Cars & transportation

What does your education teach you about cars? Usually nothing much. I never did the road safety course which are supposed to be conducted in every Singaporean school. I do not remember what happened but it is likely I was unwell the day my class went for the course. What I do remember is that there were people on bicycles, people who were pedestrians and then people driving little cars. Those driving the little cars were seen as the privileged ones.

I often hear that with a car, one feels free – perhaps that one can just drive anywhere. For me, I don’t like to drive and so the real value of a car to me, is that it’s basically a huge mobile cabinet or storage that I can bring around with me. I can put different attire in it and be able to change out more easily without having to lug a huge bag with me. And of course, this mobile storage actually can carry me with it.

But what are we really doing to the world as we indulge in the ‘freedom’ of driving around and moving a mobile cabinet around an urban space? We are holding a lot of urban possibilities hostage, while also causing pollution, emitting more carbon into the atmosphere, sustaining yet more businesses that are digging oil out of the ground. It is shameful, to say the least.

So what should we do about private transportation over short distance? I have some ideas, which can be implemented together in some cases:

  • Charge people for driving within urban areas – charge them on a per km basis and with slight decreasing marginal costs.
  • Don’t allow people to own cars, operate car rentals that work as part of the public transport network.
  • Reduce and even eliminate the need for buildings to provide parking while putting a cap on parking charges.

Close more roads on weekends, allow weekend street markets to bloom.

Saying yes to your family

The modern yes man is not the one who only says yes to the boss. He is the one who is saying yes to everyone but himself and his family. And at the end of the day, he burns out. We all are always craving for something additional, something incremental and new that we forget in doing so, we forgo the default that we have worked so hard to have in the past.

We worked hard to support, care, pursue the ones with love but work itself tend to overwhelm and get prioritised above those we care for. And of course we are telling ourselves the story that working is the way we love and care. That is the danger of boiling down our lives and identity down to a single parameter, be it money, career progression, a job title, or what we can own.

My faith has long warned me against that. God has blessed us with so much but we often end up focusing on distilling all that blessing down to a single parameter like money, and focusing on what we are missing, and thinking we haven’t had enough. It certainly doesn’t prevent me from falling back into the trap though. And I guess this post is here to remind myself.

Change story

Does change in the world put more pressure on you to review the status quo and push forward with change plans? Or does it cause you to give up entirely because “nothing you do matters”? What is the story you tell yourself about change, status quo and your agency?

Our old carbon-based economy is interlocked and we all need to rewrite our story around that and envision a different reality for our future. But because things are moving so quickly, one can either feel incredible pressure to change, to communicate something, or to think that others will do the job, I’ll just do the same. What we don’t realise is that the change we see, and feel are just a result of hedonic adaptation that causes us to miss out so much that is still in status quo.

Without a change story, it is hard for us to process and digest change. We get overwhelmed by it, and we shut it out deliberately to preserve our sanity. Old-school companies want to stay in their old ways and continue “business as usual”.

Communicating something, trying to tag on the new green buzzwords and “join the conversation” prematurely without thinking about the change story is going to cause trouble. You might end up getting lost instead, in the twilight zone between the comforts of status quo and leadership of change.

So take time, resources, capacity to consider what is the change story.

Life is kind of messed up

Do you live life or does life live you? People think of this general notion of the various milestones and pathways in the passage of living as “life” and “live that out”. We would take ownership of a life that was prescribed for us, constructed by others, expected by society. And we put upon ourselves more and more constraints. I’m not talking about actual commitments, just perceived ones.

Steve Job shared his perspective of this in a 1994 interview that was recorded and I think it sums up perfectly why it is important to rewrite our stories. Not just as an individual, but also as a generation.

Writing medium

After slightly more than a year of writing daily on my blog, I’ve started working on refining, rewriting and updating my ideas in the same or longer format. These articles will be posted weekly on my Medium page. It’s been a joy sharing my ideas and I’ll be doing more periodic consolidation and eventually publishing them into a book if things work out as I hope.

Meanwhile, for those who are sitting on the fence about writing, blogging, publishing, I highly encourage you try things out yourself.

Range of precision

Humans are poor at thinking probabilistically and this is mostly because reality tends to be a collection or a series of outcomes. Things happen and it seems like things are one or none. There’s no ‘chance of’ rain because it either rains or it doesn’t. So it would seem that probability is an abstraction, something that exists only in the minds of people.

So it might make sense to think about a range of outcomes instead. When we consider our goals and our visions of the future, it’ll be useful to think in terms of scenarios and to actually be rigorous in thinking about them. It is useful to consider if you want to be a manager, what are the conditions to fulfill it, how it would look like in terms of your family life, your friendships and relationships. If we think of our goals in the isolated way in a single dimension, we will never be able to grasp its implication in other dimensions of life.

By thinking of scenarios in a more complete manner where you look at the various goals and the claim on your resources, you can better think appreciate the “chances” of realising some of your vision. Because quite likely, they can be mutually incompatible.

Meta falling

I struggle with Meta’s value creation model; it takes people’s attention, passing it to those who value it, and makes off with the money in return. They then mine for more attention, more screen time, more private data to get more value. This sounds compelling but if their interest remains diametrically opposed to the large user base they boast of, it’s doomed to fail at some point.

Why not focus on long term value that is sustainable, aligning their own interest with the users’ interests. Collecting a fee from companies to provide identity verification services based on user data without handing over private data. Or collecting subscription fees to help users protect their private information and allow it to be securedly shared with treasured connections?

There are ways for Meta to reinvent itself to be a giant worthy of its position amongst the tech firm. Just exploring the metaverse isn’t going to be enough.

No two days are the same

I recall distinctly when I was in school that I get impressed when the working adults tells me their job has no typical days or that no two days are the same. Having been working for close to ten years, I have not seen a job where every day is the same. In fact, for most jobs in the world today, the repetitive elements have been automated. It is no longer impressive that no two days are the same.

In fact, it can be a source of incredible stress; and while work is becoming more the source of purpose and meaning, it is becoming less therapeutic. The satisfaction from seeing things you put together into a final product can be therapeutic. Just think about all the videos you doom-scrolled through Instagram showing you craftsman carving a beautiful vase, or churning out perfectly printed cloths, or products. While we are now busy creating impact, it is no longer clear what is the concrete end-result we are gunning for anymore.

And despite the deep meaning one can connect their work and role with, it is the sense of helplessness, and lack of control that eventually burns one out. In that sense, the greater the sense of meaning in the way you are contributing to the world, the more likely you’ll find it difficult to truly sustain the motivation. Because those problems won’t be solved by you alone. It will take so much more, and even all of you, and you’d find the world no where closer to that great goal you’re after.

Why better can be different

I pondered about what innovation means to us practically and psychologically. And the implications for individuals stepping out into the world is huge. We have been trained by the education system to keep getting better along the same dimensions or at least along the pathways that are given to us. But that is the sort of incremental improvement that is not really innovation.

Innovative individuals probably won’t be efficient or “the best” by measures that are already established. But they can create and invent new ways, new measures to approach the same problem. We can improve along existing out outcomes we care about by working on different areas, using a system engineering approach. Or we can decide that we want to target a different outcome instead, having exhausted the gains in the dimensions we previously worked on.

Take fuel economy of a car for example; traditionally, the internal combustion engine have enjoyed incremental improvements through better design of combustion chamber, the way the torque is produced and the design of the axes etc. But when it comes to electric cars, the electric motors tend to be already quite efficient so fuel economy improvements are achieved through making the car body with lighter materials and reducing the weight of the batteries, improving the battery capacity and ability to hold charge, or to discharge more efficiently and so on.

On the other hand, road safety has been traditionally improved through encouraging safer driving, being stringent about what happens in the cars (no texting, putting on seatbelts), as well as road design, traffic signs, etc. Most of these gains are exhausted already. But we know it can be remarkably improved through widespread coordination of autonomous driving systems. The difficulty is for us to finetune the technology and get authorities to eventually allow the adoption.

But all of these points to the fact that being better involves being different. It can start with exploring the fringes of status quo and picking something that resonates with you to work on.

Identities & inclusivity

Who are we really? As Singapore. Are we a people; do we have a single or multiple different heritage? How does our history and personal stories weave into the social identity? Do we have some kind of common identity? And do we hold on to it? How do we want to evolve? Is it up to us or to be defined by the government? How are we collectively deciding what is important to us and how to maintain these priorities?

The more I think about ourselves as a society that is growing, that is developing itself; the more I realise that we cannot get out of a paradox about our identity. It will perpetuate and we must really be conscious about allowing this paradox to work for our good rather than our bad.

We will never be able to appeal to everyone as a city. They country does not have a sub-urb or hinterland for people to retire into, or a proper place to ‘get-away’ in a meaningful manner. Maybe there is potential, and it needs to be better developed (resort at Pulau Semakau, anyone?); but for now I begin to realise that the more successful it is as an international city, the more challenges we will face as a nation. We might just try to be a regional capital that brings young people, talents and smart money to be mixed, to be exploited to generate value for the world. As we work hard to attract certain groups of people to make our city vibrant and better connected to the rest of the world, there will be people whom we end up excluding somehow. And these may be locals, they may be people in our society we want to care for and care about.

The policy capacity, the thinking around caring for young ones, for elderly, to create pockets of uncompetitiveness for them to be able to survive, thrive and to be dynamic in the long term is going to be limited. We risk optimising only for the short-term when we think only about immediate economic consequences to things. Even though we have good machinery across dimension; and we might have overcome some of the financial resource constraints our forefathers had when trying to create a system to serve all the different objectives, today we’re suffering from the lack of political attention, and policy bandwidth to manage more complex concepts around our identity and what it really means for our growth to be truly inclusive.

I bemoaned the need for public intellectuals; and perhaps this is an uncontroversial topic to start pondering over.