if you meet the singaporean on the road

thoughts on why the smartest country in the world has never shipped anything that matters, and why only you can fix it.

We are the descendants of those brave few who, fleeing war, fleeing famine, or perhaps just seeking their fortunes, gave up their whole world to move to a new life on this island.

They built a country which works so well, it has tamed the utter chaos that historically defined most of our forebears’ lives and given us all a neat, packaged life. A life which most of us can live formulaically, sleepwalking through it without doing a single brave thing. You are, of course, still expected to work hard, but we hold the honour of being the first immigrant nation to have so thoroughly self-domesticated, to have ourselves doused the ambition which ferried the droves of hungry poor, desperate and begging for better lives.

We are a rich land, and we have been a rich land for decades. Our people are industrious, hard-working, and well-educated. Our universities are nearly world-class, and they will only get better with time. We hold the privilege of being the only nation in this world with a sane government, and a competent bureaucracy.

All this effort — fifty years of non-stop toil — turning a fallow wasteland into fertile earth, and where are all the crops we have to show for it? Where are all the local companies that we can point to and be proud of? Where are our Ericssons and Nokias?

The names we give ourselves have changed over the years. We were first an “entrepôt”, a base where the riches of China and India were exchanged for opium and silver. We swapped the coolie’s rags for the standardized garments of industry, becoming a "manufacturing base” where the labour of our people etched silicon wafers and refined oil. Today, we have given up the factory overalls for the business suit and lab coat, becoming more than just a “base”, but a “hub” – of finance, biotech, and other buzzwords that print well on The Economist.

The times have changed, yet the core relationship between a Singaporean and his work has stayed the same. We are still fundamentally the comprador-par-excellence of the world. We are a service economy, in that we train our young to serve the banks, funds, labs, and factories. Where we used to serve as interpreters for the companies of the West to unlock and exploit the riches of the East, we are now PR-men for the companies of the East to whitewash themselves and fit into a world still ruled by the West. The bossman is dead, long live the bossman; he may look like us now, but we are still just his workers.

And as for the petty local masters: can you think of anyone truly aspirational? Every "success-story" ultimately boils down to a core of rent-seeking.

You can make so much money here providing very little value at all. Find the hot new policy interest the government is obsessed with, spin up a consultancy that promises to deliver on this buzzword. Apply for government grants, do nothing of substance at all, but have flashy speeches and run “workshops”. Or, if not blessed with the gift of the gab, buy OEM products from China, slap your own brand on it, and resell it for twice the price as a “local” entrepreneur. We don't have to waste a word on the real estate moguls, because all of modern history has judged the correct response to those who grow fat lording over the land.

Our best minds don't build — they're all far too smart for that! We Singaporeans are so smart, we know that the safest way to get a return on our investment is to see what everyone else is doing, and to do it better. We're so numerate, we know instinctively that starting something new has a lower risk-adjusted EV than working hard as an investment banker/consultant/lawyer/doctor/software engineer, and with a far higher Sharpe ratio too – look at this study that shows how 90% of startups actually fail!

And when that hollow feeling of being a nation with no bastion of private enterprise to be proud of creeps in, we write polemics, and create well-produced CNA documentaries of why we can't innovate. We can then excuse ourselves of doing anything about it at all, feeling slightly better for having at least so expertly diagnosed our own problems.

The problem, of course, is culture. It has always been about culture. I could invoke the names of a thousand economists and pundits, a hundred minds far sharper than mine, and it would still reduce to that singular word: culture.

Those who are smart enough

We have a brutal education system that rewards those that keep winning and shunts aside those that fail at any point. Those who commit the grave sin of fucking up even one exam, must pay penance by being forced take the long way through the Singaporean life (save of course, those rich enough to pay for an indulgence to go overseas).

By the time you reach university, you have survived two cycles of competitive examinations, each of which purports to endow in you necessary skills/knowledge to function in this modern age, but in actuality teaches you the most important lesson of all in Singapore: do not be the one that gets cut.

The rational response to such a system is to spend all your energy climbing as far up the pole as possible, before the woodchipper at the bottom grinds you down. But when every test score determines your future, who can afford to be bad at anything? The opportunity cost of an extra exam paper done or an hour spent in a tuition class is a side-project not pursued, a skill not learnt, another door closed in a long and unknown future. It is the artificial constriction of an otherwise large and varied life into paths of academic excellence, where the end goal is to become one of those professionals in a field which rewards sterling credentials.

Maybe you’re part of the 1% who never struggled in school – lucky you! You have enough spare capacity to find out what you actually like, experiment around a bit. There’s maybe 50 of you per batch. Half of you will then saunter prestigiously into the government and never see the light of day again. The other half will leave for America and never come back.

The rest of us, thankfully, still come out smart and hardworking enough, our sterling educations teaching us how to solve any problem in the world for the bossman. But without Great Leader to set the direction, do we ourselves know what problems we want to solve?

Those who are smart enough, have no taste

After 18 years of performing intelligence well, you reach university and the script suddenly changes. Studying for that "A" and being an "all-rounder" is no longer enough to be considered "doing well". You're supposed to "follow your passion" and "build something meaningful" now.

There was, of course, no time to waste developing passion or meaning. There is even less time in university now. The classes are harder, the people smarter and more motivated. So, you make do and hastily learn the new performance for the new show you're supposed to put on.

You sign up for your school's entrepreneurship programme and perform entrepreneurship. You learn all the buzzwords, all the things to say in a pitch. You make big sparkling posts on LinkedIn overstating every major achievement. You help hit the KPIs that the school wants to show that it's producing successful entrepreneurs as part of the government’s drive towards entrepreneurship. Once you have gone for your one year school-sponsored stint in Silicon Valley, the Mecca of entrepreneurship, you get another sparkling badge to add on to your resume. Congratulations, you are now a school-certified entrepreneur.

Notice the little irony that in Singapore, even the creation of entrepreneurs appears to be a state-run affair. It’s not the grassroots encouragement of weird kids that like to dream big, but a well-rehearsed choreograph where Type-A kids learn to tick boxes according to a script written across the ocean. Even those who perform well enough to actually approximate some simulacrum of starting a company have shit taste in what they execute. "Uber for hawker centers." "Amazon for Singapore." Another tuition marketplace. Another property platform for HDB rentals. Where is the ambition? Why does it always end at the causeway?

Give a Singaporean a few hundred thousand dollars, and he will build a tuition center. Local, derivative, extracting value from existing dysfunction rather than fixing anything.

Those who are smart enough, who have taste, have no faith

At some point, you will develop taste. Maybe a few years into your career, maybe during university, you'll realize you can spot all the bullshit that exists around us.

The problem now is that you have all these wonderful ideas and observations, but they're trapped behind layers of self-sabotage. You need absolute certainty before speaking, and even then, every thought comes pre-packaged with its own rebuttal. Conversations where you might be challenged are avoided, you stay quiet in meetings unless you're completely sure, and you take a backseat from discussions where someone might know more than you. There is a pervasive, societal shyness towards the simple act of having an Opinion.

The first order consequence of this is that we end up denying ourselves countless opportunities to do interesting things. When you transmit yourself into the world, even imperfectly, you allow others to develop a model of you, of what you believe in and are interested in. When someone needs a guy for something, or when someone needs an opinion on something, the person that comes to mind is first a person which exists in it. If you don’t write or express yourself, you eliminate yourself from even being considered. Our shyness makes us minimize our surface area for consideration, and this is the minor tragedy of transmission we all end up living on a daily basis.

The deeper tragedy is that this is the heart of why we all remain compradors. Not just because the best dream we have is one where we work for foreign companies or implement other people's ideas, but because we don't believe our own thoughts deserve to exist unqualified. We've been trained so thoroughly to defer, to hedge, to never be caught being wrong, that we've lost the basic faith that our own observations matter.

I wish we could change this. I wish we could be comfortable being cringe, being wrong, being loud about what we believe. The end goal is for us to have sovereignty of our actions, to stop being compradors and to start setting our own destiny. But the sovereignty of action first requires the sovereignty of thought – the conviction that when you see something, it matters that you see it, and you will say it without apology.

Without this basic faith, we remain compradors forever. Understanding everything, authorized to decide nothing.

Those who are smart enough, who have taste, and have faith, but have no will

I am deeply afraid of being someone who can only exist here. Of being so hyper-specialized to the Singapore system that I would wither anywhere else. I believe I'm smart enough to do what I want, that I have taste in choosing what matters, and enough faith in my own observations to pen this overwrought and florid essay for the world to read.

But do I have the will to act on it? How many hours have I spent thinking about this, having endless lunches and coffees with friends who all agree that Something must be done by Someone?

What I have come to realise is this: you cannot wait for someone else to change Singapore. Everything you enjoy now – even that vast entity you treat as God, the Government you curse in failure and beg in need – exists because someone spent their lifetime building it. If you hate this sordid state of affairs, you either do something about it yourself or stop pretending complaining about it fixes anything.

Doing anything hard requires sacrifice, especially when the alternative, the comfortable Singaporean life, would almost certainly make you happier. But I want to stop dreaming of the good life that everyone else wants and start dreaming of the hard life I would be glad to have lived through. One where I stop being the Singaporean too comfortable and too afraid to commit to anything, and become someone who believes in my own capacity to build whatever I imagine, and to see it through fully.

I have lived 22 years of my life following the trail, going to the right schools, having the right ambitions and pursuing the right goals. In university, I did as everyone else did, burning all my summers on internships at big tech companies, working toward that final one that everyone dreams of getting. I had what every good Singaporean dreams of, a good job which pays you well, and lets you live a life outside of it.

I turned it down to try my luck in SF. I've traded my final year of university – that last year with friends where, having nothing left to grind for, you party and drink your hearts to merry content – for years of working weekends in a city where I know no one. I have a partner I love dearly, someone I know I'll spend my life with, and I've chosen to spend the next few years an ocean apart from them.

I write this not as a performance piece begging for your admiration at how much I've given up for the grind — people far braver than me have given up much more for far less. Instead, I write this because I am proud of it being the sole brave thing I have done in my life: meeting the Singaporean on the road, and killing him.

Talk is cheap and there is no reason you should believe me. But when I come back, I will build something worth a decade of my life.