A break gave Andrew Mason the inspiration to start his new business.
Theroux found his voice during his time in Singapore. Photo credit: William Furniss
As I listened to Groupon founder Andrew Mason talk at the Phocuswright conference in Los Angeles last week about the epiphany he had while on his break in South-east Asia – about how technology was making us, including him, shitty people and he wanted to do something different with his life – found myself thinking about Paul Theroux and his lecture at the Singapore Writers Festival early this month.
I know, there couldn’t be too more different individuals than a tech wunderkind and a 73-year-old storyteller who doesn’t even go on the Internet to research places before he visits, believing that “true knowledge arises out of direct experience”, a quote Chairman Mao Zedong’s essay On Practice.
But Theroux too had a life-changing experience during the three years he spent in Singapore from 1968. “I was looking for a role to play in life,” he said. “I knew I wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know what kind.”
He began identifying with people who were trying to find their identity in a Singapore that was in the midst of major change, socially and politically. “The spirit of individuation – that’s very important if you want to be a writer. You’re not writing for anyone else, you’re writing for yourself and to do that, you have to question authority.”
So maybe it took Theroux three years to find his writer’s voice and it took Mason a month but perhaps that’s a sign of the times we live in – time-compressed, everything-accelerated.
But the fact is, time off and getting away from daily life can do things to people. “Being disconnected and being away from home is very helpful in finding out who you are and what you want to do,” said Theroux at his lecture.
“Being disconnected and being away from home is very helpful in finding out who you are and what you want to do.” Photo credit: iStock
For Mason, his attention span returned and he realised that, like a frog in boiling water, he had become completely addicted to technology without knowing it and that he had become a “shitty” person.
With Detour, it is clear he wants to do the complete opposite of what he did with Groupon. From giving consumers fast, cheap and easy deals, he now wants them to take time off to listen to his audio tours, immerse themselves in the stories told by interesting voices, enjoy the experience as a group and not in isolation and be the storyteller of tours. From instant gratification to salvation of the soul, I guess.
Theroux is of course the original storyteller. The last eight months of his three years in Singapore, he walked the streets and inhaled the sights, smells and sounds of the city. “There were lots of sailors then, Bugis Street was still Bugis Street and I deliberately wanted to write about Singapore as it looked.”
That became the setting for his book, “Saint Jack”, which was later made into a movie which was, ironically, banned in Singapore until 2006 but then screened during the recent Writers Festival.
Just as time can open minds, it can also heal wounds, I guess.
Mason obviously needed time to recover from Groupon and Singapore needed time to heal from Theroux’s portrayal of it.
Theroux says he owes a lot to Singapore. “I was an unformed individual and the experience I had helped formed my pointy of view, that I needed to see things as they are and write about them as they are, not how I’d like them to be.”
Of all cities he’s re-visited, he finds Singapore the most transformed. “The Singapore I wrote about in the 1970s would be something Joseph Conrad would have recognised, it hadn’t changed that much from the time he visited. But today it’s a completely transformed place.”
But Theroux is not one to be lulled by “surfaces”. “The surfaces may have changed but I suspect the stories are similar. One of the gifts of old age is you have this link to the past. You see the world as it is and you knew the world as it was.”
One day, I guess, Mason will be able to say the same thing and I wonder, like he does too, whether Detour will do for tours what Theroux has done for travel writing.
