News this week included: SDP youth wing’s new council; WP’s Pritam Singh cheers HDB upgrading in Eunos; data confirms capital shifting from the Gulf to Singapore amid war; the Philanthropy Asia Summit; Singapore MRT reliability hits strongest level in nearly 18 months; OpenAI commits over S$300m to SG for its first Applied AI lab outside the US; Linda Lim on AI’s impact in the US; IMDA suspends Simba-M1 deal due to potential regulatory breach; H&M moves regional HQ from SG to MY; Meta cuts 8,000 jobs including over 100 in SG; online retailers flagged for unethical, deceptive practices; Amazon leaves SG e-commerce scene; CNA commentary on the prospects for South-east Asia’s budget carriers; deepfake footage of politicians in a S$4.9m government impersonation scam; construction worker dies at Cross Island Line worksite; ST commentary calling for better conditions for migrant workers; one active tuberculosis case (and here’s Jom’s writeup on TB); the Singapore doctor working in war zones like Gaza and Sudan; Tharman on SG becoming a “node” (guess we’re tired of “hub”) for regional artists; Ayaan, Ah Meng’s great-grandson, is our first primate conceived through assisted reproduction; a new species of deadly box jellyfish discovered here; the Asian openbills reshaping local ecology; bird deaths in Singapore hit record high; the Singapore Cricket Club’s facelift; K-pop robots; and Snow City to close after 26 years as Singapore’s first indoor snow attraction.
Below are the issues we explore in depth:
Society: Withdrawal symptoms
Look beyond the brightly lit towers of the Central Business District, or the manic “rat-race” of students scrambling over each other to secure the next resume-boosting internship, and a rather sobering pointillistic portrait of Singaporean society emerges. Follow these pressures to their logical endpoint and you understand how we arrived at the number that has now become a national obsession: 0.87, our total fertility rate (TFR). This isn’t a mere arithmetic problem to be resolved with baby bonuses and other incentives, for the ground reality points to something much more profound: a generation increasingly worn down by endless competition.
Across East Asia and beyond, a new lexicon has emerged to describe this fatigue. China has tangping, or “lying flat”: a quiet refusal of relentless striving. South Korea has the N-po generation, young adults giving up on milestones once considered non-negotiable, from marriage to home ownership. Japan’s hikikomori represents something more extreme— individuals withdrawing almost entirely from society. In other places, “quiet cracking” describes workers who continue performing while slowly burning out beneath the surface. All of these are simply different expressions for the same fracture: a gradual erosion of belief that effort guarantees reward.
Singapore, however, produces its own distinct variant of this exhaustion. Unlike larger countries where those who are fatigued could opt to move to rural areas or to vanish from economic competition, Singapore has few alternative spaces to disappear into. This is reinforced by socio-economic norms that rationalise intense competition throughout life, and by a meritocratic ethos that frowns upon failure as a personal shortcoming.
The result is that instead of “lying flat”, Singaporeans deal with exhaustion in subtler, quieter, and less tangible ways. It shows up in “quiet quitting”, in workers doing only what is required; in “job hugging”, where employees cling to roles they no longer believe in for fear of instability; in “revenge bedtime procrastination”, those stolen late-night hours reclaimed from lives otherwise governed by optimisation. If tangping is withdrawal through refusal, then Singapore’s version is withdrawal through calibrated detachment (a sort of functional disengagement, if you will): remaining visible, productive, and compliant, while steadily lowering their emotional investment in the race. Amidst such widespread “unease”, to borrow the title of sociologist Teo You Yenn’s new book that explores similar themes, it’s foolhardy to expect a flourishing TFR.
Are policymakers finally waking up to this? “Many people are not just asking, ‘Can we afford children?’ They are also asking, ‘What kind of life will we be able to give our children, and what kind of life will we have as parents?’” said Indranee Rajah, chair of the newly-formed Marriage & Parenthood Reset Workgroup. To arrive at an even remotely reassuring answer, an establishment wedded to relentless growth must interrogate not whether Singapore can sustain its model but whether individuals can sustain themselves within it.
Society: From coping to flourishing
Is mental health no longer a taboo topic? From the digital corridors of LinkedIn—leaders outdoing each other in vulnerability and our ever-expanding cache of wellness coaches—to the physical ones around town—workplace wellbeing initiatives and the multitude of mental health professionals opening new doors—Singaporean society now has some awareness of this plight of our modern condition. But beyond a recognition that the words “mental” and “health” can form a permissible duo, there’s much more work to be done to embed its vitality in society. This is the main takeaway from “From coping to flourishing”, a new citizen-led public consultation involving a survey of 525 people alongside a high-engagement subpanel of 23 people with lived experience of mental health issues.
