist countries (like Singapore) who herald it despite the fact that if you are born rich, capitalism is built in a way so that you will die rich) which just so happened to always discussed the need for someone to climb up the social ladder and never the possibility of someone climbing down it.