Regular readers would have discovered the rescued stray dog my wife and I adopted passed on last week. I’ve had friends who suffered greater loss of loved ones over the past month. And of course, there’s been quite a lot of bloodshed in the US stock markets as well and there are others mourning different kind of loss.
Before I came to faith in Christ, I actually had more problems with love than suffering. Life seemed to contain lots of suffering – and it can seem arbitrary when we just survey them randomly. So what was strange was that one could love – because it seemed even more meaningless than suffering if there wasn’t a God, or if we just spontaneously emerged in the world without purpose or intent. Love was more a mystery to me.
But as I came to understood love through what was demonstrated by God in Christ, I begin to see perhaps suffering was more a challenge. Faithful Christians suffered, perhaps more than others. And through the bible, whether it was the old or new testament, people who believed in God suffered – often greatly. Yet if one pays close attention, it is often through suffering that we ourselves experience the greatest growth, and we develop more depth in suffering. I’m not saying we should encourage or create suffering but I think we have to learn to see how God’s goodness and His perfect will allows for suffering. And there is meaning in it – yes, even with the misery, the angst, the grief, the pain.
Having gone through all that, the question is, how do you respond? Do you turn bitter against or do you turn to God?
I’ve previously wrote about my thoughts in HR (here too) as well as some stories about my brushes with them. I had never thought about eradicating them entirely though – but Greg Jackson from Octopus Energy actually did that, for his 1,200-strong company. I thought that’s beyond remarkable, and once I read the story, it made perfect sense to me.
Greg’s point about how HR and IT departments can infantilise the employees and end up drowning creativity in bureaucracy and process is almost definitely true. It doesn’t mean it is easy to manage a company without these functions though. He has placed that onus on the manager, which can be quite challenging. Though in today’s highly automated world, there are a lot of the traditional HR functions that is actually already automated or outsourced.
Unfortunately, in a bureaucracy, even when things are not automated, it can seem as though the human touch has been long lost. An anecdote to this is a true story I’d like to retell: an employee who was usually allowed to make transport claims when going from his home to client meetings outside the office had to first drop off his ailing dog at a friend’s place so that the dog would not be left alone at home. However, because the friend’s place was a detour from the meeting location, he paid out of his own pocket for transport from his own home to the friend’s place, then got a cab to the client’s place. When he tried to make a transport claim from the friend’s place, his claim was rejected because the origin location of the trip wasn’t his home address. Even when he appealed to HR on the nature of the situation, the staff (read: humans) were not able to make an exception even when his line manager was supportive.
I think the value here is really in empowerment of the employees and getting the management to do the emotional labour of managing remuneration, incentives, training needed for employees rather than leave it to some specialised department. The way I think about the future of HR is that it is no longer an administrative function but that of empowerment and improving productivity through watching out for mental health. And if that is all incorporated into management, it might actually give management the needed boost and reason to continue existing.
When I was 15, I wanted to go on an exchange to China – I think it was in Ningbo or somewhere East China. It was an experience of a lifetime, or so I thought during that time. I had 3 other schoolmates selected for the programme and they were going ahead. I needed my parents’ approval to go ahead. It’d be only 3 weeks, and I’ll learn so much, make new friends and differentiate myself from my classmates who were all really elite students.
I brought up various benefits of going on the programme, but my parents countered citing safety issues. I talked about assurances from the school, and staying within the campus where the Chinese students stayed too. I mentioned how another of my schoolmate (who was my classmates when we were 12) would be going. They somehow found out and then told me he was okay because he had an uncle who lived in China. At that point I didn’t know but my parents already made the decision to exercise their power not to allow me to go for the exchange. To them, there was no point discussing further because they just wanted to close the case and move on.
Honestly, it wasn’t a nice feeling and I did feel rather bitter about it. I think it was because I felt I wasn’t engaged as an adult. They weren’t honest with me in sharing all that they had concerns with, which they were unable to mitigate and hence needed me to give up the opportunity. It was a lost opportunity for them to reinforce certain values they wanted to see in me before they were willing to let me have more autonomy or support my choices.
When I was reading up the recent coverage on the budget debates, especially the ones on the budget responsibility office (or whatever it is called, because I don’t get confused just because of different names) suggestion from the WP, it reminded me of the time my parents were shutting down the debate. There was no genuine response but just condescension and sarcasm from the cabinet. Perhaps the cabinet ministers felt like parents who knew what’s best and it was so obvious there was no need to waste time explaining further. But I think the opposition MPs this time did come across as the genuine schoolboy I was. He sincerely had a point that he believes in which he wants to make, and is giving the parent an opportunity to engage maturely.
It was a lost opportunity for the government of the day to demonstrate they continue to care and value fiscal prudence rather than just paying lip service to the fact our forefathers sacrificed to build the reserves we have. I think the cabinet ought to remember that the opposition MPs also represents the people (and in the case of the last election, I would say the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament is leading MPs representing a non-trivial 38.8% of the voters or whoever did not vote for the government of the day). And when answering to concerns of the people, the government can be more respectful and engage in more meaningful discussions.
My parents never faulted me for doing badly in school; whether I was top in class or last in class, they always said – as long as you’re doing your best. The problem was, I don’t usually know what my best really is. There isn’t really a proper benchmark. Competing with yourself, doing better and better in each of the next test is also not easy to achieve because the topics tested keeps on changing. Or if you’re gunning to be better in class ranking for each upcoming test, then it is also just a relative exercise.
Doing your best is really more of an attitude, that you have not spared any effort, you’ve not done things you regretted looking back. And looking back means not necessarily knowing the end result but then taking the same course of actions anyways. It’s another thing to say, having known the results, you regret doing such and such (that kind of regret is merely constructing an alternate universe and then attempting to live in it).
So what does it mean to have not done your best? Honestly, only you know. It could be pockets of skiving that you could have been bettering yourself. It could be actions you kept thinking you’d take and then you didn’t despite being fully capable of doing so and with no other obstacles in the way. But above all, it could be anything. The point is, what are you going to do from now? So what if you didn’t do your best just now? It no longer matters; what you do henceforth matters more.
In allowing me to put pressure on myself, and selecting my own success metrics, my parents liberated me but also gave me ownership of my own goals and targets. That is perhaps them doing their best at parenting.
Recently, I had a nice CNY dinner at Whole Earth that was specialised in ‘plant-based cooking’ which of course is there to appeal to those with ‘plant-based diets’. Really pretty good food and I’m really glad we got to go to the place – and it really did happen only because there were a couple of vegetarians within that group I was having dinner with. And this sort of diversity is great, it brings about new ideas, and causes us to think about things we take for granted. Being challenged even in terms of one’s identity is a useful way to grow.
Yet it can be difficult; when asked why we are on one diet rather than another; we might give a response that evangelises the diet, or one that tries to provide excuses for your personal idiosyncrasies. And when people test the boundaries of those diets (‘isn’t alcohol vegetarian?’ or ‘why do some vegetarians eat garlic and onions while you don’t?’), you might get uncomfortable about it. And you might not even have a ready defence or clear idea because you didn’t really think about it when you signed up to the diet. I think these are times when we can be more genuine, to say we’re still figuring these out, but that there are good reasons that you committed to the diet, and hence you’ll figure out why.
What would be an inappropriate response is to ask ‘why are you on that diet of yours then?’ as a response to the uneasiness or the discomfort of being challenged. Or to offer a more personal counter-challenge veiled in intellectualism: “what is the role of your diet in your life then?” Often we don’t even think much about our diets – the masses of us who just are brought up to eat certain things and in certain way! But with the changes that our global economy needs, we had better start questioning and thinking.
The dog I wrote about before whom we’ve adopted, he lived as a stray dog in Jurong industrial estate for most of his life. He was well liked by some factory workers and frequently fed. A while back, they moved him from Jurong to Tuas because the factory enjoyed having him; but soon at the age of 12 he got one of his ear bitten off and it got infected.
It was so bad that his wounds rotted and started to smell. No one cleaned his wounds or tended to him. Even when one of the non-profit stray feeding organisation offered to pay for his vet fees, no one took him to the vet. Instead, they left him to die near a canteen.
The canteen staff called in SPCA to take him in. By then, his wound was full of maggots. He was probably close to death but he fought on and survived. We fostered him after he was nursed back to health by the non-profit stray-feeding organisation. Then about 5 months ago, we officially adopted him. He was with us for slightly over a year.
But being 14, having led a thug life had its toil on him and after multiple bout of illness since December, his condition has deteriorated. We did a lot and spent a lot to keep him alive but it seems like he has reached a stage where he hardly has any quality of life left.
In the year he was with us, he impacted so many lives. People came with their dogs to visit him from all over Singapore. Friends who followed his instagram account told me he was such an inspiration to them. The instagram was the most detailed documentation of his life, his final year. While he lived 13 years in relative obscurity, he’d probably never realise how famous he became in his final year of life.
I plan to write a short children book with my wife (this amazing digital illustration artist) on his life and publish it to raise some funds for animal shelters. Let’s hope I’ll find the capacity for such a project so that in death, he shall continue to inspire. You’ve been a friend, a fellow old man, teacher and often-annoying pet. Thanks for bringing so much colour into our lives. Goodbye Dada.
In a recent dinner meet with some new friends who have just arrived from overseas and settling in Singapore for a stint, I discovered that we actually have a National Integration Council and they have this little guidebook about Settling in Singapore. The foreigners who received their EPs or other immigration documents allowing them to settle in Singapore would receive a hardcopy of this guide.
Besides the attractive graphics and the nice type-setting, I thought it was really nice how they put together some of the norms and conveyed recommendations on how people can adapt to the culture in Singapore. I liked how carefully worded various different practices were in Singapore (including ‘chope-ing’ seats in the hawker centres) in ways that would be neutral. In some sense, the ‘codification’ of all these cultural norms here in such a document from the government already reflected a positive sense of pride.
I’m certainly proud that we have such an organised system to help non-Singaporeans integrate better. For me, I always realise that ultimately, there’s no single Singaporean identity and it would always be full of paradoxes, tension between the Asian values with some of the westernised thinking, struggle between putting self or society first and so on. Over the years, our government have most certainly stepped away from that nannying role and try to take on a more nurturing role towards the culture and the economy. As citizens and Singaporeans, we too will have to step up and mature into a new future that we are going to create and not just passively receive.
We are stingy with our ideas for many reasons; I can think of a few:
We are afraid a poorly thought-out idea will get criticised
We are afraid the idea will put us in bad light
We don’t actually want to take the trouble of executing so we want to spare ourselves the embarrassment
We think compliance is more important than creativity
We leave ‘creative thinking’ to others while we practice “critical thinking”
But the chance to share an idea is not a chore; it is not necessarily a right, and often it is a privilege. The ability to execute aside, at the end of each day when we all walk out into the world, out of our offices, video conferences, as fellow man, we want the best ideas to win, we want the world to be a better place because there were great ideas that mankind acted upon. It was a good idea to burn fuel to get energy and turn that energy into useful work. It was also a good idea to generate those motive power from things like flowing water or shinning sun that will not be exhausted, nor throw up more pollutants into the air.
For Singapore to be greener, better, we need to give our ideas – even the simplest ones you may not think too highly of. And honestly, I think for so long, our government have been very open to ideas-sharing as long as you come in as a concerned citizen who wants to make things better. So, please, I’d encourage you to look through the Singapore Green Plan, and then post your ideas and thoughts there.
In my final blog post questioning the pillars of the Green Plan, I’m covering the final pillar “Resilient Future”. If our vision of a resilient future is just about defending our coastlines against rising sea levels (no doubt important), local food production and having more greenery, I question what resilience really mean. Our future, intertwined with the focus on sustainability and resilience needs to encompass the physical, mental, policy and system aspects of resilience. By reducing resilience simply into something physical, we are giving ourselves too easy a problem to ‘solve’.
Resilience is not an easy concept – there’s a lot of dynamism embedded in it. You can be resilient but not seen as a winner; because it is more about suffering blows than claiming credit. And at the same time, we can build resilience at one level (eg. having strong base of reserves to use when they are required) but when crisis strikes, behave in a way that reduces our resilience (eg. creating moral hazards about using further draws to delay structural changes that is needed in the economy).
And even as we think about the resilience of a nation – what about our people, who are increasingly having difficulties with mental health, who feel increasingly disconnected between the prescribed path to success during their upbringing and their personal experiences in life? Has our education, upbringing and the manner by which we consider policy-making been building up or tearing down our mental, emotional resilience as a nation?
I appreciate that the Singapore Green Plan is not so much a plan than just an effort to piece together ideas as well as existing initiatives so as to cement our agenda against climate change and for more sustainable development. We need all the best ideas we can have regardless of where they may come from. Because when the ideas get out there, whether it works or not depends not on who came up with it – but more on the quality of it and on our ability to execute them. Having healthy conversations, trying to work things out through unanswerable questions are more important than trying to answer them. As a society, it is the willingness to do this, to work together that is going to bring about that resilient future ahead.
On this part 2 of my post about the green plan, I want to interrogate the next 2 pillars about Sustainable Living, and the Green Economy.
Sustainable living; our lifestyles are a product of systemic incentives and disincentives. We already see that in the case of marriage in Singapore and HDB flats availability. And often, availability is actually more powerful than price signals in changing behaviours. Take IKEA for example, you can’t choose to buy a plastic bag, you simply have to make do with carrying with your hands if you didn’t bring your own bag. Of course you can buy the proper reusable bag but that unavailability of the cheap plastic bag option matters.
So when it comes to waste, the lack of waste bins around can help; and maybe more importantly, the availability of proper recycling bins that are locked up, keeps the stuff in them dry and used only by those who have sorted and wash their recyclables should be available. You can even have a daily passcode reset so only those who bother to login to their accounts, check the code can use the bin. This kind of accountability, sense that your upholding of sustainability living makes an impact, will be infectious. Sustainable living only works when everyone plays their part but ideas spread in a different way, the leaders of action is a minority, most people “adapt” to social conventions when they take hold. How we start things off will have to appeal to exclusivity, to those who are leaders of action. We don’t need to convert non-believers but we do need to make things easier and impactful for believers.
Trying to “mass manufacture” sustainable living in the way we drive GDP KPIs is simply not going to work. We need smart and innovative marketing – to spread the good and infectious ideas that convinces us we actually can move mountains – then things gets interesting.
The Green Economy; what exactly is that? The Green Plan blurb for this section starts off with “Tackling climate change cannot be at the expense of livelihoods and jobs”. The negative thinking and presupposition is disappointing here. There is so much assumption around loss of livelihoods and jobs because of tackling climate change which is opposite of truth. Dealing with climate change needs work; and if we think more fundamentally about the work of creating transparency about environmental impacts, around assessment, deployment of solutions, campaigning for behavioural changes (such as those points made above), there are plenty of jobs that will be created. The idea of taxing carbon then subsidising investments in decarbonisation is a great principle but safeguards as to how the investments are made is important; otherwise it gets reduced to tokenism.
All the technological solutions (such as carbon capture, use and storage, hydrogen based energy carriers) trotted out are already available though not necessarily commercial. It’s not so much a question of availability this time around but how the government can help make the economics work by helping to create scale. Singapore has done well in this historically with infrastructure and the latest example is the district cooling system applied at the upcoming Tengeh HDB estate. There are other opportunities similar to creating multi-utilities synergies in Jurong Island a generation ago. When you have stronger regulation on waste management and then provide the waste treatment services efficiently at scale, it will be taken up. And new jobs will be created.
The difficulty in the current existing narrative is the traditional marginal thinking prevailing. We behave as if the green economy is an add on, either to parts of the economy or a layer upon the whole economy. The truth is, whether we see it that way or not, it’ll pervade the entire economy, and it’s going to transform things. That does not mean marginal thinking is not useful – we still need to think about the incrementals but target the systemic differences across all sectors first, then work out the incrementals.
