Nobody said anything. That silence was the loudest thing in the room.

Ingeus fired me. Other times, companies retrenched me. Different word, same door. Six times total, someone decided my role, or my presence, wasn’t going to be part of what came next.

You’d think by job loss three or four I’d see it coming from a mile away. I didn’t. Not really, until I started paying attention to the shape of the silence instead of waiting for the announcement.

Here’s the part that makes it worse. I’ve also spent 11 years inside recruitment. I’ve sat across the table from hundreds of people after their retrenchment, talented, experienced, mid-career, blindsided. And almost every time, when we talked through the months before, the signals had been there. Nobody had named them.

These days I also run layoffsg.com, a layoff tracker, crowdsourced from mainstream media and from people going through this right now. So I’ve now seen this shape from three angles: the guy getting let go, the guy who’s read hundreds of these stories after the fact, and the guy keeping the spreadsheet.

Two things worth understanding before the list.

The people who know aren’t allowed to tell you. Not malice, legal and commercial reality. Once a decision is seriously on the table, there’s disclosure sequencing, flight risk, information leaks to manage. So the people who know behave slightly differently. Not dramatically. Just slightly. That slight difference is the signal.

It’s structural, not personal, even when it feels completely personal. Companies retrench roles, not people. Your manager may have found out a week before you did. They may genuinely like you and the work you do. None of that changes the org chart decision made two levels above them.

So you’re not looking for signs your boss dislikes you. You’re looking for signs your function, your level, or your cost, is on the wrong side of a shape the company is already changing into.

The hiring freeze. Roles vanish from the portal. A colleague leaves, and nobody talks backfill. On its own, it could be nothing; budget cycles happen. Stacked with anything else on this list, it’s a company that’s already decided on its cost base.

Consultants arrive. Not the growth-project kind. The org design, span of control, headcount benchmarking kind. If you don’t know exactly what they’ve been engaged to do, that’s worth finding out.

Communication gets careful. Town halls go from specifics to principles. “Transformation,” “fit for purpose,” “evolving our structure” start replacing actual numbers. If leadership suddenly sounds like they’re reading off a holding statement, they may be holding something.

Your manager changes. Fewer 1:1s. Shorter ones. Evasive answers about your future, your next project, your visibility upstairs. This is the Ingeus one for me. I’ve heard the same line from other people more times than I can count: “Looking back, he stopped fighting for me about three months before I was told.” That three-month gap is the whole reason this list exists.

You’re asked to document everything. Your workflow, your systems, the stuff that only lives in your head. Could genuinely be reducing key-person risk. Could be reducing key-person risk in preparation for the key person leaving. Both can be true at once.

Budget disappears. Travel freezes. Training gets denied. Expenses that used to clear now need two approvals. Companies tighten before they cut. The tightening is the signal.

Your scope shrinks. Projects reassigned. Meetings you used to be in, you’re not. This is the one people rationalise hardest. “They probably just needed someone with more capacity.” Maybe. It’s also how the case for removing a role gets built, one small handover at a time. Pay attention to what’s being taken away, not just what you’re being handed.

None of these alone means anything. Three or four stacked in the same month usually isn’t bad luck.

Most people do one of two things when they notice: dismiss it, because acting on it means admitting the possibility while the salary and title still feel real, or panic, and start making big decisions from fear.

Neither’s right. The move is quiet and early: update the resume while you’re still stable, reconnect with your network before you need them, build some visibility outside your current company’s walls, and actually find out your notice period and severance formula before you’re negotiating from zero information under stress.

I go through all of this in more depth, more of the six, and the actual mechanics behind each signal, in the video. Watch it here:

Over lunch, he laid it out. He had just come back from Nanning. There is, he said, a concerted but unofficial plan by the Chinese central government to bring overseas Chinese back to China. Since you cannot apply to be a Chinese citizen, it takes the form of an economic opportunity instead. Singaporean Chinese banding together, going after things you can never achieve in tiny Singapore.

Okay. Checks out so far.

Then the sweetener: I just needed to buy my own air ticket. Food and drinks fully covered once I’m there.

A mostly free trip to Nanning. I took it.

The trip itself was strange in a way I only understood later. There was a token park visit and a token mall visit. Everything else on the schedule was meeting other Singaporeans already in the program.

I do marketing for a living. I know this move. Get your existing customers to sell to your prospects, because a peer is more convincing than any salesman. I have advised paying clients to do exactly this.

Knowing the move did not protect me from it.

Because the “existing customers” kept escalating. First a few regular uncles. Then a Singaporean of the Year. Then an OG PAP MP. All in the program. All telling me about it over meals I didn’t pay for.

At this point nobody had explained what the program actually sells. It goes like this. You pay a membership fee to join. Two tiers: one card (SGD28k) or two (SGD47k). Each card lets you bring someone in as your downline, and each downline pays you. Two cards, more downlines. According to sharing sessions I could not verify, some people have made millions.

Notice what’s missing: the product. There isn’t one. You pay to get in, then you earn by getting others to pay to get in. It’s a money game. A ponzi scheme with better catering.

But here is the part I’m not proud of. One night in Nanning, lying in bed, I remember thinking: if a Singaporean of the Year and a former PAP MP are in this, it can’t be a scam, right?

I did what any self-respecting sceptic does. I googled it. In English. Nothing incriminating came up.

Then, for a reason I still can’t explain, I switched my keyboard to Chinese and searched again.

The results flooded in. Video after video. Malaysians running the same scheme. Taiwanese running the same scheme. A Taiwanese reporter who went undercover in Nanning with a hidden camera, and the footage made their mainstream news. The whole thing had been exposed for years. Just not in the language I was searching in.

The scam lived in a language blind spot. So did my due diligence.

When I came back, I told a journalist. I got brushed off. So the story sat in my drawer for eight years.

I’m digging it out now because a friend who joined the scheme tells me it’s making a comeback after a long Covid hiatus. The timing is perfect for them. Market is down, layoffs everywhere, plenty of people looking for the fastest way to make their money back. If you’re in that group, you are exactly who they are looking for.

To be fair, my friend joined mainly for the network, and he did meet his current business partner there. But I’m sure somewhere out there is a man who met his wife in a brothel. You wouldn’t call it a dating app. If it’s network you’re after, SID, EO or YPO will give you a far better hit rate, minus the fee that goes to funding somebody’s upline.

There was a point during the trip when I thought, so what if it’s a scam? Willing buyer, willing seller.

I recognised that voice. I first heard it at 17, working a fragrance counter as a retail assistant.

There was a gangster who hung around the place. A regular. Small talk, never bought anything. One day he let me know he wanted a bottle of perfume, that he knew there was no camera near my counter, and that I was going to help him. He made it sound like I had already agreed.

I was 17. I was more afraid of him than of what I was agreeing to. So I helped.

Then it happened again. And again. Somewhere along the way I stopped checking whether I was still afraid. By the later rounds, some of it was for my own pocket. Our last haul retailed at about $3,000. It left our hands for $1,000.

Nobody wakes up planning to fence perfume. The first time, you have a reason that sounds like survival. By the fifth time, the reason has changed and you never noticed the handover. Once you touch the moral line, it moves. And it keeps moving.

So in Nanning, I knew exactly where willing buyer, willing seller leads. You join as the guy who got talked into it over duck rice. The day you recruit your first downline, you are the gangster pointing out where the cameras aren’t.

And at that price point, some people will be joining with borrowed money. The kind that makes a person jump if it doesn’t come back. I can still quote the retail value of perfume I helped steal as a teenager, so I know how long these things stay. I didn’t need another one.

And if you’re thinking you can always exit later: they will tell you someone will gladly buy over your membership when you want out. Remember what this is. A ponzi scheme does not have a return policy. One friend got conned into it by her stylist, and only got her money back by threatening to blow the whole thing up in the middle of the salon. That is the refund process. Hope your upline has a business she wants to protect.

When I got home in 2018, I told another friend the full story. His response: “So old already still kena scam. Gotta self-reflect.”

I took offense. He is also not wrong.

The duck rice was good, by the way. Looking back, it was the only thing in the entire program that was actually free.

The new boss sucks. The restructure makes no sense. The boss is a dick. Standard stuff. The kind of talk that fills a car ride and a thousand kopitiam tables every evening in Singapore.

I kept my eyes on the road and mostly listened.

I’ve heard this too many times. The label changes but it’s the same bottle of wine.

The pragmatist solution is to seek greener pasture. But urgh, that means giving up the flexibility, the comfort, the people, the [fill-in-the-blank].

So they stroll on, hoping things somehow improve. Or maybe do a Bryan Johnson and just try to outlive everyone else at the office.

Let me tell you about Amin.

Amin was the QA manager at my third job, an aviation spare parts distributor, around the time SARS emptied the airports and very nearly emptied my desk too. Grumpy old man. One of the genuinely nice ones. He had an answer for everything, either in his head or somewhere in a notebook only he could read.

He’d been there longest, so he knew where everything was, why every odd decision had been made, which supplier to never trust and which one would save you on a Friday night. The company couldn’t get rid of Amin. Amin was the documentation. His value wasn’t the QA work. It was that the institutional memory lived inside his skull and nobody had a copy.

That’s how he stayed till retirement. The iron rice bowl was never a government thing. It was an Amin thing. You made yourself the only backup drive, and they couldn’t unplug you.

Now every company can pay Anthropic $20 a month and spin up a digital Amin for the whole office to use.

That, on top of globalisation, layoffs becoming normal, Singapore’s climbing cost of operations, and of course AI, is driving a relentless wave I keep watching on layoffsg.com, the tracker I’ve been keeping since the announcements started getting frequent.

Everyone expects the big distressed cuts, the Lazadas of the world. What surprised me were the small ones. Companies that look perfectly healthy, trimming three here, four there. Not dying. Restructuring. Quietly shipping the expensive Singapore function offshore, or replacing the Amins with something that doesn’t take leave or ask for a confirmation letter.

I was fired or laid off six times. The universe is sending me clear signs that I’m unemployable and please stop trying. I ignored it five times. The sixth was the one that hurt, a role I’d coveted, my comeback after closing my recruitment business, dead at 10 months. That’s the one where I finally accepted my fate.

It’s not a bed of roses, and anyone who sells you that should be executed. Doing your own thing is tough. You’re your own worst boss with zero regard for work-life balance. As the saying goes, you didn’t want to work 40 hours a week for someone else, so now you work 100 for yourself.

Still, I’m glad that conversation in the car happened. The struggle is painful, but I’m glad I don’t sit in those conversations anymore. I have clients now, not bosses. I build my own rice bowl instead of depending on someone else’s fictitious iron version.

What made it slightly easier was a combination of moves I worked on, mostly by accident, along the way. Each one nudges the needle on its own. Put together, they compound.

It’s how I landed three retainers the week I announced on LinkedIn, five years ago, that I was going independent. When your reputation precedes you, everything gets easier.

There are 8 of these moves. The book, the bylines, the speaking, the podcast, and a few more. None of them work in 30 days. They’re slow, unglamorous, and they pay out years after you start. Which is exactly why almost nobody starts. They wait until the layoff lands, until the deal finally breaks, and by then it’s the worst possible time to begin building the thing that takes years.

The best time to start was before you needed it. The second best time is the afternoon you realise the rice bowl was never yours to hold.

I broke down all 8 moves in a video. If you’re staring at your own back seat right now, wondering how long the deal holds, start here:

My youngest came up and asked if we could go roller-skating.

Every fibre in my body wanted to say no. I had a few excuses lined up. Getting late. Next week. Daddy’s tired. All true. All reasonable.

Then a thought arrived that I didn’t ask for and couldn’t shake. No becomes a pattern. A pattern becomes a reputation. And one day, someone is going to ask my kid what their father was like, and I do not want the answer to be “he was always tired.”

So we went roller-skating.

Small thing. I know. But small things are how this actually happens, in either direction.

I’ve watched a few friends slide into something I can only call weekend parenting, and none of them planned it. It starts innocently. A late meeting, so the grandparents feed the kids dinner. The late meeting becomes a late night, so the kids sleep over. One night becomes two. Two becomes most of the week. Nobody decides to become a weekend parent. They just keep saying yes to one more late night until a daily relationship quietly turns into a visiting one.

I think about this more than most fathers because I didn’t have one to copy from.

My own father was a trader and, somehow, also a Tai Chi teacher. I genuinely don’t know what he traded. Stocks, I think. He wasn’t around much. The clearest memory I have of him is an evening at Parkway Parade, just wandering around together for a few hours, no particular plan. That’s the whole memory. That’s the file I have to work with.

He died when I was thirteen. So whatever “being a father” means, I had to build it myself, mostly by watching other people’s dads and guessing at the rest.

A few years ago, I started writing something called Daddy’s Field Manual. Everything I want my kids to know, written down, in case I’m not around to say it in person. I never finished it. I have a nagging feeling I might not get the decades my father didn’t get either, which is exactly why the manual exists in the first place. It’s sitting in a folder somewhere, half done, the way most things you actually care about tend to stay half done.

And I have four kids. With four, you also cannot micromanage them the way you’d check an assistant’s email for typos. They’ve had to figure things out themselves. On a trip to Japan, I watched seven-year-olds commute home from school alone and thought, why not us too. Mine do the same now. I’d rather they learn to survive without me than discover later they never had to try.

Randy Pausch used to say you get to pick three: work, family, health, friends, the usual list. You don’t get all of them. I wrote a whole piece once about why I don’t really have friends anymore. Same maths, different column. Every father I know has quietly made this trade, whether he admits it or not.

I want my kids to be independent enough that they don’t fall apart without me. I also had four of them, partly so they’d never be without each other.

I’m not sure those two things point in the same direction. Independence and closeness aren’t the same skill, and I’m building both at once, hoping they don’t cancel each other out before I find out which one actually mattered.

Happy Father’s Day.

He had three board directorships, two committee seats, and multiple rental properties.

He wasn’t lying to be cruel. He was protecting what he’d built — and hoping you wouldn’t notice the gap between what he said and what he did.

I noticed too late. I went all-in on one company for a decade. $5M revenue, 30 staff, everything I had in one place. Then the partners changed, the investors pulled out, and I spent three months not knowing what to do with myself at 9 am on a Monday. Then I drove Grab.

This video is what I learned from that — and what your boss already knows that nobody taught you.

What is covered:

00:00 Side Hustle Hypocrisy

00:27 Leaders Diversify Quietly

01:41 The Loyalty Deal Died

02:18 All In Then Burnout

03:04 Uber And Identity Loss

03:21 Diversify Without Seniority

03:49 Build Assets Under Your Name

04:03 Writing Builds Reputation

04:30 Fractional Work And Niches

05:43 Commitment Versus Concentration

06:06 What Equity Are You Building

06:42 Do As They Do

There’s a thing food bloggers do where they understate the caramelising time. Five minutes, they say. Or ten at most. Tom Scocca wrote about this in Slate back in 2012 — really, it’s closer to 45 minutes, sometimes more. The bloggers know that if they told you upfront, you’d just grab the canned version. So they round down, you get burned, and the soup never tastes as it should.

The passive income crowd does the same thing. Build a funnel, post some content, watch it compound. What they don’t mention is the slow years before any of that. And here’s the thing about trying to rush caramelised onions — the faster you try, the worse it gets. You end up with burned bits and wasted time. The people who get it right are the ones who accepted early that this was going to take as long as it takes.

And it’s not just the length. There’s also the part where you think you’ve ruined it — the moment the pan looks wrong, the smell shifts, and you’re not sure whether to scrape it or start over. That’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. That’s just the middle of the process.

My business has been slow lately. The tech budget cuts that started somewhere upstream eventually reached a contractor like me. On the hard days, I start scrolling LinkedIn Jobs. The idea of a regular salary is genuinely appealing. The regularity of it. One less uncertainty sitting on your chest.

But then I also remember the meeting with a fellow association council member many years ago. At some point, he mentioned his daughters and then went quiet. His expression shifted. I’ve spent enough time around people to read a room — and in that meeting, he’d spent two hours talking over everyone, steering every decision back to himself, never once asking what anyone else thought. If that was how he moved through the world, I could understand the distance.

I’ve seen versions of this more times than I can count. I missed the birth of my third kid because of a work commitment. I still think about it. You can’t get that one back.

But here’s what leaving corporate actually bought me.

My oldest talks to me about his gym routine like I’m his training partner. My second told me last week she wants to work at Baskin-Robbins so she can try all 72 flavours. (I did not tell her that’s not how employment works.) My youngest tells me everything, often well past the point where I need to know.

My third is quiet. Maybe he’s still processing the birth thing. But we make a good escape room team, and I’ll take it.

None of that happened by accident. I engineered it. Left corporate specifically so I could be around for the weekday pickups, the random Tuesday conversations, the time that only exists if your schedule is actually yours.

Everyone’s reason is different. Mine happens to be time with my kids. Yours might be something else entirely — the work itself, the freedom, the thing you’re trying to build. But you had a reason when you started. Something specific enough that you were willing to take the harder path to protect it.

The article I mentioned earlier ends with this: the best time to caramelise onions is yesterday. You should have started before you needed them.

Most of us didn’t. We’re already behind schedule, already wondering if we should just order in.

But the canned version was always available. You chose the two hours for a reason.

Just don’t forget what it was.

In Chinese, there’s a word for these people: 贵人 (guiren). Literally, “noble person.” In practice, the person who showed up at the right time which made the next chapter possible.

I’ve been thinking about mine.

It started with a conversation with Manu Khetan. We were in the middle of an assignment when he asked how I was doing. I told him the truth: work had thinned out, budgets tightened, and a few things had been cancelled. He listened, then shared what he thought I could consider.

Somewhere in that exchange, it hit me. His faith in me 4 years ago is what made this journey possible in the first place. And when I looked back further, every win I could point to had someone like him in it.

RecruitPlus, 2004.

4 of us decided that starting a business sounded more exciting than our dead-end jobs. We were right about the excitement. We were wrong about almost everything else.

What we didn’t account for was that none of us actually knew how to run a recruitment business. My girlfriend (now wife) did. She came on board as an associate — full commission, no safety net — because that’s all we could offer. Her billings kept the lights on while the rest of us figured out, slowly and expensively, what we were doing.

That company ran for 11 years. The original partners exited along the way. I stayed.

None of it happens without her saying yes to a very uncertain proposition in 2004.

CareerLadder, 2014

My attempt to become an independent career coach didn’t start with a business idea. It started with a book.

Steven Pang suggested we compile all the blog posts we’d both been writing and publish them. Everything You Wish to Ask a Headhunter. He pushed it through when it could easily have stayed as a folder of drafts nobody printed.

The book came out, and suddenly, career coaching wasn’t a stretch. People had a reason to take me seriously before I’d done a single session. The business followed the credibility, not the other way around.

Without Steven insisting that the book happen, there’s no CareerLadder. And without CareerLadder, I would not have managed to get a job at Ingeus to be their first Singapore Ops Director, since they needed someone with a mix of recruitment and career coaching experience.

HackerTrail, 2016

This one’s harder to write about because it requires admitting something uncomfortable.

I exited RecruitPlus thinking opportunities would follow. 3 months of silence later taught me otherwise. My career coaching idea isn’t panning out, and I was desperately in need of something to make ends meet. I still remember taking the call from Tushar Tejuja at Kallang Wave Mall with my kids at the free swimming pool. He needed someone for sales. Part-time. That’s what he could afford.

I took it.

I had 11 years of running a business behind me. I also had 11 years of overspending whatever I made, a mortgage, kids, and a confidence level that was at an all-time low. Tushar didn’t offer me a lifeline because the optics were great. He offered it because he needed someone, and he thought I could help.

That part-time gig compounded. It planted me in the HR tech space. Everything that followed grew from that.

PeopleStrong, 2019

Nikhil Bhardwaj reached out about TechHR 2017 in India. Invited me to check it out. I didn’t, but did so during the 2018 version, as our conversation led me (and my business partner at our HR consultancy then) to help bring Singapore-based HR Tech to participate as exhibitors.

At the event, the then marketing manager of PeopleStrong recognised me from my HR tech content. She walked me over to a booth. We set up a meeting. The company was looking to expand into Singapore and needed an advisor. It eventually became a full role as we wound down the consultancy.

My official entry into HR tech traces back to one message from someone who didn’t have to send it.

Marketing Sumo, 2021

Manu first engaged me 4 years ago when I put out a LinkedIn SOS at the start of this independent journey. Content retainer back then. These days, I co-host his corporate podcast. The engagement changed. The through-line didn’t: he showed up early, when it mattered most.

I likely wouldn’t be writing any of this if he hadn’t.

Looking back, none of my 贵人 announced themselves as 贵人.

A girlfriend joining a shaky startup on full commission. A co-author pushing a book that could have stayed as a folder of drafts. A part-time offer when I was almost drowning. A conference invite I could have filed away.

Every single one had an easy “no” attached to it. Or at least a “not yet.”

The self-made myth is seductive partly because it lets you avoid those moments. If everything depends on you, you don’t have to say yes to things that don’t look like wins yet. You can wait for the opportunity that looks the part.

Mine never did.

I paused for a long time. My short answer: don’t have.

I have 4.

Singapore’s TFR is now 0.87. I am, statistically, a freak. Not enough of us to move the needle, clearly.

The reason I have 4 is genuinely stupid. I have an older sister I’m not on talking terms with. When we only had 2 kids, I was scared they’d turn out like that. So the solution, obviously, was to have more. We stopped at 4.

Very sound logic.

And it was great when they were young, oblivious, and fun. But they grow up. They go to school. Some struggle academically. And I’m already getting ahead of myself because I’m one of the lucky ones since my kids came out healthy. I have friends whose kids didn’t, and that threw a spanner into their lives that never fully comes out.

Then there’s the kiasuism. I have a friend, hipster at heart, the kind of guy who goes diving in South Africa and cooks his own food on weekends. I always thought he’d be chill about his kid’s academics. His P6 boy now has tuition for every subject, and he’s already mapped out every possible DSA pathway just in case.

He went through a lousy school and turned out fine. I went to a not-bad school and wrecked it academically. I turned out fine. And yet when my eldest was in P6, I did the exact same tuition-for-everything thing.

Plot twist: it did nothing. He ended up in a neighbourhood school, which made him better.

Teo You Yenn said on The Financial Coconut that autonomy is a myth. You think you’re making free choices until you don’t get paid for 3 months. Then see what your choices look like.

So we overcompensate. We keep inching forward, chasing goalposts we can’t see clearly, or that might not exist. On this small, claustrophobic island where you can’t not compare, social media makes it worse. Every new Swatch, every travel vlog, every minimalist HDB reno that is 100% not kid-friendly. It’s easy to look at what children cost and feel the pull backwards.

And they do cost. StanChart estimates raising a child from 0 to 18 runs between S$280,000 and S$560,000 for a middle-income household. That’s your CPF Retirement Account minimum sum, evaporated. And if you still harbour thoughts that your kids will take care of you in old age out of filial piety, here is a slap to wake you up.

So I’m not optimistic about whatever the new government family workgroup will be producing. These things tend to land somewhere around “4.5 months maternity leave instead of 4.” Tactical tweaks. It’s like putting up corner mirrors and widening the footpath to stop PMD accidents when the real answer is just to ban them.

Having 4 kids and having chased the 5Cs that my government used to actively sell me until they quietly stopped, my finances are a mess. Being self-employed makes it worse, especially now with my client base heavy in tech. On the hard days, I think about how much simpler my life would be without them. Logically, financially, pragmatically. I can do that math easily.

My youngest saved my number as Best Daddy Ever. She’s since updated it to Farter Father, which is honestly more accurate.

I ferry them to their outings and watch them having fun. When my eldest made it through secondary school and came out with real options, I felt something I didn’t have a word for. My favourite thing right now is watching all 4 of them in a room together, just playing.

Warm. Full.

I didn’t put those words in the first half of this piece. They don’t show up in a spreadsheet. I don’t know how you buy them any other way.

That content creator is probably still waiting for a proper answer.

The honest one is: don’t have.

The other honest one is: I’d do it again. All 4.

I’ve been sitting with both of those for a while now. Still can’t pick one.

Not 4 close friends. 4 friends, full stop. And I’m being generous with one of them.

My definition is strict. A friend is someone who can hear the ugly, unedited version of your life and not flinch. Someone who doesn’t immediately try to fix you, reframe you, or pivot to their own story. Someone you can sit with and do absolutely nothing (no agenda, no occasion, no reason) and that’s enough.

And when they need the same from you, you show up without being asked. No questions, no conditions. You just show up.

A psychiatrist, but cheaper and with better drinks. Except this one you’d take a bullet for, too.

By that definition: 4. Maybe 3.5.

I also have 48,000 followers on LinkedIn.

Make of that what you will.

I learned what friendship actually is by losing it completely.

This was back in secondary school. A good friend decided, after a misunderstanding involving his ex-girlfriend, that I needed to be cancelled. He was thorough. One by one, the entire cohort stopped talking to me. For the better part of a year, I ate lunch alone every single day.

I told myself it recalibrated me. Made me tougher, more unfiltered, less dependent on approval. And maybe some of that is true. But the more honest version is that I built walls and called it character.

I only figured out how much it had actually cost me years later. I was at my kids’ art class, waiting at the holding area the way parents do, killing time by writing. I’ve been working on a book for them — something to leave behind, in case. My father died early. I don’t want them to have nothing if the same happens to me.

I got to the part about secondary school. And I just started crying. Not a quiet tear. The kind you feel in your chest before it reaches your face. I was sitting there trying to hide it from the other parents, pretending it was a running nose. I think even the blind could tell.

Thirty years. That’s how long it took for that lunch table to catch up with me.

Think of friendship as a long game of tennis. Two players. The ball goes back and forth at varying pace, varying intensity, but it always goes back and forth. That’s the whole point.

Most people, I’ve discovered, don’t want to play tennis. They want an audience.

And we’re apparently terrible at admitting it. An IPS poll found that young Singaporeans aged 21 to 34 reported the highest levels of social isolation and loneliness, and more than half felt anxious about talking to people in person, finding it easier to communicate online. We live in one of the most densely packed cities on earth. And we are lonely.

Turns out, 6 million people on a tiny island doesn’t actually solve anything.

Importantly, many people don’t really know how to be friends. Here’s what they actually are when some cosplay to be my friend.

The Ego Caddy. Every conversation circles back to their latest win. The new car, the promotion, the deal they just closed. Did you hear about the deal? I’ve sat across from people and felt genuinely relieved when they finally asked me something. Then the moment I paused to breathe, they were off again.

The Emotional ATM. Available whenever they need to withdraw. Gone the moment you show up at the counter. You’ve listened to their 2am spiral about their boss, their relationship, their existential dread - multiple times, no complaints. Then one day you need to unload something. Read receipt. Three days of silence. Then a meme.

The “Content” Creator. They come close fast. Ask the right questions, remember details, and make you feel genuinely seen. Then your darkest Tuesday ends up as their next “here’s what I learned about resilience” post. You weren’t a friend. You were a case study.

The Timed Reach-Out. You haven’t heard from someone in two years. Suddenly, they’re in your DMs asking how you’ve been. Between “how are you” and “actually, I wanted to share this incredible opportunity” is a very short distance. Either they’ve joined an MLM, started selling insurance, or found God. Sometimes all three simultaneously.

The 3.5 I’ve kept shares one quality. They don’t perform. They show up messy, let me do the same, and nobody keeps score.

That’s it. That’s the whole criterion.

48,000 followers. 3.5 friends. What do I know?

But I’ll tell you what I do know. I know exactly who shouldn’t be on that list.

He wants out and to do something on his own. The usual story.

Except I’ve been hearing this a lot lately. Another guy, also 40s, says he wants to quit because of elder care responsibilities. The ideas he’s pitching, though, are all service businesses that’ll eat his time whole. I didn’t say anything. But the math doesn’t add up.

And then there’s someone I spoke with recently, a CFO at a large company (she’d kill me if I named it). By any measure, she made it. Corner office, the title, the pay. And she’s phoning it in. Has been for a while. All the restructuring, the constant changes, the new priorities that replace last quarter’s new priorities. She stopped going above and beyond sometime last year. Maybe the year before. She can’t quite remember when.

Three people. Different industries, different levels, same quiet misery.

I know that misery. I spent years in it.

I’ve been independent for a while now. Fractional work, writing, building things on my own terms. And when I sat across from these people, I did feel relief. Genuine relief.

But I’d be lying if I stopped there.

Because when a client calls timeout. When a retainer doesn’t renew. When the months where the stars just don’t align stretch longer than you planned for, I would look at the corporate cage and think: at least the aircon is good.

That is truly the part nobody puts in the “I quit my job and never looked back” posts.

Now, here’s what I think is actually happening with my 3 friends.

They’re not burned out, exactly. Burnout implies you ran hard and hit a wall. These people stopped running. They’re still showing up, still collecting the salary, still attending the meetings. But something quietly switched off. The CFO isn’t lazy. The furniture guy isn’t unambitious. They’ve just outgrown the story they told themselves about what the job was supposed to mean. And they haven’t found a replacement story yet.

So they dress it up. Elder care. Company changes. Wanting something different. All true, probably. But also covers for something harder to say out loud: I don’t know what I’m doing this for anymore.

The cage doesn’t feel like a cage when you first get in. It feels like stability. Structure. A reason to show up that someone else hands you every morning, already formatted, with clear KPIs.

That part is genuinely comfortable and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

What independence actually costs is the removal of that comfort. Every month is a negotiation with uncertainty. Some months the stars align. Some months you’re refreshing your inbox and wondering if you made a catastrophic mistake around 47 years old.

The people still inside aren’t stupid for staying. They’re paying a price. So am I. Just different prices.

Predictable misery versus unpredictable uncertainty. If you’re honest about it, most people will take the predictable version every single time. At least you know what’s coming.

I think about this whenever the temptation gets loud. Which it does and more than I’d like to admit.

The furniture guy will probably stay another 2 years. The elder care guy will probably not quit. The CFO will probably ride it out until a package comes along.

And me? I’ll probably stay independent.

Because on the days when the stars do align, no pay cheque has ever felt like that.

AGMs. Boomers in collared shirts, arriving early, loading plates from the buffet before the meeting starts. Fully focused. Extremely motivated. Zero ambivalence about what they came for.

That is hunger.

So when Shulin Lee, a recruiter and founder of Aslant Legal, appeared on a CNA podcast to say that Singaporeans are being replaced because foreigners are hungrier - I had some thoughts.

I ran a recruitment agency once. The people who walked through my door fell into two buckets.

Bucket one: people I had to hunt down, woo, and convince to even consider a coffee meeting. These were the ones my clients actually wanted. The best ones don’t come to you. You go to them. And if they don’t return your calls, you’ll never know they exist.

Bucket two: everyone else.

If you spend long enough talking to bucket two, you start to think the whole sea is full of the same fish. It’s a sampling problem. The recruiter’s view of the talent market is, almost by design, skewed toward people who need help. So when a recruiter tells you what Singaporeans are like, please take it with a grain of salt. They are describing the subset they actually see.

But let’s say we accept the hunger framing. Let’s go there.

Hunger is not a personality trait. It’s a function of whether effort maps to outcome.

My first HDB in Tampines: $275k before grants. My first car: $68k all in. Was I hungry? Sibei hungry. Because the finish line was visible. I could see it, calculate it, sprint toward it.

Today’s fresh grad starts at maybe $3,500 to $4,000 - call it double what my cohort made. That same HDB is $500k to $700k on the resale market. Not double. Triple, minimum. Salary grew arithmetically. Housing grew geometrically. The ratio has completely flipped.

If I run as fast as I can and the finish line keeps moving, I don’t become less hungry. I become less stupid. I stop running a race designed for me to lose.

Former PM Lee called it “divine discontent”. The idea that restless, driven people will always push harder. Lovely concept. Works better when the condo at the end of the sprint doesn’t cost $1.8 million.

I hosted Gen Z on the Work It podcast. The episode was called “Generation Z Claps Back: We Are Not Strawberries.”

What struck me: they will work hard for you. They will give you a full shift. But they will not die for you because they have watched, with their own eyes, what dying for the company gets you.

Companies are now laying people off even while posting record profits. All in anticipation of AI adoption. Optimising for a future headcount before the future has even arrived. And then someone goes on a podcast to tell the people being optimised away that they need to be hungrier.

There’s a word for this. I’ll let you pick one.

What bothers me more than the claim itself is the timing. The moment someone gets far enough from the bottom, the instinct kicks in: close the door, face the room, deliver the hard truth.

I was on a panel once. A fellow panellist looked out at a room full of people who had just been retrenched (people anxiously updating CVs, attending free talks, genuinely trying) and delivered, with great conviction: “Nobody owes you a living.”

This same person had struggled to find a job after his own retrenchment. Someone had given him a hand. He remembered none of it, apparently.

Same genius: the MP’s daughter who wrote: “Get out of my elitist, uncaring face.” Different era, identical move. The further some people get from the bottom, the faster they want to close the door behind them.

Chris Kuan noted on Facebook that Shulin seemed surprised that the reaction was brutal. You waved a red flag in front of a bull, then acted shocked when it charged. Haha.

I may be biased, of course.

I need young people to be okay, financially, emotionally, and physically, because someone has to finance my diaper change when I’m old. So I am, structurally, always on their side.

If you’re young and reading this: stay hungry. Just maybe not for the AGM buffet. That’s already taken.

Two rejections that, in the moment, probably felt like the full stop on a career that hadn’t really started.

Kevin Hart talked about this on his new reality show, Funny AF. He’s looking for the next big comedian — and somewhere between auditions, he gets into the things that didn’t happen to him.

Except they quietly did something else. Missing SNL meant he never got locked into that orbit. Soul Plane flopping meant he had to find other rooms, other producers, other writers. He ended up somewhere he wouldn’t have looked for if things had gone to plan.

He’s now one of the highest-paid entertainers alive.

There’s a Princeton professor named Johannes Haushofer who made a list of everything that didn’t happen to him. Every rejection letter. Every application that went nowhere. Every program that said no.

He put it on the internet.

It went viral. Which is maybe the most Princeton thing that could happen — your failure CV outperforms your actual CV.

His explanation was simple: most of what he tried failed, but the failures were invisible while the successes were visible. So everyone looking from the outside assumed things just worked out for him. They’d compare his highlight reel to their own blooper reel and wonder what was wrong with them.

Nothing was wrong with them. The blooper reel is just the part nobody posts.

I have my own list.

Didn’t get promoted to Sec 4. Repeated Sec 3. Didn’t get into polytechnic. First business — built it, ran it, didn’t cash out when I should have. Then the GM role at Hired.com. Went through the whole interview process, thought I was the obvious fit, didn’t get it.

Each one stung the way only rejection can sting. The kind where you replay the what-ifs for longer than you’d like to admit.

But the Sec 3 repeat put me in a different cohort, which rewired how I thought about timelines. Not getting into poly forced a path I wouldn’t have taken voluntarily. The business that didn’t pay out taught me things no clean exit would have. And the Hired.com role I didn’t get? I eventually stopped trying to climb someone else’s ladder entirely.

I can’t tell you I knew any of this at the time. I didn’t.

The problem is we’re all keeping 2 CVs. One we show people. One we bury. The visible one has the wins, the promotions, the things that worked out. The hidden one has everything that actually got us here.

Haushofer made his hidden one public. Hart turned his into material.

In Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos told Loki that failure isn’t experience. Loki disagreed. “I consider experience, experience.”

Hard to argue with a god of mischief.

The things that didn’t happen weren’t detours. They were the route.

If you prefer, here is the written summary:

So a couple of weeks back, I published an article on Channel News Asia about fractional work, and it opened a floodgate of inquiries. I’ve received numerous questions via LinkedIn and even had face-to-face meetings about it. This prompted me to think: why keep repeating myself when I can just create a comprehensive resource? And that’s how this blog post came about.

Introduction to Fractional Work

Fractional work might sound new to some, so let’s first clarify what it entails. Think of it as part-time work within an organization, but at a more senior level. It’s different from being a consultant because a fractional professional isn’t just advising; they’re rolling up their sleeves and doing the work. This approach often includes reduced hours, making it distinct from typical full-time roles.

Financial Viability of Fractional Work

One of the biggest questions I’ve received is about the financial sustainability of fractional work. Can it work financially? The answer is yes, but with caveats. My earnings in this field have fluctuated, sometimes dramatically. It’s crucial to be prepared for periods of instability, where assignments might end sooner than expected. Retainer agreements help provide some stability, but the market dictates that you remain ever-vigilant and hunt for new opportunities.

Handling Dry Spells

Dry spells are a reality in fractional work. Personally, I diversify my income sources. Besides fractional assignments, I engage in project work, content creation, co-hosting podcasts, and even enjoy some royalties from my book. Leveraging personal branding has been pivotal in my success, helping me build pipelines of assignments and opportunities rapidly.

Networking and Setting Up Shop

Is a big network a prerequisite for success in fractional work? A substantial network helps, but isn’t mandatory. Various directories and communities, such as Portfolio Career Asia, support executives in finding opportunities and learning more about this career path.

Whether you need to set up a company or can operate as an individual depends on client preferences. I chose to incorporate a private limited company, which I found to be a cleaner arrangement. However, there’s flexibility here based on individual circumstances.

Landing Your First Client

My first client found me after I put out a call for opportunities online. The strength of a niche focus and a strong professional reputation brought further business my way. When well-established in your area of expertise, word-of-mouth can be a powerful tool.

Choosing Independence Over Full-Time Offers

What if a client wants to convert you to a full-time role? It’s a personal choice. For me, the independence and flexibility offered by fractional work outweigh the security of a full-time position. It allows me to explore different opportunities freely, maintaining a diverse and dynamic career.

Industry Suitability and Retirement

Not all industries are receptive to fractional work. Founder-led businesses or those setting up shop in new locations, like Singapore, tend to be more open. It’s essential to find industries where your expertise gives you a competitive edge.

As for retirement, fractional work is less about planning an exit and more about lifestyle. It prioritises time and personal growth over relentless career ambition, a choice that aligns with my middle-aged priorities.

Pricing Yourself

Pricing in fractional work isn’t straightforward due to the lack of standard benchmarks. Initially, I based my rates on market rates for full-time roles and adjusted based on demand. It’s about finding a balance between supply, demand, and your unique expertise.

I hope this blog post answers some of the burning questions about fractional work. If there’s more you’d like to know, feel free to ask in the comments. Thank you!

One week, a new engagement initiative. The next, a community survey. The week after, a cross-functional taskforce. Each one landed with its own KPI attached, like a gift nobody asked for but everyone had to sign for.

By month three, my logical brain started asking the question nobody wanted to answer: where do you find the space to add new things if there are none to minus?

Silence. Next slide. Moving on.

This is the corporate default setting. And if you’ve ever watched a kiasu Singaporean approach a buffet line, you already understand the physics. One plate. Infinite ambition. Chye sim at the base. Curry chicken on top. Sushi balanced against the salmon. A prawn somewhere in the middle doing structural work. The plate is now an engineering marvel. Nobel-prize-worthy, really.

Two things tend to happen next.

One, you cannot finish. You pay the penalty and pretend the extra rice was for your friend.

Two, one small sneeze and you are witnessing food avalanche in real time.

The corporate version of this is your Google Calendar. Knowledge workers today take pride in showing you how tight their week is. Back-to-back meetings. Double-booked slots. The occasional triple booking that they mention with a sigh, as if it is a burden, when really it is a flex. Busyness equals productivity, right? At least that’s the theatrical version.

Contrast this with what Warren Buffett once told Bill Gates. Buffett pulled out his diary. It was mostly empty. He said his best days are the ones where nothing is scheduled. Somehow the wisdom of the Oracle of Omaha escapes the rest of us, who keep treating a blank Tuesday like a personal failing.

Closer to home, look at parliament. Every year, a fresh round of schemes, grants, and initiatives. Bold names. Optimistic acronyms. What happened to the old ones? Did we take them away? Did they work? Did they not work? We don’t really know. They’re just under the rug. And the rug now needs new stuff on top of it, to keep the old stuff from showing.

Which brings me to the part that genuinely surprised me.

There is actual science on this. In 2021, researchers at the University of Virginia ran a series of experiments, published in Nature, on how people try to improve things. They gave participants a Lego structure that needed to hold a brick above a stormtrooper figurine’s head. Each Lego piece added costs ten cents. The cleanest fix was to remove one block. Most people added instead.

The researchers concluded that people “rarely look at a situation, object or idea that needs improving and think to remove something as a solution. Instead, we almost always add some element, whether it helps or not.” They went further, linking this bias directly to overwhelming schedules and institutions bogged down in proliferating red tape.

In other words: it is not just your CEO. It is your brain. Additive ideas come to mind quickly. Subtractive ones require cognitive effort. We default to stacking the plate because stacking the plate is easier than thinking.

And once you see the pattern, it’s everywhere.

The gym-goer who keeps adding supplements but refuses to cut the late-night supper. The company that launches a wellness programme while the same leaders send emails at 11pm. The condo that adds a new facility — a pickleball court, a co-working lounge, a wine cellar — every time the MCST meets, and somehow the monthly fees go up but the lifts still break down. The parent who signs the child up for another enrichment class while the homework from the last one sits untouched.

The honest fix in all of these is a subtraction. The instinct is always an addition. Because the addition feels like action. The subtraction feels like admitting the last addition didn’t work.

So here is what I’ve been trying lately. Before adding anything new — a project, a subscription, a meeting, a WhatsApp group, a fourth streaming service I forgot I was paying for — I ask what comes off the plate to make room. Not in a Marie Kondo way. Just a small accounting question. If nothing comes off, the new thing probably isn’t as essential as it felt thirty seconds ago.

Most weeks, the honest answer is that nothing needs to go on. The plate was fine. I just wanted to feel like I was doing something.

My old CEO probably wanted the same thing. Somewhere on his calendar, in a recurring Monday slot, was a meeting called Management Sync. I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if one week he just cancelled it.

No replacement. No rescheduling. Just an empty hour returned to every person in that room.

Probably would have been the best KPI he ever set.

It was instinct, really. One Tampines Hub, need a spot, Starbucks is right there. Shao Chun replied that the hawker centre would do fine.

That $6 latte I didn’t buy tells you everything you need to know about Shao Chun — and embarrassingly, everything you need to know about me.

Shao is hard to miss. Put him in the right robe, and you could genuinely mistake him for a Shaolin monk who got lost on the way to the temple. The bald head is real. The demeanour — unhurried, bright, like someone who has stopped checking his phone for notifications that don’t matter — is also real.

His CV reads like a millennial highlight reel. NTU banking degree, 2010. Equity analyst at Merrill Lynch. Then JPMorgan. Then the pivot to tech — LinkedIn, and eventually Google, where he stayed for nearly eight years before a round of layoffs made the decision for him.

Most people in that situation would have panicked. Shao moved to Chiang Mai.

His wife is Thai. (I told him that a foreign spouse is a Singaporean’s best retirement plan. He agreed without hesitation.) The cost of living is a fraction of Singapore’s. He makes YouTube videos for his channel, 9to5millionairemindset, at a pace of about one a month. He has around 20,000 subscribers — which, if you know how YouTube economics work, is a long way from stable income.

But here’s the thing about income. It’s not just what comes in. It’s what comes in minus what goes out.

And Shao has engineered the “what goes out” side of that equation with the kind of precision he probably once applied to equity research.

His friends tell him he doesn’t need to be so frugal. He could make more videos, build the channel faster, ramp up income to match his old lifestyle.

He told me this and I waited for him to say he was considering it.

He wasn’t.

We ended up on the businessman and the fisherman — you’ve probably heard some version of it. Businessman meets a fisherman on the beach, catches enough fish each day to feed his family, spends the rest of his time napping and playing with his kids. Businessman tells him he should scale up, build a fleet, IPO the operation, and then — only then — he’d be able to relax on the beach.

Fisherman asks: what do you think I’m doing right now?

Shao is already the fisherman. The beach is Chiang Mai. The fish is sufficient. Why would he go one big round just to end up exactly where he already is?

I had no answer for him. I still don’t.

A few days after we met, a friend messaged me on Instagram. How’s family, how’s work?

Family is great, I replied. Work… is work.

And that’s the honest version. No matter how you frame it — fractional, gig, part-time, portfolio career, whatever language makes it sound like a choice — work has a way of being annoying. It follows you. It has opinions about your calendar. It exists, with needs, on days when you’d rather it didn’t.

I want to retire by 55. I don’t know exactly what that looks like — some version of enough, I think, where work becomes optional rather than load-bearing.

But I also have four kids. Shao’s equation works because he built it to work — fewer obligations, lower overheads, deliberate choices about what he actually needs versus what he’d been conditioned to want.

I haven’t made those choices yet. I still suggested Starbucks.

Frugality, I think, is not really about money. It’s about figuring out the smallest number of things you actually need to be fine — and then protecting that number from everything that wants to inflate it.

Shao looks like a monk because he’s done the accounting. Not of his bank balance. Of his actual life.

The hawker coffee was $1.20. It was fine. It was, genuinely, fine.

I think about that more than I expected to.

No longer workplace jargon, the rise of fractional work reflects an evolution in how white-collar workers earn a living.

In Singapore, the number of LinkedIn profiles containing “fractional” in their job description has surged past 1,000. Specialised directories like The Fractional Directory have popped up to connect these high-level talents with a hungry market.

Even the government has signalled that this isn’t a passing fad. In 2025, Workforce Singapore launched pilot programmes specifically designed to match start-ups with seasoned experts in HR, finance, and operations. But is fractional work just a corporate fad, or is it something deeper?

DIFFERENT FROM FREELANCE OR PART-TIME

It took me two years of living the fractional life before I even knew the term existed. When I started in early 2022, I called myself a “Part-Time CMO.” It sounded practical, but it didn’t quite capture the weight of my responsibilities.

It took a client to point out that what I was doing was fractional work. I swiftly updated my LinkedIn headline while we were still on the Zoom call.

While “fractional” certainly sounds sexier than “part-time” or “freelance”, there is a structural difference. Fractional work isn’t just about the hours; it’s about the nature of the relationship.

If you hire a freelance graphic designer on Fiverr, you are buying a specific output, such as a logo, banner or deck. In a fractional arrangement, you aren’t an extra pair of hands for a one-off project. You are a supplier of high-level strategy, embedded in the senior management team. Beyond doing the work, you own the outcome.

There are several reasons for the rise of fractional work. The COVID-19 pandemic was the catalyst, breaking the psychological barrier that workers must be seen in an office from 9 to 6.

Once companies realised their people could work effectively via Zoom and Slack, the geographical and temporal chains were broken. And let’s be honest: C-Suites do not “strategise” for eight hours straight. Most of their time is swallowed by board meetings and office theatrics, so less time does not mean fewer outcomes.

Then there is the economic pressure. Payroll is typically the heaviest burden on any ledger. Amid the economic uncertainty of 2026, companies are prioritising short-term agility. They need a heavy-hitting chief financial officer to guide them through a Series B or a merger, but they may not have the US$300,000 annual budget for a full-time hire.

But for me and many others, the driver is personal. As I age, my inability to tolerate corporate politics has grown. I’ve spoken to peers, such as a CFO at a major Southeast Asian media company, who are similarly jaded. They are tired of the constant reorganisations and the fear that their job is a line item waiting to be deleted. Under a fractional model, we can contribute our best work without the emotional tax of office politics.

PRICE AND ACCESS

For businesses, the value proposition of fractional workers comes down to price and access. Asking a start-up to hire a 20-year veteran on a full-time basis is usually impossible. But they can “buy” 20 per cent of that person’s brain. They will also be able to tap into the fractional worker’s network, which can be more valuable than their actual hours.

One question I get is how fractional workers can be C-suite executives for three different companies at once. In 2022, the answer was “very little sleep.” In 2026, the answer is artificial intelligence.

AI is the silent engine behind the fractional boom. It can handle the heavy lifting of data processing and drafting, which are the time-consuming parts of any executive role.

For instance, when I’m acting as a fractional CMO, I use AI to synthesise months of customer interview transcripts, or to build complex market simulations that used to take a week of manual spreadsheet grinding. This leaves me more time to do what the client actually pays for: high-level judgment, cultural navigation and relationship building.

Fractional work is going mainstream – it is now a searchable job type on platforms like Indeed and LinkedIn. Barring a global financial collapse, the costs of rental and full-time payroll will only continue to rise. Fractional work is simply the professionalisation of the gig economy for the C-suite.

My take? It’s not a fad. It’s the future of how expertise is traded.

This article is originally published on CNA. You can find other articles I’d written for them here.

On collection day, he was still going. Still singing the car’s praises as he drove me over to pick it up. At some point, I turned and asked, almost as an afterthought: so what do you drive?

A Subaru.

The world didn’t end, exactly. But something shifted. Not because he’d lied since he hadn’t. He was probably a perfectly good salesperson doing his job with genuine enthusiasm. But there’s something about that moment that lodges in you. If the car is this good, why isn’t it good enough for you?

The Verna, as it turned out, was not great. The fuel efficiency was poor — I was at the petrol station embarrassingly often. The pickup was weak, especially going uphill. It spent more time at the workshop than I’d like to admit. Eventually, the car and I parted ways. I don’t miss it.

But I’ve thought about that moment many times since. Because I keep seeing the same thing play out, just at a much larger scale.

The pattern has a name.

Researchers call it the “say-do gap”: the well-documented disconnect between what people and organisations claim they believe and what they actually do. Studies suggest that stated preferences predict real behaviour with only about 34% accuracy. In other words, what someone tells you they’ll do is wrong two-thirds of the time.

Companies are not immune to this. In fact, they might be the worst offenders, because the stakes of the gap are higher and the audience is larger.

Take the AI industry right now.

You’re scrolling LinkedIn. The usual parade - someone just automated their entire sales pipeline with Claude, someone else dissolved their BDR team and replaced it with an AI agent, someone’s closing deals while they sleep. You’ve seen this post seventeen times this week, different avatar, same energy.

Then you check Anthropic’s careers page.

At the time of writing, Anthropic - the company whose product everyone on LinkedIn is using to replace their sales teams - has 133 open roles in their sales department. One hundred and thirty-three. Salaries ranging from $116K to $290K. Business Development Representatives, Account Executives, Growth roles. A full-scale human sales operation, being built in parallel with a product marketed as making human sales teams obsolete.

And Anthropic isn’t alone. A few months ago, Salesforce made headlines for aggressively hiring salespeople - this while actively marketing agentic AI to customers as a tool for reducing headcount in, you guessed it, sales.

We’ve seen this movie before.

There’s a concept in the tech industry called “dogfooding” — the idea that a company should use its own product internally before asking customers to rely on it. Microsoft popularised the term back in 1988. The logic is simple: if it’s good enough to sell, it should be good enough to use yourself. When companies do this, it builds credibility. When they don’t, it should raise questions.

A high school friend once tried to convince me to quit smoking. He made a pretty compelling case. He was smoking while he said it.

The crypto era is instructive here too. I know this one personally.

A friend got me into crypto around 2021. He was genuinely pumped — the kind of conviction that feels like insider knowledge when you’re on the outside of it. I trusted him. Put in $30,000. By the time the music stopped, I had $200 left. I later connected the dots: he had every incentive to bring people in. His reputation took a significant hit afterwards, and I wasn’t the only one who got burned.

I don’t think he set out to con anyone. But he was selling a story he personally stood to gain from, and I took the excitement at face value instead of asking harder questions. The loudest voices in the crypto conversation were often the ones most financially exposed to your belief in it.

Then there’s the online course industrial complex. Someone builds a modest income teaching people how to build a modest income. If the method worked as advertised, why would they bother teaching it to you? The question answers itself.

In a noisy, TLDR world, the loudest claim wins by default. Most people don’t have the time, or the incentive, to check whether the person selling the vision is actually living it. That ease is exactly what gets exploited.

So how do you tell the bluff from the real thing?

Get a little more cynical. Not paranoid butcynical. Paranoid is assuming everything is a lie. Cynical is asking, quietly, who benefits from you believing this.

A few things worth keeping in mind:

Watch what they hire, not what they announce. Press releases are marketing. Job postings are operational reality. When a company posts aggressively for roles they claim their product eliminates, that tells you where the technology actually stands. The hiring budget doesn’t lie the way the keynote does.

Are they eating their own dog food? If the AI company isn’t using AI to run its own sales pipeline, that’s worth noting. If the salesperson drives a Subaru, that’s worth noting too. Behaviour leaks out if you look closely enough. Even if there are legitimate reasons for the gap, the optics take a hit — and optics are often the point.

Who’s getting rich from the idea - and how? The crypto evangelist made money from your belief in crypto, not necessarily from crypto itself. The course seller made money from selling courses about making money. When the messenger profits more from the message than the method, slow down.

Give it time. NFTs had a very loud two years. Then the music stopped. Most hype cycles have a shelf life. The question isn’t whether something is exciting now — it’s whether the people selling it are still around in five years, building on it quietly rather than loudly.

None of this means AI isn’t genuinely transformative. It probably is, in ways we’re still figuring out. The honest version of the story - AI handles the volume, humans handle the stakes - might turn out to be exactly right.

But “might turn out to be right” is very different from the confident, frictionless certainty that fills your feed every morning. The LinkedIn version has already closed the deal, collected the commission, and is posting about it.

My Verna salesperson wasn’t dishonest. He was enthusiastic about something he had good reasons to be enthusiastic about. But he drove a Subaru home every night.

Ask people what they drive. It tells you more than the brochure ever will.

Battle of Fates is a Korean survival show where 49 fate readers — shamans, tarot readers, saju masters, face readers — compete to prove they can actually read destiny. On paper it sounds like glorified entertainment. Forty-nine mystical figures in a room, one winner. I went in half-sceptical, half-curious, the way you approach anything that sits just outside what you’re willing to believe.

What I didn’t anticipate was how human they all were. And I mean that in the heaviest sense of the word.

Every single one of them had a story. Not a fun origin story — the kind with a montage and a triumphant score. The kind you carry quietly. Grief, loss, illness, years of being misunderstood. The kind that doesn’t resolve, it just becomes part of how you move through the world.

The one that stopped me was Young Master Byeon. He started his journey at five years old. Five. We’ve all seen this archetype in other forms — the piano prodigy who was practising Chopin while other kids were watching cartoons, the chess grandmaster who never really had a childhood to speak of. We tend to celebrate these stories. But watching Byeon, the feeling I got wasn’t admiration. It was something closer to grief. Whatever opened in him at that age, he never really got to be a child after that. No clean stretch of ordinary life before the weight arrived. It just arrived early and stayed.

I sat with that for a while.

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We romanticise people like him. The gifted one, the seer, the person who can perceive what the rest of us can’t. There’s a kind of glamour to it — in movies, in folklore, even in the way we half-jokingly consult fortune tellers at Waterloo Street and then think about what they said for three days after. The gift feels powerful from the outside.

But watching these 49 people, I kept wondering: what if it’s less gift, more weight? What if the sensitivity that lets you read someone else’s fate also means you can’t quite switch off? What if the same thing that makes you perceptive also makes ordinary life feel a little harder to inhabit?

I don’t know if fate reading is real. I genuinely don’t. But I think that question might be less interesting than this one: what does it cost the person doing it?

Byeon wasn’t an exception. The more episodes I watched, the more I noticed the pattern.

There was Seolhwa, who was told she would have a short life. She knows this. She continues anyway — reading other people’s fates, showing up, doing the work — with that knowledge sitting somewhere in her. I don’t know what to do with that kind of person. I’m not sure I have the vocabulary for it. “Brave” feels too clean.

Then there were the shamans who are parents. What struck me about them wasn’t the rituals or the intensity, though there was plenty of both. It was something smaller: the fear that their children might inherit this path. They didn’t choose to become shamans — in Korean shamanic tradition, the calling chooses you, often through illness or crisis. You resist it, you suffer more. You accept it, and your life becomes something most people wouldn’t recognise as ordinary.

And these people, who have built their entire identity around this path, quietly hope their kids are spared.

If that’s not a review of the life, I don’t know what is. Nobody lies awake worrying their child will inherit something good.

Here’s what makes it complicated though.

People still seek them out. In droves. The show’s guests — celebrities, ordinary people — sit across from these fate readers and open up in ways they probably don’t with their therapists. They cry. They nod. They say how did you know that.

So there’s something being exchanged in that room, regardless of what you believe about the metaphysics of it. These wounded people, with their heavy histories, are giving something real to the people who come to them. Maybe the suffering is precisely what makes them good at it. Maybe you can only see certain things clearly if you’ve had to look at hard truths your whole life.

None of them chose this. Not Byeon at five. Not Seolhwa with her shortened timeline. Not the shamans who resisted the calling until resistance became its own kind of suffering.

But here they all are. Showing up. Reading strangers. Carrying their weight and somehow still making it useful.

And they’re not alone in that. Most people carrying a hard hand never end up on a show. They’re just out there — the single mother holding three jobs together with sheer will, the kid who grew up too fast because someone had to, the person who rebuilt quietly after losing everything. No cameras. No audience. Just the daily decision to keep going anyway.

We don’t get to choose the hand we’re dealt. Some people get a harder one than most, and no amount of positive thinking changes that. But what stays with me, watching all 49 of them, is that the hand isn’t the whole game.

You still get to decide how you play it.

If that scene made you wince a little, good. Because that instinct to immediately locate the gap instead of celebrating the ground is exactly the problem Tim Ferriss was circling in his recent piece on the self-help trap. His line hit me cold: to continually improve yourself, you must continually locate the ways you are broken. We’ve built an entire culture around doing exactly that, and we’ve gotten very good at it.

Singapore is a spectacular case study. Back in 2016, PM Lee told us to have Divine Discontent — never to be fully satisfied, to always be reaching. Noble idea. Except somewhere along the way, Divine Discontent stopped being a personal philosophy and became a national anxiety. Ministers remind us to reskill and upskill or risk irrelevance. Every other LinkedIn post screams that 90% of people are using AI completely wrong. Oh, and if you want the cheat code, just comment WOOHOO and they’ll DM you a PDF (that nobody reads past page 3).

I should know. I have a Notion page stuffed with AI prompts I’ve collected like a man preparing for an apocalypse that requires very specific text inputs. You know what that Notion page taught me? That I am an excellent collector of prompts. That’s it. That’s the whole lesson.

And here’s the phrase we’ve collectively forgotten how to say: good enough.

Not in a defeatist, give-up-and-rot sense. But in the honest, clear-eyed sense of: I am doing well. The goalpost keeps moving, and maybe I should stop chasing it. You score 100? Now you need to score 100 consistently. You graduate from a local university? Last generation, that was a golden ticket. Now you need seven internships, a specialisation, an online certification, a side hustle, and probably to make offerings at Tua Pek Kong for 49 days straight. And still, maybe, possibly, a job.

This screenshot I’ll drop here says it all. Nobody — nobody — needs anything that sophisticated. We’re solving problems we don’t have with tools we’ve barely started using.

Ferriss puts his finger on something deeper, though: the optimisation obsession starts with a foundational belief that you are broken. That the glass is perpetually half-empty when it comes to yourself. Keep seeing yourself that way long enough, and it stops being motivation — it becomes a kind of low-grade misery you’ve learned to call productivity.

Think of it this way. You finally add a car perfume to your car after years of meaning to. Does the car suddenly feel new again? For about four minutes, maybe. That 0.00001% improvement you chased didn’t change anything fundamental. But somehow we keep believing the next upgrade will be the one that finally makes us feel complete.

Most of us are, in fact, doing remarkably well given everything we’re dealing with. That deserves more than a footnote.

So what instead? Not nothing. Not abandoning growth entirely. But maybe redirecting the energy toward what actually matters — friends, family, a hobby you do just because you like it, meals you cook for someone else, conversations that don’t have a productivity angle. Anything, really, except trying the new technique that meshes Pomodoro with time-blocking while listening to a binaural beats playlist your LinkedIn connection swears by.

Life is already here. Already happening. Already, in most of the ways that count, pretty good.

The 98 marks are right in front of you.

My first thought — embarrassingly honest — was: must be nice to live in Australia.

Work-life balance. Shops that close at a reasonable hour. A culture that doesn’t celebrate staying at the office until 9 pm as a personality trait. I told myself that’s why he has time for all this, and I don’t.

Then I caught myself.

He has 24 hours a day. I also have 24 hours a day. The math is the same. The question isn’t time. It’s what fills it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Specifically about how I spend the hours that aren’t work. The honest answer, for a long time, was: social media rabbit holes. Netflix until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. The particular exhaustion of consuming a lot while doing nothing.

Recently, I built a book nook. If you haven’t seen one: it’s a miniature diorama — in my case, a tiny Shakespeare bookshop, complete with shelves, a staircase, and a sign that reads “Welcome to My Book Store” — that sits between books on a shelf. It does nothing. It solves no problem. It cannot be monetised. I bought a kit on a whim and spent many afternoons assembling it, and somewhere around the third tiny shelf I realised I hadn’t looked at my phone once, hadn’t thought about work, hadn’t thought about much at all except whether this miniature plant was going in the right corner.

I felt better afterwards than I had in weeks.

There’s a name for this. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying what he called “flow” — the state of being fully absorbed in a task, where self-consciousness drops away and time stops registering normally. The activity has to be the right level of challenging: too easy and your mind wanders, too hard and you freeze. Building flat-pack furniture, apparently, sits right in that sweet spot for me.

The research on hobbies is more robust than you’d expect. A 2023 study published in Nature Medicine tracked over 93,000 people aged 65 and above across 16 countries for up to eight years. People with hobbies consistently reported better health, greater happiness, and fewer symptoms of depression than those without. That’s not a small convenience sample. That’s a serious longitudinal study across diverse cultures pointing in the same direction.

At the neurological level, engaging in an enjoyable hobby triggers the brain’s reward system, releasing dopamine — the chemical tied to pleasure and motivation, which then reinforces the desire to do it again. It’s one of the few legal, free ways to reliably hack your own reward circuitry.

There’s also a stress angle. One study found that roughly 75% of participants saw their cortisol levels drop after making art — even those who didn’t identify as artistic. The act of making something with your hands, it turns out, has a physiological effect that passive consumption simply doesn’t replicate.

But here’s what I find most interesting, and what I think is most relevant for people like me who have spent years optimising everything: the identity buffer argument.

When your professional identity is the only one you have, any failure at work becomes a failure of self. A bad performance review, a project that doesn’t land or a period of unemployment all start feeling like existential threats. You’ve put all your eggs in one basket.

I felt that after exiting from my recruitment business after 11 years. Without any other identity, I was thrown straight into an identity crisis which took months to get out of.

A hobby cracks that open. If you’re also someone who grows aquatic plants, or builds speaker systems, or does weekend barbecue with genuine investment, a bad week at work is still a bad week at work, but it doesn’t touch the part of you that knows how to keep a planted tank alive. Your self-concept has more surface area. It distributes the load.

One scientific review catalogued more than 600 distinct ways hobbies can benefit people — from reduced stress and improved mood to the development of creativity, resilience, and self-confidence. Six hundred!

There’s a particular trap worth naming here, especially for people with an entrepreneurial reflex: the temptation to monetise.

The moment a hobby becomes a side hustle, something changes. The thing you did because it absorbed you completely is now subject to performance metrics. Are people buying? Is the audience growing? Could this scale? The frivolousness and the uselessness were precisely what made it work. Turning it into a revenue stream strips the very quality that gave it its restorative power. And the exhaustion from managing a side hustle has a way of bleeding into everything else.

Some things are allowed to just be for you.

I know the objection. I’ve made it myself. Time is the real constraint. Between work and family and the ten thousand administrative tasks that constitute modern adult life, where exactly do the hobbies go?

But I keep coming back to my friend’s husband and his aquatic plants. He’s no less busy than me in any meaningful structural sense. He’s made a different set of choices about what the non-work hours are for. Something more like an investment in a version of himself that isn’t legible on a CV.

If you spend three hours a day on your phone — which, per most screen time reports, is a conservative estimate for a lot of us — and redirected even 15 or 20 minutes of that toward something that required your hands and your full attention, the research suggests it would matter. Not in a productivity-hack way. Not in a way that optimises your output or builds your personal brand. More quietly and durably, being good at something for no reason tends to matter.

The frivolousness is the point. That’s what makes it work.