Workers Party rally in Anchorvale, Singapore, during GE2025 (Photo: Laremy Lee)
Singaporeans have long rolled their eyes at the stereotypical Asian parent mentality that often defines societal attitudes towards learning and education.
You know how it is; nothing is ever quite good enough. An A- is dismissed for not being an A. One’s accomplishments are frequently measured against those of others, prompting questions like: “Why you never score higher than your friend?”
Though we have since come to decry this attitude whenever it rears its ugly head, it’s strangely ironic to see that same spirit unabashedly manifest itself after the dust had settled on GE2025.
Much of the public reaction thus far, from those who desire more pluralism in Parliament, has been to lambast and lampoon opposition parties for their perceived failure to wrench more constituencies away from the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP).
Worse still is the hand-wringing over Singapore’s supposed failure to mature as a democracy, simply because more non-PAP voices haven’t been elected to Parliament to offer broader, more incisive perspectives.
The dismay is understandable. It speaks to the “divine discontent” in our Singaporean DNA, which then-Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong described in 2016 in his National Day Rally speech as a function of us being “always not quite satisfied with what we have, always driven to do better”.
Nevertheless, while the disillusionment is understandable, it may be misplaced—highlighting instead an opportunity for a hopeful, collective mindset shift among Singaporeans and their leaders. One that can lay the foundation for a stronger, more resilient future in the next six decades to come.
Recently, a young person reached out to me to schedule a video chat about life paths and careers.
I was pretty impressed by a few things:
First, her courage and confidence in networking, especially since neither of us knew the other before this.
It takes gumption and moxie to do a cold approach in any situation, so kudos to her for breaking the ice.
Second, her creativity and maturity – while she’s on a gap year, she’s been talking to people around the world to learn from them.
This is precisely what the internet was built for – knowledge and exchange of ideas across boundaries.
Last but not least, her well-crafted questions.
What she asked gave me much food for thought, in terms of what I’ve learnt thus far, and how someone else might also be able to use that learning to do or be better.
And, perhaps, if another opportunity presents itself again, it might be a comparison to what I would say in the future. It’d be interesting to see how my thinking would’ve evolved – or not – at each age or life stage.
What advice would you give your younger self?
When it comes to learning and life, strike a balance between going at it on your own versus getting trusted advice from someone who’s been there and done that.
On one hand, reinventing the wheel can often be an exercise in futility.
Having someone reliable with the wisdom of experience to guide you makes the process of learning and development quicker and less painful; you get to avoid any pitfalls while reaping the rewards of success.
On the other hand, tried-and-tested methods, while safe, may not always lend themselves to creativity and innovation.
She asked a follow-up question: How do you find that balance? While i had provided an initial response, I’m reworking what I said initially and would like to offer this instead:
Always gather information first, regardless of whether what you want to do is something others have done before, or something no one has done before.
You may uncover inputs that are useful, relevant and applicable, in a direct or indirect way.
Conversely, you may discover information that indicates a need to forge your own path, instead of following a well-trodden one.
Once you gather sufficient insights, distil them to make decisions on how best to do what it is you want to do.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learnt from your career?
Take care of yourself.
I don’t mean this in a selfish or self-centred way, such as by placing your own needs before those of others.
Rather, really carry out self-care in all the different dimensions i.e. physical, mental, emotional, etc.
When you’re in a good place, you can accomplish almost anything, be it leading yourself or others to greater heights.
To use the oft-quoted Oxygen Mask Analogy: during turbulent times, putting on our own masks first allows us to help others put on their masks.
(NOTE: I had actually published this post on Vesak day, to share something tangentially related to the festival which has given me a different perspective on life [and death]. However, I realised there was a lot more i wanted to say and have been adding to it since then.)
A discussion on reincarnation, it explores how young children will sometimes relate, to their parents, eerie accounts of past lives.
For the record: I’m not a woo-woo person. I find it hard to believe claims about alternative medicine, mysticism and the like, especially when they sound more like assertions than well-researched findings.
So when I started reading the thread, it was with some degree of scepticism.
Undoubtedly, there were dubious-sounding stories. Yet, for many of the recounts, there seemed to be a pattern:
The children who had past-life memories were very young, around the ages of three to six years old or so.
The utterances often took the sentence stems of “I used to…”, “When I was older…”, “This happened when I was big/grown-up…”, “Before you were my mum/dad…”, etc.
These memories were sometimes triggered by certain experiences or places.
It took a while but I ploughed through all the comments, fascinated by the uncanny similarities of the cases.
Or coincidences, perhaps. I was recently introduced to the word “apophenia” or the “tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things”.
I was well aware of the possibility of me trying to make meaning out of nothing at all, as well as all the other conclusions that could be reached.
In other words, the nature of the internet affords an anonymity that allows anyone to pretend to be someone they are not, contributing to the proliferation of catfishing, a heightened belief in fake news, etc.
So it could be argued that these people who were posting on the Reddit thread – if they were even people and not bots – were all in on the act, posting tall tales for the attention, using a certain template hence the pattern, etc.
Even then, my gut told me there seemed to be much more to reincarnation and past lives that I – and we, as a civilisation – don’t know enough about.
At the same time, I saw, in some of the posts, mentions of academic research on reincarnation that had been carried out.
I thought it fair to suspend my judgement and started sifting through the external sources provided by some Redditors, as well as searching for key terms that had sprung up in the posts.
Since then, I’ve been reading as much as I can on these – and related – topics.
Interestingly, I’d been carrying out research on mindful leadership and self-care since last year, with some forays into meditation.
Some of the concepts I’m reading and learning about are starting to coalesce in some manner – though, again, I acknowledge the possibilities of confirmation bias, recency bias, etc.
I’m compiling what I’ve covered so far below this post so as to facilitate the search for anyone who might be interested in finding out more and desires some level of rigour in the readings.
As mentioned earlier, I’m not a woo-woo person, so I wanted to be sure the works had some degree of credibility.
Unfortunately, there’s still some fluff in some of the materials. This is unavoidable and should not be seen as marring the overall quality of the research done by other scholars or thinking embarked upon by other writers.
Until there are better and more precise ways to capture measurements, information, etc. about the phenomenon, what we have presently has to suffice for now.
Perhaps you might also be interested as to where I stand with regard to reincarnation and past lives, and why I’ve been so captivated by it.
First, the notion of reincarnation. Is it real? Does it exist?
The best answer I have right now comes from the translated abstract of a Spanish paper* which encapsulates my views in a nutshell:
The hypothesis of reincarnation is controversial. We can never say that it does not occur, or [that we] will obtain conclusive evidence that it happens. The cases that have been described so far, isolated or combined, do not provide irrefutable proof of reincarnation, but they supply evidence that suggest its reality.
* NOTE: I haven’t been able to read the paper in full so my assumption is that the translated abstract represents the paper accurately, and that the paper is sound.
Next, if reincarnation is real, it’s conceptually appealing to me, as a believer in and lifelong practitioner of people development.
The purpose of reincarnation, as theorised by some religions in which reincarnation is a central part of their belief system, is for each of us to learn a set of lessons in each lifetime as we progress to our final stage, be it enlightenment, liberation or what have you.
Even if reincarnation were proven to be fake or a hoax, this principle of bettering ourselves is still a noble one to practise.
There’s a third reason which revolves around human intelligence and the next stage of our evolution as a species, though I haven’t quite been able to formulate it into a coherent thought.
The general idea I have right now: we need to be devoting as much resources – money, time, energy, etc. – to understanding ourselves as we are dedicating to developing technology of and for the future.
I hope to return to this soon when my thoughts are more fleshed out. In the meantime, please enjoy the readings and do let me know if there’s anything I should add to the list.
Web articles that provide a starting point
Children Who Report Memories of Previous Lives | University of Virginia The website of the Division of Perceptual Studies, a department in University of Virginia’s School of Medicine, dedicated to the study of phenomena related to consciousness functioning beyond the confines of the physical body, and phenomena that suggest continuation of consciousness after physical death.
