LAN Cafes and Schopenhauer: How I Became An Academic

For the non-Millenial, non-Singaporean folks, it is hard to imagine teenage boys waiting in line and taking their school uniforms off (just the top, of course) to enter a dark LAN Cafe in a dingy mall on a weekday afternoon. That was my daily reality as I sought to get away from the mundanity of formal schooling. When the school bell rang, I would round up some friends to head to a nearby mall. Unfortunately, we had to deal with the small issue of being in our school uniforms, as the licensing conditions for operating a computer games centre in Singapore meant that "no student wearing his or her school uniform or any part of a school uniform" could be admitted into one (Singapore Police Force, 2018).

Photo of boy using cardboard boxes to cover his school uniform to enter a LAN Cafe
A photo of a teenage boy in Singapore attempting to use cardboard boxes to circumvent the no-uniform rule in LAN Cafes in Singapore (source: Mothership)

Teenagers being teenagers, we found creative ways around this (see the boy in the cardboard boxes above). Looking back, I don't think we truly grasped how inappropriate and silly the whole thing was. Despite the absurdity, playing with my friends in those LAN Cafes was social, made me feel competent, and I got to be in worlds where I could be who I wanted to be. As an adolescent who was awakening to - as Schopenhauer calls it - the insatiable Will, these moments offered temporary respite from the pressures of being a young person growing up in Singapore. In a crowded nation with increasingly fewer physical spaces to relax, mediated experiences are one of the most commonly used ways to find oneself, explore, and relax. Understanding the motivations, substance, and consequences of these experiences isn't just an academic exercise - it reveals who we are and where we're heading, both as individuals and as a society.

Some fun facts about my favourite pieces of media (there are too many...so I list three):

Some other fun facts: