Singapore

It’s not easy to live in Singapore sometimes. The small city size means we are generally familiar with almost the entire island. Well, actually I’m talking about Gen X and Y in general. We grew up without iPhones and the constant notifications of our online lives. Because of that, we mingled with people as we got along, took buses or MRT everywhere, and traveled all over the island just to meet up and chill out. Yet despite knowing the map so well, we are still divided by our areas of domestication. Actually you can almost break Singapore down like an…

If you belong to Gen X or early Gen Y, you’re probably part of the last generation that remembers what it was like to be completely off the grid. No smartphones, no blue ticks on WhatsApp, no Grab live tracking. If you wanted to meet up with friends, you couldn’t send ten messages back and forth. You agreed on a time, picked a spot, and simply showed up. The Discipline of Waiting Meeting up meant waiting at an MRT station, outside your favourite shop at Wisma Atria, or by a specific stone table under a void deck. If your friend…

Singapore is a pretty grounded place. Take a walk around the neighborhood on Sunday morning, and you can see everyone, young and old, wear a sloppy T-shirt and slippers, queue at the same hawker center for a $4.50 meal, and grumble about the exact same COE madnes. Yet behind the scenes, you can also sense a quiet divide in the way we live: the landed group, the HDB majority, and the big in-between—condo stayers. The HDB Corridor: High-Density Reality Most of us grew up in a HDB flat, and it used to come with zero acoustic secrecy. In older blocks,…

I sometimes come across videos in Xiaohongshu, and find a noticeable split in visitors opinions on the price of living in Singapore. One group looks utterly traumatised, and vents: “Singapore is so much more expensive then Beijing and Shangahi! Don’t come! A small bottle of plain drinking water at from a convenience store costs $1.50! A 15-minute Grab ride cost me $50! We had chili crab and it was fabulous…until we saw the bill was $200!”Then another video pops up right after. A different visitor is wandering through a normal neighbourhood, looking shocked: “Living in Singapore is so cheap! I…