Author: Eigen Moomin

Compiled by: TechFlow

We are the descendants of those brave people who gave up everything they had and migrated to this island, either fleeing war, seeking refuge from famine, or simply in pursuit of a better life.

They built a functioning nation, a place that tamed chaos and gave us a well-ordered life. A life that allowed us to navigate the routine without having to do anything truly courageous. Sure, you still had to work hard, but we also became the first nation of immigrants to completely domesticate ourselves. We extinguished the ambition that had driven our ancestors, hungry and full of dreams, to cross oceans in pursuit of a better life.

This is a prosperous land, and it has been for decades. Our people are industrious, hardworking, and well-educated. Our universities are nearly world-class, and will continue to improve. We are fortunate to be the only country in the world with a rational government and an efficient bureaucracy.

Yet, after half a century of unremitting efforts, turning a barren land into fertile soil, where are our "crops"? Where are our local companies that we can proudly point to? Where are our "Ericsson" or "Nokia"?

The way we refer to ourselves has changed with the times. From our earliest days as an "entrepôt," a trading hub connecting the wealth of China and India, to a "manufacturing base," where our labor carved silicon wafers and refined oil. Today, we've traded our factory uniforms for suits and lab coats, evolving from a "base" to a "hub"—a term for finance, biotech, and a host of other buzzwords favored by The Economist.

While times have changed, the core relationship between Singaporeans and work remains unchanged. We remain the world's foremost compradors. As a service-oriented economy, we train young people to work in banks, funds, laboratories, and factories. We once served as intermediaries for Western companies, unlocking the wealth of the East, but now we serve as image packagers for Eastern companies, integrating them into a world still dominated by the West. The old "boss" has passed away, and a new "boss" has taken his place; he may look like us, but we are still his workers.

As for those local small "bosses": Is there anyone who is truly worthy of admiration? Every so-called "success story" ultimately boils down to a kind of "rent-seeking" behavior.

Here, you can make a lot of money by providing very little value. Find a new policy direction the government is enthusiastic about, set up a consulting firm, and promise to deliver on those buzzwords. Apply for government grants, do no real work, and simply give flashy speeches and hold "seminars." Or, if you're not good at speaking eloquently, source OEM products from China, slap your own brand on them, and sell them as a "local entrepreneur" at double the price. As for real estate tycoons, modern history has long since proven right against those who made their fortunes on land.

Our brightest minds never try to invent—they're too smart to know it's too risky! We Singaporeans are smart enough to understand that the safest way to get a return on investment is to observe what others are doing and then do it better. We're good at math and intuitively know that the risk-reward ratio of starting a business is far lower than being an investment banker, consultant, lawyer, doctor, or software engineer, and the Sharpe Ratio of the latter is much higher—just look at this study: 90% of startups fail!

And when that hollow feeling of “we are a nation without a corporate bastion to be proud of” strikes us, we write articles and make slick CNA documentaries explaining why we can’t innovate, so we can rest easy knowing we’ve at least diagnosed our problems so “professionally”.

The problem, of course, is culture. It's always about culture. I could cite thousands of economists and commentators, hundreds of minds smarter than mine, but in the end it all comes down to that simple word: culture.

Smart people

Our education system is brutally cruel, rewarding those who consistently succeed while excluding those who are prone to failure. Those who commit the grave sin of botching even one exam must pay the price and are forced to take a long road in life in Singapore (except for those who are wealthy enough to pay for studying abroad, of course).

By the time you finally get to college, you’ve already gone through two rounds of intensely competitive exams, each of which claims to give you the skills and knowledge necessary to survive in modern society. But in reality, the most important lesson they teach you is: don’t be the one who gets eliminated.

Faced with such a system, the rational response is to strive tooth and nail to climb up, lest you be crushed by the "sawchipper" at the bottom. But when every test score determines your future, who can afford to do poorly at anything? The opportunity cost of doing an extra test or an hour in cram school is a side project that can't be continued, a skill unlearned, and another door closed to a long and uncertain future. It artificially confines an otherwise rich life to the pursuit of academic excellence, the ultimate goal of becoming a professional in a field that requires exceptional credentials to reap the rewards.

Maybe you're one of the 1% who never suffered in school—lucky you! You had plenty of time to discover what you truly love and try new things. There are probably 50 people like you in each class. Half of them will join the government, have a glamorous career, and never see the light of day again. The other half will leave Singapore for the United States, never to return.

Thankfully, the rest of us are still smart and hardworking enough, and our excellent educations have taught us how to solve any problem in the world for our bosses. But without great leaders to show the way, do we know what problems we want to solve on our own?

Smart, tasteless people

After 18 years of consistently excelling, you arrive at college and the script suddenly flips. Studying for A's and becoming a "jack of all trades" is no longer enough to qualify as "excellence." Now, you're expected to "follow your passion" and "create something meaningful."

Of course, there's no time to waste on cultivating passion or a sense of meaning. There's even less time in college these days. The courses are harder, the people are smarter, and more motivated. So, you're forced to adapt to a new script, scrambling to learn how to perform on a new stage.

You enroll in the university's entrepreneurship program and practice entrepreneurship yourself. You learn all the buzzwords and every presentation technique you need. You create engaging LinkedIn posts, exaggerating every major achievement. You help the university meet its key performance indicators (KPIs) to prove it's producing successful entrepreneurs as part of a government-sponsored entrepreneurship initiative. Once you complete your university-sponsored year-long internship in Silicon Valley, the mecca of startups, you'll add another shiny badge to your resume. Congratulations! You're now a certified entrepreneur.

Note a subtle irony in Singapore: even the birth of entrepreneurs seems to be government-directed. This isn't a grassroots encouragement of ambitious eccentrics, but rather a carefully choreographed dance, with Type-A kids ticking boxes and completing tasks according to a script sent from across the ocean. Even those who perform well enough, even vaguely imitating entrepreneurial behavior, often execute on lackluster projects. "Uber for hawker centers," "Amazon for Singapore," "another tutoring marketplace," "another HDB rental property platform." Where's the ambition? Why do these ideas always stop there?

Give a Singaporean a few hundred thousand dollars and he'll build a tuition center. Localize, spin off, and extract value from existing problems rather than trying to solve any.

A smart, tasteful, and faithless person

At some point, your tastes improve, maybe a few years into your career, maybe during college, and you realize you can spot the bullshit that's all around us.

The problem is, you have all these brilliant ideas and observations, but they're trapped by layers of self-sabotage. You need absolute certainty to even speak, and even then, every idea comes pre-packaged with a corresponding rebuttal. You avoid conversations where you might be challenged; you remain silent in meetings unless you're absolutely certain; you retreat from discussions where someone might know more than you do. There's a widespread social shyness about expressing opinions, even the simplest ones.

The primary consequence is that we end up missing countless opportunities to do interesting things. When you present yourself to the world, even if imperfectly, you allow others to shape your image, your beliefs, and your interests. When someone needs help with something or needs advice, the first person they think of is often someone who already exists in the world. If you don't write or express yourself, you exclude yourself and may even be ignored. Our shyness leads us to minimize our exposure, and this is the little tragedy of transmission that we all ultimately experience every day.

The deeper tragedy is that this is the core reason we remain compradors. Not only is our biggest dream to work for a foreign company or implement someone else's ideas, but it's because we don't believe our own ideas deserve unconditional recognition. We've been so thoroughly trained to yield, hesitate, and avoid mistakes that we've lost our fundamental faith in our own observational abilities.

I hope we can change this. I hope we can be comfortable with our fears, make mistakes, and speak out loudly for our convictions. The ultimate goal is to gain autonomy in our actions, to stop being compradors and start controlling our own destinies. But autonomy in action requires autonomy in thought—the conviction that when you see something, you see it, it matters, and that you will speak out unapologetically.

Without this basic belief, we will always be compradors. We know everything but have no right to decide anything.

A person with intelligence, taste, and faith, but no will

I'm deeply afraid of becoming someone who can only survive within the Singapore system, afraid of being over-specialized to the point where I can thrive only in this environment and wither elsewhere. I believe I'm smart enough to do what I want; I have the taste to discern what's important; I even have enough confidence in my observations to write this, perhaps overly pretentious, article for the world to read.

But did I have the will to act on it? How many hours had I spent pondering these questions, endless lunches and coffees with friends, all agreeing that “something had to change, by someone”?

I've come to realize this: You can't wait for others to change Singapore. Everything you enjoy now—even this behemoth you treat like a god, the government you curse when you fail and pray to when you need it—is because someone spent their entire life building it. If you hate the way things are, either take action yourself or stop pretending that complaining will solve the problem.

Doing anything hard requires sacrifice, especially when the alternative—a comfortable life in Singapore—will almost certainly make you happier. But I hope to stop dreaming of the good life everyone else aspires to and start dreaming of the hard life I'm willing to endure. In that life, I'll stop being a Singaporean who lives a comfortable life and doesn't dare to promise anything, and become someone who believes in my ability to create anything I imagine and ultimately achieve it.

For the first 22 years of my life, I followed a predetermined trajectory: attending the right school, having the right ambitions, pursuing the right goals. In college, like everyone else, I spent my summers interning at major tech companies, hoping to finally land that coveted position. I had everything every successful Singaporean dreams of: a good job with a high salary and the ability to live comfortably outside of work.

But I turned it down and tried my luck in San Francisco. I traded my senior year of college—a carefree time spent partying and having fun with friends—for weekend work in an unfamiliar city, where I was alone and knew very few people. I had a partner I loved deeply, and I knew we would spend our lives together, but I chose to spend the next few years separated from them by an ocean.

I write this not for show, not to earn your admiration for the sacrifices I made for my "struggle"—braver people than I have sacrificed far more for far less. Rather, I write this because I am proud of the one and only act of bravery I ever experienced: meeting that "comfortable Singaporean" on the road and then killing him.

Empty talk is useless, and you have no reason to believe me. But when I come back, I will create something worth sacrificing ten years of my life for.