Have no future

The first time I heard it, I laughed. A young operator, barely twenty, was standing at the plant gate rolling a cigarette, and when I asked him what he planned to do next year, he did not shrug and he did not sigh. He just said it, flat and final, the way you say the rain will pass: no future. I thought it was a joke, the kind of thing you say when you are young and bored and want to sound interesting. He said he was not joking, and then he added, almost kindly, that I would hear it everywhere if I listened. He was right. Within a month I heard it from a driver, from a barista, from my own nephew after his graduation ceremony. Not shouted, not wept. Stated, like a fact of geography.

That is the strangest part of it. When I was young, a sentence like no future was supposed to be loud. It was a punk slogan, something you screamed at the world because you were angry and wanted the world to know. The version I keep hearing now is quieter. It has no anger in it at all. Nobody is rebelling. They are reporting. The way you report that the store is closed, or that the bus did not come. That is what worries me more than any riot ever could. Anger still believes a future is possible and is furious it has not arrived. The quiet version has stopped expecting it.

A promise we were raised on

We were all raised on the same promise, and I do not think any of us questioned it until it was too late to ask for a refund. Study hard, pass the exams, get the degree, and the country will hand you a future, pre-packaged and ready to open. Our parents believed it because for their generation it was almost true. A certificate really did open doors. A government job really was a job for life. You could work at one company for thirty years and receive, at the end, a gold watch and a pension and a place in the family history. The promise had fine print, but nobody read fine print when the weather looked this good.

Somewhere between their generation and ours, the machine that printed those futures quietly stopped. Not with a crash. Not with an announcement. It just slowed, then stalled, then sat there looking exactly like it always had, while the doors it used to open stopped opening. The degrees kept coming. The ceremonies kept happening. The gowns, the photos, the proud parents, all of it identical to before. Only the ending changed, and the ending is the part nobody photographs. We did everything we were told and arrived, on schedule, at nothing.

Everyone is doing everything right

I work at a plant, and if you want to understand a country, stand at the gate of a plant at six in the morning and watch who walks through. Some of the smartest people I know punch a clock there. Operators with engineering degrees who took the shift because the shift was the only thing that said yes. A woman beside me calibrates instruments with a precision that would embarrass most laboratories, and she has been on a rolling contract for six years, renewed every January like a magazine subscription nobody remembers ordering. Her future is not a plan. Her future is a renewal date.

Ask them why, and you will not hear bitterness. That is the thing I keep circling. They will tell you, calmly, that the office jobs they trained for now ask for three years of experience they do not have, or pay less than the plant, or have already been filled by someone who knew someone. They will tell you that the companies that once hired graduates now hire algorithms and contracts. And they will say it without self-pity, because self-pity is a luxury for people who still believe the system owes them something personal. The operators know the system does not owe anyone anything. They just did not know it would stop pretending it did.

The ones who can leave, leave. I have watched the smartest of them go, one by one: the nephew working on a ship in another ocean, the former supervisor now in a factory on the other side of the world, the friend who sends money home from a kitchen in a country whose language he learned from an app. Every one of them left quietly, the way you leave a house that is still on fire but nobody has mentioned it. And the rest of us, the ones still standing at the gate at six in the morning, we are not the ones who failed. We are the ones who did not have a ticket. I have stopped being able to tell the difference between courage and having nowhere else to go, and I suspect, by now, so have they.

The maths does not close

People talk about hopelessness as if it were a feeling, something that arrives in the chest like weather. It is not a feeling. It is arithmetic. Sit down one evening with a young worker, a payslip, and a list of what a life costs, and you will watch the future die of addition. The wage goes up a little every year. The rent goes up more. The rice, the transport, the school fees, the medicine, everything climbs faster than the wage can chase it, and at the end of the month the columns simply do not meet. Nobody has to explain to them that they cannot afford the future. They have done the maths themselves, on their phones, at night, and the numbers have already told them.

So the big things get postponed, and postponed, and then quietly abandoned. The wedding becomes next year, then the year after, then a smaller ceremony, then nothing. The child becomes a question nobody asks anymore. The house becomes a word you use for other people's houses. Even the small dignities get postponed: the dentist, the new shoes, the holiday that would prove you are alive and not just employed. I watch whole lives being lived in a holding pattern, circling a runway that was never built. It is not that they have given up on the future. It is that the future has given up on them first.

Anger still believes a future is possible and is furious it has not arrived. The quiet version has stopped expecting it.

The comedy of the nation

If it were only the arithmetic talking, they could argue with it. But the arithmetic is not the only thing speaking. The country speaks too, and this is the part that makes everything feel like a joke that has forgotten to end. Living here means living inside a comedy written by people who do not realise they are writing one, and I have started to keep a small, private list of its best scenes, the way you collect the funny things a child says. It is the only way to survive them without going bitter.

Scene one is the road, and the road is the one I know best because I drive it twice a day. In a sensible country, a road is built so that people can drive on it. In ours, I am increasingly convinced, a road is built so that it can be inaugurated. I have watched the same stretch of street be inaugurated three times in two years, complete with the ribbon, the applause, the photograph of the important man holding the giant scissors, and each time the ceremony was flawless and the road itself remained, underneath the fresh patch of asphalt laid precisely where the cameras would point, exactly the same road. They even re-inaugurated it once after it rained. In a normal country you fix the hole and move on. Here the hole gets a second ceremony.

Scene two is the office, and this one I did not witness myself. A young man I work with took a day of leave to get a single letter stamped. One letter. He arrived before the office opened, because everyone knows you have to. The employees arrived an hour later, unhurried, carrying their breakfast. There was a queue, then a long break that started suspiciously early and ended suspiciously late, and when his number was finally called, the man who owned the stamp was in a meeting, and the meeting, by the sound of it, would outlast the afternoon. Come back tomorrow, he was told. He came back tomorrow, and the man had gone to another city. He came back the day after that, and by then he had used three days of leave for a signature that took eleven seconds to make. When he finally got it, nobody asked why it had taken so long, because in this country a stamp is not a formality. It is a pilgrimage. And everyone knows that a pilgrimage is supposed to cost you something.

Scene three is the photocopy, which sounds small until you add it up. The state already knows everything about us. It knows our identity numbers, our addresses, our family names, our fingerprints, the faces we make for the camera. It knows what we earn and where we live and which school our children attend. And still, for the simplest request, it asks us to bring four copies of documents it already possesses, and the copies must be carried by us, from counter to counter, because the counters do not talk to each other. The data is all there. The data is just not allowed to move without us. So we become our own couriers, shuttling our own lives from one window to the next, and we call it service, and somewhere a database sits idle, full of answers, waiting for a question nobody thought to ask it.

Scene four is the holiday, and this one costs me money, which is why I remember it. At nine o'clock at night, the announcement came: tomorrow would be a national holiday, sudden and glorious, decided by someone far away who would not lose a day's wage over it. In other countries people plan their holidays. Here holidays are planned for us, announced like a surprise nobody asked for, and for people like me and the young operator, a sudden holiday is not a gift. It is a day without pay, decided by someone whose salary does not stop when the country takes the day off. The same government that cancels our futures also cancels our Tuesdays, and it does both with the same cheerful, unthinking ease.

I keep the list because I need to believe it is funny, and it is, until you notice what the laughter is covering. A road inaugurated three times is a road nobody is serious about fixing. A stamp that costs three days of leave is a service that has quietly changed sides, built for the comfort of the people behind the counter rather than the people in front of it. Photocopies we carry ourselves are a country that would rather make us run than make its systems talk. And sudden holidays are a sign that the people who decide do not feel the consequences of what they decide. That is the real joke, and it is not funny at all: the country behaves like a comedy, but the people who write it never have to sit in the audience. They are never the ones waiting in the queue, or driving on the re-inaugurated hole, or losing a day's wage to a holiday they were told about at nine at night.

Ask the young why they leave, and they will not always mention the wage. The wage is arithmetic, and arithmetic can be argued with, postponed, survived. What they mention, sooner or later, is the feeling that the country is not serious. Not cruel, not evil, just not serious: a place where things are announced instead of done, inaugurated instead of finished, stamped instead of solved. You can survive a country that is poor. It is much harder to survive a country that is a performance. And I think that is the quietest thing the young operator is saying when he says no future. He is not saying the days have stopped. He is saying the show has stopped convincing him, and he has stopped clapping.

The family business

Now I have to write about the part I kept avoiding, because it is the least funny scene on my list and the one that explains all the others. In the news, unemployment is a number, revised every quarter, argued over by people who have jobs. In my neighbourhood it is not a number. It has a face, and the face is usually young and usually still living with its parents, because that is what a degree gets you here: a better-educated resident of your childhood bedroom. The country does not have an unemployment problem, it has a queuing problem, and the queue does not move because the queue was never the point.

The question that decides your life here is never what can you do. It is who do you know. I have watched it happen too many times to call it a coincidence. A young man I know passed every stage of a selection for a government job: the written test, the interview, the medical, all of it, clean and honest and better than most of the people who got in. Then the results came, and his name was not there, and the people who got in included, as these things always do, the children and relatives of the people who ran the selection. There is a word for it here that everyone understands and no one says in the office: orang dalam. The insider. The one who does not need to pass because he was already inside. My friend did not fail the test. He failed to be born to the right parents, and no exam in the world can fix that.

Call it nepotism if you want, but the word sounds too clean, like a small administrative flaw. Here it is something larger, because when work is scarce, a job stops being an opportunity and becomes an inheritance. The powerful do not hand their children money, not always. They hand their children the queue, the place at the front that everyone else has been standing in for years. And the cruelest part is that the families who need that inheritance most are the ones who have nothing to pass on. The operator's son will start at the back, same as his father did, while the minister's nephew starts at the front and calls it merit. The poor do not need the state to be generous. They need the state to be fair, and fairness, it turns out, is the one thing that cannot be inherited.

And the money. I have to write about the money, because it is the reason there are no jobs to pass on in the first place. Every year the country announces that a fortune has been lost, and the fortune is always announced in numbers so large they stop meaning anything, trillions that could have been hospitals, could have been schools, could have been the factory that would have hired my neighbour's son. They even have a name for the projects that exist only on paper. Ghost projects, they call them, budgets that walk and buildings that never arrive, and I have started to think the name is too kind, because a ghost at least has the decency to haunt one place. Our ghosts are built everywhere and exist nowhere, and every one of them was once a job that someone did not get.

What stings most is not the theft itself. Countries steal; thieves exist everywhere, and every country has its share. What stings is the sentencing, which is where you see the whole system wearing its true face. Here it is possible to be jailed for stealing a chicken and celebrated for stealing a budget. The small thief, the one with no connections and no protection, is caught quickly and punished thoroughly, because catching him is easy and costs nothing. The large thief has lawyers, friends in high places, and a talent for being transferred rather than tried, and when he is finally convicted, years later, the sentence is often shorter than the trial, and everyone understands that the real sentence was always going to be paid by the people who could not afford the appeal. Justice here is not blind. It is just very good at looking away when the thief is well dressed.

Put the three together and you finally see the whole picture, the one the young are looking at when they say no future. Corruption is why there is no money. Nepotism is why the little money there is goes to the same families. And unemployment is what is left for everyone else: not a failure of the economy, but a decision, made quietly every year, about who gets to eat. The country is not poor. The country is unfair, and unfairness is harder to wait out than poverty, because poverty can end and unfairness only compounds. People can forgive a government that tries and fails. It is much harder to forgive one that has stopped trying and simply manages who wins. And when the young look at the queue that never moves, at the insider who starts at the front, at the ghost projects and the well-dressed thieves, they are not making an argument. They are reading the room, and the room has told them, in every language it has, that the game is fixed and they were never dealt in. You cannot tell a generation that has read the room that the room is fine. They were in it.

The loan that is sold as freedom

And when the future is cancelled and the door is locked, something else moves in to fill the space, and its name is debt. I did not understand this until I started noticing the phones. Every worker at the plant has a phone now, of course, but that is not what I mean. I mean the way the phones have started to own the people who carry them. A young man I work with borrowed two million rupiah from an online lender because the washing machine died and his wife was pregnant and the month was longer than the money. Two million. The kind of number you could almost laugh at, until you learn that the interest does not care about your laughter. By the time he finished paying it back, he had paid nearly four, and the machine that did it to him is always there, glowing in his pocket, offering him two million more in thirty seconds, no questions, no shame, just a button that says yes. The future used to be stolen from us slowly, by the system. Now it is sold back to us by an app, and we pay for it in instalments.

The lending apps are only half of it. The other half is the gambling, and I do not say that lightly, because I have watched it take people I care about. Online gambling has become a kind of mass sedative here, advertised on billboards and smuggled through the same phones that are supposed to be making us smarter. I have known operators who lost a month's wage in a single night and came to work the next morning looking like men who had been in a fight with themselves. I have known a foreman who sold his motorcycle, then his wife's jewelry, chasing the win that would finally pay back the losses, and everyone at the plant knew and nobody said anything, because what do you say to a man who is drowning and has decided the water is a swimming pool? They are not gambling for fun. They are gambling for the future that was cancelled, trying to win it back in a single spin. And the house, as always, is the only one who wins, and the house is a server in another country that does not know our names.

This is the cruelest invention of all, I think. The old system stole our futures and at least had the decency to look like a system, something you could name and blame and vote against. The new one does not look like anything. It looks like a convenience. It looks like freedom, and it arrives in thirty seconds, and it takes everything slowly, with interest. We spent years being told the future was cancelled, and now we are being offered a loan to buy a fake one. And the worst part is that the young men taking the loan are not stupid. They know the odds. They know the interest. They take it anyway, because the alternative is sitting in the dark with a broken washing machine and a pregnant wife and a month that will not stretch, and when the future is a locked door, even a loan shark looks like a window.

The future used to be stolen from us slowly, by the system. Now it is sold back to us by an app, and we pay for it in instalments.

The air we are going to inherit

There is another inheritance coming, and it does not wait for the will to be read. It is in the air. I notice it most on the days I ride my motorcycle into the city, which I do less and less because my chest complains. On those days the sky is not a sky. It is a ceiling, grey and low and patient, and by evening my shirt collar is grey and my lungs feel like they have been sweeping a chimney. We used to say the city was growing. Now it is the smog that is growing, and it has become so normal that we have stopped mentioning it, the way you stop mentioning a relative who is always sick. We have built a country where the first thing a child inherits is not a house or a hope, but a cough.

The rivers are part of the same story. Once, every town here was built on a river, and the rivers were the roads, the markets, the baths, the life. Now many of them are open sewers, and the fish that used to feed the poor are gone, and the poor have learned to fish for plastic instead, because plastic at least has a price. The floods come every year now, and every year the officials stand on the bank and promise to fix it, and every year the water remembers that it was here first. We are not inheriting a country from our parents. We are inheriting a debt to the earth, and the earth does not offer payment plans. And the strangest part is that nobody is angry about it, because anger requires believing someone could have done better, and we have stopped believing that about anything.

The hours the city eats

And even the time itself is being stolen, in a way so ordinary we have stopped counting it. I have a friend who leaves his house at five in the morning to reach a job that starts at eight, and he leaves again at five in the evening to reach home at nine, and if you do the arithmetic, he spends more of his waking life on the road than with his children. The traffic here is not an inconvenience. It is a tax, collected daily, in the only currency that cannot be printed: hours. Four hours a day is twenty hours a week, a thousand hours a year, and a thousand hours is a month and a half of a life, gone, in a queue of motorcycles and buses and cars that are not going anywhere faster than the ones in front of them. We complain about it, of course, and then we sit in it again the next day, because the alternative is a house we cannot afford or a school we cannot reach, and the city has arranged itself so that the poor must travel the farthest to earn the least. The future is not only cancelled. It is also late, every single day, in traffic.

The vote that was bought

I have been avoiding politics in this essay, not because it does not matter, but because it is so exhausting that even writing about it feels like more of the same. But there is one scene I cannot leave out, because it happened in my own street and I still do not know whether to laugh or cry at it. Election season came, and the candidates came with it, and suddenly our poor neighbourhood was rich with gifts. Rice, cooking oil, sugar, sarongs, envelopes with money folded inside, all of it arriving just before the voting day, all of it stamped with the faces of the men who wanted our votes. The man who had done nothing for us for five years was suddenly our best friend, and the man who had been stealing from us for five years was suddenly the one who remembered our names. Democracy here has become a market, and the poor are the stock, traded every five years for a sack of rice.

I am not naive. I know that politics has always had its hands in the pockets of the powerful, everywhere, in every country. But there is a difference between politics that sometimes serves the rich and politics that is openly for sale. Here the buying is not even hidden. It happens in the open, in the markets, in the mosques, in the kitchens, and the price is known to everyone, and the only people who are shocked by it are the ones who have never had to sell their vote to feed their children. And what do the poor get in return? The candidate wins, and the rice runs out, and the five years begin again, and the road is still a road, and the school is still a school, and the only thing that has changed is that the man in the big house now has a reason to ignore us for another term. We sell our futures every five years, and we call it democracy, and the buyers laugh all the way to the next election. And yet, even here, I have seen the stubbornness of ordinary people. I have seen neighbours who refused the envelopes, who argued that a vote should be a voice and not a sale, who stood in the street and told the brokers to take their rice elsewhere. They lost, of course, most of them. But they lost the way people lose when they are right, and there is a kind of dignity in that which the winners, with all their rice, will never understand.

The old who cannot afford to stop

And what of the end of the road? We talk so much about the young who have no future that we forget the old who have no past to fall back on. My neighbour is sixty-seven years old and still works as a night guard, because the pension he was promised never arrived, and the savings he had were eaten by his daughter's wedding and his wife's hospital bills and a thousand small emergencies that no one plans for. He sleeps four hours a day. He stands at the gate of a building that is not his, watching over the cars of people who earn in a day what he earns in a week, and when I ask him when he will retire, he laughs, and the laugh is the saddest sound I know. Retirement, in this country, is not a stage of life. It is a luxury, and it has been cancelled along with everything else.

The system was designed for a world that no longer exists. It assumed a lifetime of formal work, a pension that would follow, a family that would take you in when the pension ran out. But the work became contracts, the contracts became gigs, the gigs became nothing, and the pension became a rumour, and the family, the last safety net, has been stretched so thin by its own struggles that it can barely hold itself, let alone its elders. So the old keep working. They become guards, drivers, street sweepers, sellers of snacks, anything that will pay for rice and medicine, and they work until their bodies refuse, and then they work a little more. We have created a country where the young have no future and the old have no rest, and in between, the rest of us are running, trying to be both at once.

The sandwich generation

And that is the last thing I want to write about, the running. There is a name for my generation now, and the name is a sandwich, because we are squeezed between the generation above us, who need to be fed and cared for, and the generation below us, who need to be raised and educated, and we are the filling, the soft part in the middle that takes all the pressure. My salary, such as it is, does not belong to me. It belongs to my mother's medicine, my child's school, my sister's tuition, my uncle's funeral, and the small portion that is left over belongs to the future, except that the future keeps getting more expensive and the portion keeps getting smaller. I am not saving for my own old age. I am saving for everyone else's, and I am running out of sandwich.

I do not write this to complain, because complaining implies that someone is listening who could change it, and I have stopped believing that. I write it because I want the record to be honest. The future is not just cancelled for the young. It is cancelled for the old, who cannot stop. It is cancelled for the middle, who are squeezed. It is cancelled in the air we breathe, the hours we lose, the votes we sell, the loans we take, the gambling we do in the dark. There is no single villain in this story. There is only a system that has stopped delivering, and a people who have been asked to carry it, and a generation that has quietly concluded that the carrying will never end. And yet, and yet, and yet. I keep writing that word, and I keep meaning it. Because I have seen the old night guard stand a little straighter when his daughter visits. I have seen the sandwich generation cook for each other when the month runs out. I have seen the young operator, the one who said no future, help a stranger push a stalled motorcycle in the rain, without being asked, without expecting anything, because that is what we do here, we carry each other, even when there is nothing left to carry with. The future may be cancelled. But the people are not, and as long as they are not, I cannot stop believing that something will survive, even if it is only the stubborn, stupid, beautiful habit of taking care of each other.

What keeps people going

And yet. I keep coming back to the gate at six in the morning, and I keep watching them walk through. This is the part I cannot explain with arithmetic, and I have stopped trying. The same people who can tell you, calmly and correctly, that the future has been cancelled, still wake up before the sun. They still work the shift. They still bring lunch in the same container, still joke with the same people, still save the small amounts the maths says are pointless. They are not hoping. They are doing. And there is a difference between the two that I did not understand until recently.

Hope is a thing you feel about tomorrow. Doing is a thing you owe to today, and today still has teeth. Today has a child who needs to be fed and a mother who needs her medicine and a roof that leaks when it rains hard. The people I work with did not stop being kind when the future was cancelled. The kindness just got smaller and more local, the way a fire gets smaller and more careful when the wind turns against it. They cook for each other. They carry each other's shifts. They lend money they cannot spare and do not ask when it will come back. They are building the only future that is still available to them, and it is made of Tuesdays.

Maybe that is what no future really means, and I think this is the sentence I have been walking toward all along. It does not mean the days have stopped. It means the ladder has been removed, the one our parents climbed and told us to climb, the one that went from effort to reward in a straight, predictable line. What is left is not a ladder at all. It is a floor, and on that floor people are still building things, smaller things, sideways things, things that will never be in the brochure. The future was never going to arrive like a train. Maybe it was always supposed to be built like a house, and we are the generation that has to learn to build it without the blueprint.

I do not want to romanticise this. There is nothing noble about an expired dream, and I will not tell a young operator that standing still is secretly freedom. Some of them are genuinely trapped, and pretending otherwise would be a cruelty dressed as comfort. But I have also started to notice something I did not expect, which is that the people who stopped waiting for the future are, in a strange way, the only ones who are fully alive in the present. They are not saving themselves for a day that will not come. They are spending themselves on the day that is here, and there is a fierce, unphotographed dignity in that.

The young operator who first said it to me is still at the plant, still rolling his cigarettes at the gate, still renewing his contract every January. I asked him once, months later, whether he still believed it, the no future thing. He thought about it longer than I expected, and then he said something I have not stopped turning over since. He said the future was probably still cancelled, but that he had decided to stop checking the mail for it. He had started, he said, living like the day was the whole point, and not a waiting room for something better. He said it without irony, which is the part that got me. He was not performing wisdom. He was just describing how he had learned to survive, and survival, in a country that has quietly stopped promising anything, looks a lot like this: work, cook, love, sleep, and do it all again tomorrow, not because the future deserves it, but because the people around you do.

I still do not have an answer for him. I do not think anyone does, and I have stopped trusting anyone who claims otherwise, because the ones who claim to have the answer are usually the ones selling the ladder. But I have learned to look at the gate differently now. Every morning those people choose, again, to walk through it, and a choice you make every morning, with your eyes open and the arithmetic done, is not the same as a hope you were given as a child. The promise was cancelled. The people were not. And as long as they keep waking up, keep feeding their children, keep being kind to each other in a country that has stopped promising them anything, I do not think I am allowed to call it no future. I think I have to call it a future they are making themselves, one Tuesday at a time, out of materials nobody promised them.

Abraham Herd

Gets lost on purpose and reports back. Abraham writes about ordinary days, good sandwiches, and whatever he found on the way.