Redditer: Does anyone remember their time as a kid playing along the HDB corridors in the 80s and 90s?

[Tragedeigh]

Does anyone remember their time as a kid playing along the HDB corridors in the 80s and 90s?​

General

I was thinking about the recent influx of complaints about neighbours being nuisance especially those with kids and it got me thinking when did we become so intolerant?

I remembered as a kid I always played on my bicycle along the corridor from one end to the other end and my next door neighbour would tease me about when I’ll remove my training wheels. And then there’s time when me and one of the neighbour kids would play outside our units along the corridor together with our toys laid out on ground. Also I am pretty sure I probably made a lot of noise as kid jumping around with my skipping rope and singing along to kids show. But I don’t recall anyone coming down to our unit to complain. To be honest, I’m not even sure I’ve ever interacted with the neighbours directly above or below our unit. And before anyone says that it’s because the flats were build different in the past, I would like to highlight that noise nuisance complain today come from all types of HDB flats not just the newer BTO flats.

This got me thinking about the mouse utopia experiment conducted by John B Calhoun where mice were given unlimited resources in a controlled environment which led to population to boom initially, but it eventually collapsed despite there still being an abundance of resources. Calhoun described this phenomenon as behavioural sink.

Are we, as Singaporeans, in the pursuit of population growth heading towards the same direction as the mice in Calhoun’s experiment? Our birth rates are abysmal and our society feels more fragmented than before which are similar trends that appeared in the experiment before the mouse colony declined. I am interested to hear what Singapore redditors think about this.

 

[A Singaporean]

Rather live in a cave.