She told me she likes my content because it’s unfiltered. I get that a lot, although I’ve never figured out if it’s a compliment or a polite way of saying I have no editor.

Then she added that it’s much better than “some cringey influencers.”

I asked for names, but she hesitated. Nobody wants to be the one who says it out loud.

So I threw her two. Crystal Lim-Lange. Juliana Chan.

Bingo.

(A decade in recruitment teaches you one thing. If someone won’t tell you their salary, you guess a number and watch their face.)

Not the first time

Those 2 names come up a lot. Whenever someone tells me who they can’t stand, one of them usually makes the list. Sometimes both.

I don’t see much of their stuff myself. My feed these days is mostly people trying to be funny about work, because I find those much more fulfilling. At the very least, they made me laugh. Favikon currently ranks me #1 in corporate humour in Singapore.

(Yes, I know. I just slipped a ranking into the second section of a post about cringe. Keep that in mind. It comes back to bite me later.)

But this time I got curious. Are they really that insufferable or is this just what happens to anyone who gets big on LinkedIn?

So what is cringe, anyway?

Cringe is second-hand embarrassment. It’s the feeling you get at a wedding dinner when the uncle at your table starts reading out his CV. He thinks he’s impressing everyone. You’re staring at the fake shark’s fin soup, wishing it were deeper.

LinkedIn cringe is its own strain. Humble brags. Fake inspiration. A coffee spill that somehow teaches 5 lessons about leadership. A tree that fell over and grew back up, now a metaphor for your Q3.

Trung Phan wrote the best explanation I’ve read, back in 2022, in his newsletter SatPost: Why is LinkedIn so cringe? He blames 3 things. The persona LinkedIn asks you to be. Who actually pays LinkedIn. And what the algorithm rewards.

The persona bit is the one that stuck with me. He talks about the version of himself that lives on his resume:

“My least favourite version of Trung is ‘CV Trung’... Because CV Trung is a knob.”

We all have a CV version of ourselves. LinkedIn is the only platform that asks you to post as him every day.

Then there’s the money. LinkedIn’s biggest paying customers are recruiters and HR departments. Trung borrows a line from Fadeke Adegbuyi’s essay “LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe” that hit a bit too close to home:

“The depravity of a platform where HR Managers are the rockstars speaks for itself.”

I’m also an HR influencer. I read that line twice.

Which makes me wonder. If the platform is built to produce cringe, how much can you blame the people it produces?

How I got the data

I wasn’t going to judge 2 people on vibes and a coffee. So I went and got their posts.

Read more

It went something like this.

I made that up. It was a joke on LinkedIn.

But forty-two years ago, it was basically real. In January 1984, the Singapore government set up a unit to help public servants find love. Two weeks ago, it launched a platform to help public servants find love. Same target audience. Same idea.

So whether the government should play matchmaker is a dead question. It has done it for four decades. What I want to know is why it keeps failing badly enough to try again.

For the record, I’m not anti-marriage. I have four kids. And for about ten years I ran a headhunting firm, which is matchmaking with a commission. So I looked at FirstDate the way a recruiter would.

What FirstDate actually is

Half the internet reacted to a headline, so here are the basics.

• A GovTech pilot. It launched on 29 September and applications closed on 5 October. Only public officers aged 21 to 35 can join.

• Nobody ordered it. It came out of GovTech’s staff hackathon. Some engineers went, “Eh, why don’t we fix dating?” Very Singapore.

• One match at a time. You fill in a questionnaire on interests, habits, values, religion and dealbreakers. You get one match, a compatibility score and 72 hours to decide whether to swap contacts. No swiping.

• Singpass-verified. No fake profiles, no scammers, no married uncles pretending to be single. You won’t be matched with someone from your own agency.

• A Nobel-winning algorithm. Matching uses Gale-Shapley, the stable-matching method behind Lloyd Shapley’s share of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics. It’s the same family of maths that matches junior doctors to hospitals.

After the date, you rate it. Stars. Like a Grab driver.

An early version floated a government-subsidised first-date meal. Can claim or not? Must keep receipt?

As an ex-headhunter, I actually like the design. Tinder is a job board: thousands of listings, everybody spamming, nobody reading properly. FirstDate is a headhunter: one shortlisted candidate, sent to you, with a reason why. In my old job, the shortlist beat the job board every time.

42 years of government cupid, in four eras

Watch one number the whole way through: the fertility rate. Spoiler: it does not go up.

Era 1: The U-turn (1966–1987). Before Singapore spent decades begging us to have more babies, it spent years telling us to have fewer. Stop at Two worked too well. By 1976 the fertility rate was 2.1, exactly replacement level, and then it kept falling. In 1983, Lee Kuan Yew used his National Day Rally to sound the alarm about graduate women not marrying. The 1984 Graduate Mothers’ Scheme followed, including priority in top schools for the third child of a graduate mother. Let’s be honest about what that was: the state ranking whose babies were worth more, by degree. Singaporeans hated it, and it was scrapped the next year. By 1987, “Stop at Two” had become “Have three, or more if you can afford it.” Same people, same confidence, opposite advice.

Era 2: The matchmaker state (1984–2009). January 1984 brought the Social Development Unit, set up to match graduates in the public service. Subsidised mixers, trips and, yes, computer matchmaking. Floppy-disk romance. A separate unit for non-graduates followed in 1985, so your dating pool was sorted by your exam results. Walao. Singaporeans gave it a nickname: Single, Desperate and Ugly. To be fair, it did produce weddings, more than 1,100 by 1992. In 2009 the units merged into the Social Development Network. That makes FirstDate at least the third dating service for civil servants, the most matchmade workforce in the world.

Era 3: The chequebook (2001–2023). In 2001 the strategy shifted to money: the Marriage and Parenthood Package, with the Baby Bonus in the middle, enhanced in 2004, 2008, 2013 and 2015. This is the number to remember. The package’s budget went from $500 million in 2001 to $2 billion in 2013, four times as much. Over roughly the same period, the fertility rate fell from 1.6 to 1.25. If I told a marketing client I’d quadrupled their budget and sales went down, I’d be packing my laptop that afternoon. By November 2023, the SDN had shut its matchmaking platform. Government cupid, retired. Or so we thought.

Era 4: The reset (2026). In 2025 the fertility rate hit a record low of 0.87. Marriages fell for the third year in a row, to 24,688. This year brought the Marriage and Parenthood Reset Workgroup, then a National Day Rally package of up to $62,000 per child. And now, 42 years after the SDU, a dating service for public servants. Again. Look at the word they chose: reset. You only hit reset when the game is going badly.

Why the government keeps doing this

In Singapore, no wedding means no baby. Births outside marriage just aren’t socially or legally accepted here. So if the government wants more babies, it needs more weddings first. Your love life is a supply chain issue.

The clock is loud, too. Singapore became a super-aged society this year, with at least 21% of us aged 65 or older. And we’re marrying later: the median age at first marriage in 2025 was 31.1 for men and 29.6 for women.

Here’s what doesn’t add up. Singaporeans still like marriage. In a 2025 government survey, about 95% of married people said they were happily married, and most Singaporeans say they want to marry and have kids. Tokyo found the same thing: about 70% of people who wanted to marry were doing nothing to find a partner.

In marketing we call this the say-do gap. The customer says “I love your product” and never buys. In headhunting we have another name for it: passive candidates. They’ll take your call. They’re open to the right offer. They’re just not looking.

You never move a passive candidate by sending them more job listings. You find out what’s stopping them, and you fix that. Remember that. It’s the whole answer to whether FirstDate works.

My verdict: it fixes sourcing, but the problem is the offer

FirstDate will probably work for the people who use it. And it will do nothing for Singapore. Both can be true.

To be fair, it’s the best one they’ve ever built. There’s no profit motive: commercial apps make money when you stay single. Singpass keeps out the fakes. One match at a time beats swipe fatigue. It’s a humble pilot, not a ribbon-cutting. And Tokyo’s version has produced real families: about 16,000 members, 760 couples, 265 marriages.

But do the maths. That’s under 2% of members married, and Japan’s fertility rate still fell to 1.14. Singapore registers about 24,000 marriages a year, and a pilot for civil servants under 35 won’t move that. The stigma hasn’t gone either: Single, Desperate and Ugly, forty years later, new app. And an algorithm can’t do chemistry. If everyone ranks the same few people first, it just shares out the disappointment more fairly. Very efficient heartbreak.

Here’s how I see it as a recruiter. Every hire goes through a funnel: sourcing, interview, offer, acceptance, retention. In ten years of headhunting, I almost never lost a good candidate at sourcing. Finding people was the easy part. I lost them at the offer. Pay not enough. Location too far. Bad timing. Or they went home, talked to their spouse, and came back the next morning with “Sorry ah, Adrian.”

FirstDate is a great sourcing tool. Singapore’s marriage problem sits at the offer. When a couple in their 30s decides whether to marry and have kids, they’re asking: can we afford the flat? Childcare? What happens to my career? Who looks after my parents? No algorithm touches that.

The National Day Rally package does go after the offer, with full-day childcare down to $150 a month and higher income ceilings for BTO flats. That’s the right fight. Is it enough, and fast enough for someone who’s 30 today? I don’t think so.

And with my HR hat on: when exactly are people in their 20s and 30s supposed to date? You’re working till 8pm, replying to your boss at 11pm, flying to Jakarta on Monday. If employers actually cared about the birth rate, they’d stop sending emails at midnight. That would do more than any app.

If I ran FirstDate, I’d do three things:

1. Open it to everyone, not just civil servants.

2. Kill the age cap of 35.

3. Publish the results, good or bad, so we actually learn something.

Forty-two years ago, the government sorted singles by their exam results and sent them on subsidised trips. Today it uses a Nobel Prize-winning algorithm and Singpass. The tools got much better. The fertility rate got much worse. Supply was never the problem. The problem is whether people can afford to say yes.

Sources

The “press release” at the top is satire. There is no Office of Leadership Supply.

• FirstDate (GovTech pilot)

• Mothership: Govt staff from the same agency won’t be matched on FirstDate (4 Oct 2026)

• Mothership: Govt explored a dating site for singles aged 35 and below (3 May 2026)

• CNBC: Singapore debuts a state-backed dating app for young government workers (4 Oct 2026)

• The Star / The Straits Times: Marriages in Singapore fall further in 2025 (10 Jul 2026)

• Malay Mail: Tokyo govt dating app leads to 265 marriages (28 Jul 2026)

• Singstat: Population Trends 2026

People always say job search is a full-time job. They’re right. They’re just wrong about what kind of job it is.

Job search is a sales job. You have exactly one product to sell, and that product is you. Like every sales job, if you don’t close, you don’t eat.

There’s one big difference. In a corporate sales job, miss your quota month after month and you get fired. In job search, nobody fires you. No boss, no performance review. You just quietly go hungry lah.

Sold at a discount

Right now, more people in Singapore are going hungry. Last quarter, over 4,000 workers were retrenched, the highest quarterly number since the end of 2020. About eight in ten of them were PMETs.

If you believe the stats, the overall job market is still “relatively healthy.” That’s no consolation if you’re the one who got the letter. Nobody gets laid off, reads the news, and feels better about it.

Getting back in is also taking longer. About 55% of retrenched residents found a job within six months. The quarter before, it was 60.7%.

Then there’s the price. Picture a professional earning $8,400 a month, the median pay for PMEs. They get retrenched, and six months later they land a job paying $6,000. The stats will call that a successful re-entry.

What it actually is: six months without a salary, then a pay cut of almost 30%. In sales terms, you closed the deal. You just sold at a huge discount.

So I won’t pretend I have a magic formula for landing a premium. For most of us right now, the goal is getting a foot in the door.

Why listen to me

I spent a decade running my own recruitment company. That’s ten years on the buyer side of this sales job. I’ve seen the applications that get a callback, and the ones that get deleted in seconds.

I also co-wrote Everything You Wish to Ask a Headhunter with Steven Pang, a guidebook answering the questions job seekers are too afraid to ask recruiters directly. So when I say job search is a sales job, it’s not a theory. I’ve been the customer, and along the way I’ve been on the selling side too.

Stop spamming

If job search is sales, why do so many of us do it like the worst salesperson in the office?

Same pitch for everyone. Blast it to 500 leads. No research, no follow-up, no tracking. Then wonder why nobody’s buying.

There are now tools that will auto-send 500 applications a month for you. That’s spam lah, and spam gets filtered.

Here’s the playbook instead. Six things: where to sell, how to prospect, how to fix your pitch deck, how to work warm leads, how to manage your pipeline, and how to close.

1. Pick your territory

Every good salesperson knows it’s much easier to sell where people are already buying.

A recent CNA commentary pointed out that total employment grew by 11,000 in Q2. Most of that went to non-residents, mainly work permit holders in construction and manufacturing. Resident employment grew by only 2,000-plus. So yes, jobs are being created. Just not necessarily for the person who got retrenched from a bank last month.

Before you send another application, ask where the money is flowing. Right now the answer is simple: AI. Ride that wave.

The wave is bigger than AI companies, though. Look upstream and downstream:

• The infrastructure. Chip makers, data centres, the power and cooling AI runs on. VSMC recently opened its first plant in Singapore. They don’t do AI, but they supply the companies that do.

• The adopters. Every bank, hospital and retailer that now needs people to implement AI, train staff on it, and govern it.

And look away from the sinking ships. Shopee cut 8% of its developers. DBS said it will phase out about 4,000 contract and temp roles over three years while it hires for AI. F&B lost about 3,000 jobs in the first half of the year because of rent and costs. Different reasons, same lesson. If the industry is sinking, applying harder is like going door to door selling fax machines.

Move one step sideways, into the role right next to the wave. If you need new skills, train for them, but train for a real job and not a hope. Acting Manpower Minister Jasmine Lau put it well: career conversion programmes should train people for actual roles companies need, instead of teaching a new skill and hoping a job turns up that uses it.

If you want to spot which companies and sectors are shedding jobs, check layoffsg.com, the layoff tracker I run. It’s historical data, but history is a decent teacher. The patterns there are the ones you may want to avoid.

2. Prospect for advice

Stop asking for a job. Ask for advice instead.

When you message someone with “Do you have any openings?”, you’re asking them to make a decision. The easiest decision is no, or silence. Try this instead: “I’m exploring a move into your field. I’d love your advice on how to approach it.” Now you’re asking them to be the expert, and people love being the expert.

Advice conversations also have a funny habit of turning into “Actually, you should talk to so-and-so.” I’ve seen it happen many times.

When I was doing business development, I never pitched clients directly. I’d tell them, “I just joined this company. This is what we do. Not sure if it’ll work for someone like you. Can I get your advice?” Six out of ten agreed to talk to me. There’s a saying in startups: ask for money and you get advice; ask for advice and you get money. Same thing applies to job search.

3. Let the leads come to you

The best salespeople don’t only chase leads. They get leads coming to them. For a job seeker, that’s content.

You don’t need a big following. You need maybe 50 of the right people to see that you think clearly about your field. One post a week about what you know is a billboard that works while you sleep.

This is how I got into HR tech. I’d been writing about it for years. At an event in India, the company’s marketing person recognised me from my writing, and within minutes we went from chatting at the booth to them telling me they were expanding to Singapore. My last job before going independent came the same way: my ex-boss appeared on my podcast, and I’d been telling all my guests I was on the lookout.

I’m still doing it now. When a few contracts got cancelled, I started a marketing newsletter to put myself out there. Within the first month, two prospects came in. Neither has closed yet, but I’m pointed in the right direction.

So if you know what you’re specialising in, write about it. Or make videos. Whatever works, as long as people start to see you as the specialist.

3. Fix your pitch deck

Your resume is your sales deck, and it has two audiences: the machine first, then the human.

The machine. Most companies run resumes through an applicant tracking system (ATS) that scans for keywords from the job description. If your resume says “managed client relationships” and the job ad says “account management,” the machine may not connect the dots. Even in the age of AI, some of these older systems are still quite stupid.

So mirror the language of the job ad, but only for things you’ve actually done. To check, tools like Jobscan and Teal compare your resume against a job description and show which keywords are missing. There’s also a Singapore-built one called ApplyLah that tailors your resume to each role using only your real experience.

The human. Once you get past the machine, a person takes a look. Give them results instead of responsibilities, and numbers instead of adjectives. Honestly, ChatGPT can help you with most of this today.

Want to go further? For your dream company, print a hard copy, figure out who the decision-maker is, and mail it to them. You don’t need to do it for every application. For the one you really want, why not?

4. Work your warm leads

Every salesperson knows a warm lead beats a cold call. In hiring, the warm lead is a referral.

Referrals make up only about 7% of applicants, yet studies have found they account for 30 to 50% of hires. Referred candidates are about four times more likely to get hired. Newer data is more conservative, but the pattern holds: a tiny share of applications, a big share of hires. It makes sense. When someone refers you, they put their own reputation on the line.

So the real question is who you know, and who they know. Most of us are terrible at answering that. Thousands of LinkedIn connections, old colleagues, contacts in our phone, and we can barely remember who’s where now. A tool like Happenstance helps. It searches across your network to find who you know, or who can get you to the person you want. If your connections also use it, you can see their networks too.

A friend of mine spotted a Lego job posted by their talent acquisition person, who was asking for recommendations. He started a group chat and got about ten of us to comment on the post. Every comment said the same thing: “You should talk to Michael.” If you were that recruiter, who would you call? Michael didn’t get the job in the end, but I thought it was a clever approach.

How aggressive you want to be is up to you. At one of my previous jobs, my boss ran the Korea office and went a full year after set-up with zero business. So he started camping on the ground floor of a target customer’s building, chain-smoking, because he knew exactly who he wanted to meet (and hope to “bump” into at the smoking corner). Months later, he finally bumped into that person, made small talk, and eventually won their business.

I’m not asking you to sacrifice your lungs lah. The point is that the people who can say yes to you have lives. They play golf. They do charity work. Know where to find them, and when to lean in.

5. Manage your pipeline

No serious salesperson keeps 50 deals in their head. They use a CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce. You should too.

Track every opportunity: company, contact, stage, last touch, next step. Most deals, and most jobs, are lost in the follow-up. The recruiter says “I’ll get back to you soon,” two weeks pass, and then what? Do you follow up? Do you even remember?

There are free tools built for this. Huntr gives you a Kanban board that moves each job from saved to applied to interview to offer. Teal has a free tracker too. If all that feels like too much, a spreadsheet works fine. What matters is that you use something.

6. Close at the right price, then keep selling

Here’s the best news in this whole post. In a sales job, you have to hit quota every month, every quarter, forever. In job search, you need one customer. You don’t need 400 applications. You need one employer to say “we want you.”

That changes how you spend your time. Fewer leads, better leads, warmer leads, proper follow-up.

I’m not going to pretend the market isn’t bad right now. But that’s outside anyone’s control. Your better bet is to outpace the competition by doing the things they won’t do, because those things are hard.

Remember the $8,400 professional who came back at $6,000? A good salesperson doesn’t only close. They close at the right price. The more warm leads you have, the less pressure you’re under to take the first discount on the table.

And once you close, don’t stop selling. There’s no such thing as loyalty these days. Keep having those coffee conversations. Keep your pipeline warm, because there will be a next time, and you don’t want to start from zero.

The best time to sell is when you don’t need to. It’s like borrowing from a bank: the best time to ask is when you already have money. When you’re down and out is exactly when the bank won’t lend.

But from 1 July 2028, every one of them in Singapore companies with more than 200 employees will need what I let lapse.

I spent ten months inside IHRP in 2021, on the leadership team. Long enough to see the grant taper start but not long enough to see where it lands. You see, IHRP was set up by MOM, NTUC and SNEF. For those of us who are familiar with these 3 organisations, you can already tell where the money is coming from.

And 9 years after the IHRP certification launched, the number of people it has certified sits at around 9,000. According to LinkedIn, Singapore’s HR headcount is roughly 55,000. So after nearly a decade, with tripartite backing and government subsidies, IHRP has certified only 16% of the HR population in the country it exists to professionalise.

Hence the lofty goal of hitting 18,000 certifications by 2030. Which sounds noble… if one is forgetful.

Because in 2022, NTUC and SNEF shook hands on 12,000 IHRP-certified professionals by 2025. That did not happen. In 2023, the number was set to reach 15,000 by 2027.

Going by the pace of the last few years - about 700 new certifications a year - 2027 is fifteen months away, and there’s no way they clear it. So this month, the number reset again: 18,000 by 2030. Quite similar to our World Cup Goal 2010. Big words, little action.

A business that keeps missing its own numbers and announcing a new one instead of explaining the last looks less like progress and more like resetting the goalposts, with a press release each time.

Roughly less than 2,000 companies in Singapore have more than 200 staff. About 900 already have a certified HR person. That leaves 1,100 companies who, as of the new law, are now IHRP’s customers whether they wanted to be or not. Getting to 18,000 by 2030 needs about 2,250 new certifications a year, more than triple the recent pace. The gap between what the market wants and what the target needs is exactly the size of the mandate.

When I was there in 2021, on the leadership team, drawing a comfortable five-figure monthly salary, I was told the operating grant was already down to 75% and tapering to zero. I was, for ten months, a line item in that headcount-to-grant math myself.

IHRP was meant to stand on its own two feet eventually. I don’t know what percentage the grant is on now. What I do know: headcount was about 30 when I was there in 2021; it is now closer to 40.

The certification fees remained highly subsidised, from $163.50 to $272.50 once every three years, and a growth rate that’s been slowing for three straight years. The arithmetic doesn’t close on its own, and I’d guess plenty of people inside suspected as much. Which might be exactly why the government just handed it 1,100 new customers by law, plus a fresh $100 subsidy so the cheap version stays cheap enough that nobody complains.

Even if IHRP hits 18,000 on the nose, the money barely moves. Call it 1,100 new certifications, mostly at the cheaper end, subsidised down to $163.50 every three years. That’s something like $60,000 to $100,000 a year in fresh amortised revenue, against a gap that, by my own rough maths, likely runs into the millions.

Compare that fee to the neighbours. PMC, the equivalent lean-body cert for management consultants, runs you close to $4,000 all in. SHRM, the American one, is $500 to $2,000 depending on how you shop. CIPD, the British one everyone name-drops on LinkedIn, starts around $2,700 and climbs past $6,500. IHRP: $163.50 to $272.50, every three years, subsidised down further from there. For the only certification about to be written into Singapore law, that’s an odd place to sit.

They do have other products but it barely moves the needle. The Human Capital Diagnostic Tool is free to companies, and the assessor-led version was, at least at one point, fully funded by MOM. Spending someone else’s money doesn’t count as diversification. Skills Badges are earned through courses run by other training providers. IHRP stamps the badge; the course fee goes mostly to somebody else.

The events business, though, is the real thing. Sponsorship for their flagship forum runs from a few thousand dollars for a logo on a webpage up past fifty thousand for the top tier. That top tier alone costs more than 300 individual HR certifications.

The pitch to sponsors is that a large share of the community is HR directors or above, from MNCs and large local companies. That’s a genuinely valuable audience, and somebody at IHRP clearly knows how to price access to it. The credential that audience is supposedly built on still costs less than a nice dinner for two, once every three years.

Ten years running my own recruitment firm’s P&L taught me one thing: you don’t cross-subsidise your way to sustainability forever with programmes that cost more to run than they bring in, while the one thing you actually sell is priced like an afterthought.

Because if you do the maths on nine years of payroll, rent and programmes, even roughly, you land somewhere north of $25 million. For comparison, a Louis Vuitton Speedy 25 retails for $2,760. Multiply that by every HR professional IHRP has ever certified and you land in almost exactly the same place. On a back-of-the-envelope basis, it might genuinely have been cheaper to skip the accreditation altogether and just buy all 9,000 of them a bag.

All that is fine if these are private monies, but it isn’t.

Worse still, this is also a body that grades HR practice nationally and scored 2.3 out of 5 on Glassdoor from its own staff, with only 37% saying they’d recommend working there. So what HR best practices are they trying to inculcate? Not to be like them?

It also holds a Great Place To Work Singapore award through next year. I don’t know how both of those are true at once, and I suspect IHRP doesn’t either.

If you ran a business like this, on a credential priced like a rounding error next to your own sponsorship rate card, with output missing its own forecasts for three years running, someone on your board would ask whether it needs the kind of shelter HCLI eventually got.

HCLI launched in 2010 backed by a ministry, a university and a statutory board, not so different from IHRP’s own tripartite start. It ran that way for seven years. In 2017, Temasek Management Services folded its own leadership arm into HCLI, and what came out the other end kept the name but became a permanent subsidiary of TMS, tucked inside a sovereign wealth fund’s balance sheet ever since. IHRP was supposed to be different: taper the grant, live off its own fees. I wonder which version it ends up being.

Somewhere in my inbox is still the email telling me my IHRP-SP lapsed on 17 April 2023. I never worked out what I was paying for. From July 2028, two thousand companies won’t get to make that choice. For them, it won’t be an email. It’ll be the law.

Then I actually sat down and did the maths properly. I was completely off the mark.

My oldest just missed the new baby gift and child credits by age cutoffs. My two middle kids get a partial run of child credits plus a PSEA top-up. Only my youngest, at 10, gets close to the full package. Add it all up across all four kids, spread over the next seven years, and my real total comes to roughly $63,000. A fraction of the $280,000.

I go through the full breakdown, kid by kid, in the video below, along with a few things I think are worth talking about:

• Why the $70K figure doesn’t hold its value

• What’s conspicuously missing from the package

• How Singapore’s incentives stack up against Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong

• Whether this was ever really a money problem to begin with

• Why I had four kids myself, and one slightly ridiculous idea for how Singapore could make big families genuinely aspirational

Doing this exercise humbled me a bit. I went in expecting to feel shortchanged by the government but I left convinced that the number was never really the point.

Would a bigger cheque actually change your mind about having kids? Or is it the other stuffs that money can’t touch?

Let me know in the comments.

Eight years ago I flew to Nanning, sat through five days of the world’s most elaborate sales pitch, and walked away from what turned out to be a pyramid scheme. I wrote about it once and filed a police report but nobody really followed up.

Then 52 Singaporeans got detained in China over a suspected pyramid scheme, my old article resurfaced, and suddenly my face was in the news.

The question I’ve gotten the most since: how the hell did you not realize it was a scam?

Fair question. So instead of answering it piecemeal in comments, I sat down and answered everything. What actually happened in Nanning. Who I met (a Singaporean of the Year finalist, a former MP). Why I still won’t name them. When it clicked that something was off, and why I put money in anyway even after it did.

I could’ve stayed quiet about all this. A lot of people in my position do, because nobody wants to be known as the guy who almost fell for it. But I don’t think that’s the right instinct. The people running these schemes get to operate in public. I don’t see why the people who got pitched to should have to hide.

Full video’s below

That answer came back to me many times over the 16-days trip as I kept noticing myself and the younger folks on their phones taking calls and flipping open laptops to catch up on work, while the retirees just sat there, basking in it.

I want to retire at 55. That used to be Singapore's actual retirement age, back in the 1960s, before it climbed to 60, then 62, then 63, and 64 from this July, with 65 already pencilled in for 2030. I'm aiming for the number the country itself used to think was enough.

A friend of mine, Ashok Samuel, used to run private equity risk at GIC. He retired early, and unlike most people who set a financial target, some number like $2 million liquid before they'll even consider it, he decided he'd pull the hand brake at 55 regardless. Hit the age, and that's it, ready or not.

We walked Botanic Gardens together for over 2 hours once. What perked him up most, he said, was simply catching up with people every day. I get that. During Covid, catching up with people, even over video calls on lunchclub, was my own highlight of most weeks.

Part of why work never really ends here is the expectation that you stay reachable, holiday or not. Singapore is pro-business, and in white collar jobs especially, that headspace follows you everywhere, officially on leave or not.

It's different elsewhere. In Germany, a colleague once prepped for a 3-month trip with zero expectation of checking in. German courts have ruled that contracts forcing workers to stay available during leave don't hold up. She was legally entitled to just disappear.

A Singapore cabin crew I met at a bar in India once told me the job has odd hours as compared to his past job in logistics. But once it's done, it's done. No residue left behind to occupy your head rent-free. I felt exactly that driving Uber for a while. Switch off the app, and that was it. For the longest time, I'd never felt so liberated.

At a recent event, a few of us joked about how the small talk used to go. Years ago it was how are you, we're hiring, so are we. Now it's we're laying off, so are we.

One of them is a CPO at a PE-backed company that's looking to sell soon. Someone asked how he's holding up. He said he's fine either way. He'll just become a farmer.

It wasn't entirely a joke. I've lost count of the people telling me they're sick of white collar work and would rather drive Grab, or work ground staff at the airport. On my own trip, one of the guys does gardening for a living now. Another, a retiree, works at the National Gallery, doing exactly the kind of job you'd have looked down on ten years into a corporate career.

A job's whole point used to be security. If triple hatting, the corporate nonsense, and the constant layoffs just buy you more stress instead, what's actually left to trade for?

I've mentioned before that I have 4 kids, and their education alone is a long, expensive commitment. Between that and old debt I've been paying down for years, I've barely built up savings of my own.

Even so, the idea of doing more work is starting to wear on me. And I'm clearly not the only one. Plenty of my peers are just as sick of it, the escalating demands, the unrealistic targets, the pressure that keeps adding up.

You used to be able to coast in one job and retire into the sunset. Now you get replaced by AI before the sun even rises.

And I'm independent. I can't imagine how much worse it is for employees stuck tolerating decisions from senior management that seem to come down to a coin toss, with zero consequences for the people flipping the coin, just because they happened to land in the C-suite.

I'm 47 now, 7 years out from 55. But that's my finish line too. The modern professional identity just isn't worth the peace of mind it costs.

My retirement funds probably won't stretch to the yearly travel I love.

But given the choice between travelling while still opening my laptop for a report, or just chilling at a local kopitiam without a care in the world, I'll take the kopitiam. Plus I get my bak chor mee fix in the same sitting. Now isn't that just life.

I’m not the only one. There was a family in the recent news about partitioning their place so their 4 kids have a room of their own.

Two of my soccer buddies have 4 too. And who can forget that civil servant with 8 kids.

It would seem like a no brainer to just round us OGs up, put us in a room to distil why we had so many kids (or never learn to use a condom) but I don’t see that happening.

We are instead getting someone who is childless to helm our supposed rethink on family construct. Look, I have no issue with someone with zero lived experience trying to tackle a problem purely based on what one can learn from textbook. For all we know, they can do a better job.

But if I have to choose between a former army general versus a rail veteran to helm SMRT, my money is always on the latter.

The problem is simple guys. It is whether we want to acknowledge it. Ask any couples if they want to have kids or not and their instinctive reply is no. Why so? Don’t look far. Look at this photos of my wife when our kids were still young.

They say weeks can happen in years and for us, years happen in weeks. Look closer and you would realised her soul has left her body.

Anyone who tells you they can balance relationship, kids, career, hobbies, etc likely have money to pay for helper and sometime helpers.

Right now there is zero instance someone would look at me as a father of four and think to themselves: “I would want to be like Adrian”.

Because, why the fuck for?

For the fact that my finance is a mess because apparently caring for kids means paying everything for them until they start a career in their early 20s. Something clearly the government thinks otherwise as financial support ends when kids turn 10.

I need to buy a bigger house (current one is not big enough) because of crowd control. Given the recent lifting of the 15 months waiting period for private home owners, I’ve decided to check out my options for public flats in Pasir Ris.

I filtered my search for the biggest space thinking it should still be worth it. The #1 listing for Pasir Ris is a EM at 2000+ sqf listing for 1.5M.

1.5M!

And truly, the logistics of kids are best done with your own vehicle. It’s because of that, I could fetch my kids from school occasionally and hang out. Sometimes nearby, sometimes at the zoo during off peak when there’s no crowd but us.

Alas, I don’t need to tell you how much COE is right now. If I’m single or have no kids, I would have stuck with public transport.

The part that hits me the most is when it is close to the end of school holidays. With 4 kids, I have 4x the number of Parents Gateway notifications. Usually more than the emails I get on work.

And don’t even get me on tabao food for them. One wants economic rice, one wants carrot cake, another wants Chee Cheong fun and the last wants BCM no chilli. So I have to queue 4 times.

Tell me, which part of such life would make a couple think that the other side of the fence is greener? My side has no grass. Just sand.

So the fix here is easy. What are things that need to be done so couples will actually be envious of couples with kids.

As the saying goes, if a problem can be fixed with money, it isn’t a problem.

And money, Singapore has a lot. So here is my list of what needs to be done to truly turn the situation around.

1. Everything discount card. Think Merdeka card but given to parents with 3 kids and above. It will apply an across the board discount for everything they buy, from groceries to petrol.

2. Priority queue. Not just at USS but everything from your favourite Michelin BCM, the next Blackpink concert and preferred primary schools.

3. 1 x COE. Once you hit 4 kids, keep an eye out for a COE in your mailbox. Since this is Singapore, we are always concerned about abuse. So you only get one non-transferable cert and it only applies to MPV.

4. Guaranteed NDP tickets. The ones ensuring Singapore continue to live on and consequently ensure foreign imports be low are not celebrated at NDP? But no parents contingent please. Our weekends are already full without weekly rehearsals.

5. VIP parking. Very Important Parent. Right at the entrance, engine idling, hazard lights blinking, like you’re picking up a minister. Or just let us use the handicap lot since we do have a handicap in our quality of life.

6. One queue at the hawker centre for parents ordering 4 different things. Economic rice, carrot cake, chee cheong fun, BCM no chilli, one line, one auntie, no more explaining twice that the chilli was a hard no.

And the most power move: legislate that all dependants have to financially support thier parents oncr they are drawing an income. Deduction will be managed by CPF board and the monies go straight to the parents’ CPF account. More kids = more contribution.

None of this fixes the TFR overnight. But my neighbours might finally look twice.

I test a lot of productivity tools. Most promise to save time. Few actually do.

The PLAUD NOTE Pro is one of the rare exceptions.

It’s a small AI voice recorder that captures meetings, calls, interviews and conversations, then automatically generates transcripts, summaries, action items and key takeaways. Instead of frantically taking notes, I can stay focused on the discussion and review everything afterwards.

For anyone in marketing, HR, sales, consulting or content creation, that’s a huge advantage. I’ve used it to capture podcast interviews, client meetings and brainstorming sessions. Often turning a one-hour conversation into usable content within minutes.

What I like most isn’t the hardware. It’s what happens after the recording. The AI helps surface the important moments, so I spend less time organising notes and more time acting on them.

If you’re someone whose best ideas happen during conversations, this is a tool worth looking at.

Disclosure: If you purchase through my link, I may earn a commission at no additional cost to you. I only recommend products I genuinely find useful.

My younger son texted me on a school day to ask if I could take him to the barber. He is 13.

I was buried at work, so I told him to go alone and I’d pay him back.

Then he asked what he was supposed to tell the barber.

I was tempted to tell him to figure it out himself. But I paused and typed out some instructions on the fly: keep the sides neat and tidy, a slope is fine if the barber suggests it, and decide for yourself whether to trim the top or leave it alone.

He went. When I saw him that night, he had a proper haircut.

But that exchange stayed with me.

When my kids were small, we had to teach them everything. How to crawl. How to walk. How to hold a spoon. How to use the toilet. None of it was obvious to them yet, so we taught them every skill, sometimes hand over hand.

My own father died when I was 13, the age my son is now. Everything after that, whatever needed learning, I learned on my own. Trial and error, with enough hard knocks to eventually get the hang of things.

It worked out for me. But it probably did because I got lucky, and luck isn’t something I can pass on to my kids through DNA.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot that.

I assumed that once they became teenagers, they would figure out the rest themselves. Or school would teach them. Outsourcing is tempting once the child in front of you looks less like a child.

But I had skipped the part in between.

I remember training my kids to get themselves home from school, from Marine Parade to Pasir Ris. I followed them a few times to check that the route was safe. On the last run, I trailed behind without letting them know I was there, just to make sure.

That was how I taught them when they were younger. I showed them what to do, watched them try it, then slowly stepped back.

By the time they reached secondary school, I assumed I could skip straight to the stepping-back part.

That was naive of me.

A first crush. A first fight. Falling out with a friend. Walking into a barber shop alone and explaining what you want. Teenagers do figure these things out, but sometimes through knocks they did not need to take.

They still need guidance. I had simply stopped giving as much of it.

I saw the same thing when I taught at ITE.

Many of the students were still trying to work out what they wanted and how to move forward. Yet discipline often became the priority. Miss an assignment or fall short on attendance, and suspension followed.

I found that backwards. These students needed more help, not more punishment. We treated their mistakes as acts of defiance when sometimes they were signs that nobody had shown them how to manage what was expected of them.

I worked with a lecturer who had gone through the ITE system himself. He told me stories about getting into so much trouble as a student that he nearly ended up in a boys’ home.

I thought that history would make him more patient with the students in front of him. Over time, he became one of the lecturers who suspended kids for almost anything.

We were all teenagers once. Yet it is easy to forget what being one felt like: the not-knowing, the uncertainty, the stress of figuring out a body and a world that kept changing around us.

Their problems look small because we have already survived our versions of them. We know that a bad haircut will grow out, a crush will pass and one quarrel probably will not end a friendship forever.

They don’t know that yet.

My father was no longer around to teach me those things. I learned them through trial and error because I had no other choice.

My children do.

My son decided for himself whether to trim the top or leave it alone. I gave him enough information to walk into the shop by himself, then left one decision to him.

That may be what guidance looks like when your children become teenagers. You stop holding their hands, but you don’t stop telling them what they need to know.

That afternoon, it took five lines of text before my son left the house.

Next time, I want to remember to send them.

Everyone is asking whether AI will take our jobs. I think we’re asking the wrong question.

The real disruption isn’t that experienced professionals are being replaced. It’s that the first step of the career ladder is quietly disappearing.

In this video, I explore:

• Why AI helps junior employees more than senior ones

• Why companies are hiring fewer entry-level workers

• What happens when AI takes over the work people used to learn from

• Why today’s graduates face a very different job market

• The hidden risk businesses are creating for themselves

• What leaders, managers, parents and young professionals should do next

Using research from MIT, Stanford, Harvard and real-world examples (including the ATM revolution, factory electrification, and the Air Canada chatbot case), I explain why the biggest AI problem may not be automation, but the disappearance of apprenticeship.

Whether you’re a CEO, manager, HR professional, student or parent, this is a conversation we need to have before it’s too late.

👇 I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Is your company still hiring junior talent?

Or has the entry door quietly started closing?

Leave a comment below.

If you enjoy thoughtful discussions about AI, work, leadership and the future of careers, consider subscribing. New videos every week.

Timestamps:

00:00 AI Hiring Paradox

00:22 Homework Without Struggle

01:05 ATM Story Misleads

01:55 AI Levels Skills

02:39 Entry Jobs Vanish

03:48 Apprenticeship Gets Cut

04:36 Where Seniors Come From

05:34 Why AI Pilots Fail

06:54 Redesign Workflows

08:08 Trust and Accountability

09:05 Protect the Bottom Rung

It is probably one of the unhealthiest things you can eat right after a workout. But it also fixed my entire day.

Because I've had this exact plate before. I was a teenager then and that plate became lunch on most days in a cafe on the top floor of Far East Plaza.

I haven't been back to there in a decade but sitting there in Pasir Ris holding a metal fork, I swear I was 20 again for about 10 seconds.

They call this comfort food. Food that makes you feel better because it's familiar, because it reminds you of home or of being younger.

The other one for me is my mum's prawn rolls. Those got me to her place many times when she was still around. You tell yourself you're visiting your mother. Partly you're visiting the prawn rolls.

That's roughly why I cook for my kids.

Not often though since cooking is a hassle and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But occasionally, especially for the teenage ones who would rather spend 3 hours on FaceTime with their friends than 1 minute with their parents.

I was that kid. Door closed, in my room, discovering this new thing called the internet. Then broadband came along, and oh boy.

But I always came out. The smell from the kitchen would get under the door and I'd slowly stop whatever I was doing and walk to the table.

In Singapore, food is cheap and outsourcing is easy. Most of my parent friends can't cook past fried egg and instant noodles. No judgment, I get it. When both adults are working and the hawker centre 5 minutes away, why bother.

Food is also what makes people stay. My wife had a colleague who got clearance to transfer to the Melbourne office. He came back in under 3 months. He missed the food. Bak chor mee, roti prata, that kind of missing.

My mum's prawn rolls didn't mean much when I was 16. They were just dinner. They only became the thing I'd drive across the island for after she was gone.

So I am hoping some 40-year-old version of my kids will be sitting at a hawker centre near their place one day, eating something ordinary, and get thrown back into a kitchen in Pasir Ris. And I won't be there for it.

Not all at once. Twenty here, fifty there, the way a tap drips. He told me this quite calmly. The friend will pay him back.

I asked how. The friend is also 17. No job and not close to getting one. There is no mechanism in the world by which this money comes home.

So I told him straight up: You’re not getting it back.

He nodded. He understood me completely.

He remains optimistic.

I was 33 the first time.

A friend needed $2,700 to clear a credit card bill. He was an army regular, which in my head meant safe and stable, and I’m going to get my money back.

What I didn’t know was that he was doing the rounds. I wasn’t a friend he came to. I was a stop on a route.

Eventually the loan sharks got tired of waiting and turned up at his camp. You can imagine how that goes for a regular. He isn’t one anymore.

Here’s the part I don’t enjoy. He lives in my estate now. Some mornings I see him at the pool with a young kid (which I reckon is his), and I look at my phone with tremendous urgency, as though the void has just messaged me.

He does the same thing. We have an arrangement. Neither of us agreed to it out loud.

So the $2,700 is still charging me but not in money. Every time I make myself invisible in my own estate, that’s the interest.

Then the ICO. Twenty thousand Singapore dollars.

This was the first crypto peak, when everybody knew a guy. My guy was someone on a roll in crypto, and he explained it to me in the tone people use when they’re being generous with you.

Then he beat his chest. If anything happens, he said, he’d cover it himself.

Nobody asked him to say that. He offered it. And I heard it as reassurance instead of what it was, which is a man promising to pay a bill he could not pay.

I won’t pretend he took advantage of me. I wanted the $20,000 to become $60,000 while I slept. He was just the permission slip.

Nothing happened. Nothing was ever going to happen. And he never compensated anybody, because of course he didn’t.

The last one is the worst, because I saw it coming.

After my mum passed, I wrote about it. A LinkedIn connection reached out with his condolences. We met in person, and he told me his mother had passed too.

Four years before mine, he said.

Four years is long enough that he was out of the worst of it. Short enough that he’d still remember what the worst of it felt like.

Yup, this guy gets it.

In subsequent meetings, he mentioned he does a bit of day trading on the side. Doing well. Would I like to come in?

I declined politely, but he asked again and again.

Before I gave him anything, I went and read his profile properly. Something in it didn’t sit right. I couldn’t tell you what. Nothing you could point at. Just a low hum, like a room that’s slightly too warm.

I sent him USD $1,000.

I want to be precise, because “I got fooled” would be a relief. Fooled is fixable. Fooled means next time I read more carefully.

But I did read carefully. The hum was there. I paid the money to stop hearing it.

Because the alternative was to sit across from a man whose mother had died and say: mate, I’ve looked you up, and I don’t like what I see. That sentence costs more than a thousand US dollars. So I bought my way out of saying it.

Updates came for a while. Then they stopped.

I checked his number recently, and he is not on WhatsApp anymore.

He’s still on LinkedIn though. So I know exactly where he is. And every so often I go and look at the profile again, scanning it, hunting for the thing that would prove I couldn’t have known.

I never find it. What I’m actually checking, if I’m honest, is whether his mother existed.

So I don’t lend now. Not to friends, not to friends of friends, not even to someone crawling towards me, leaving a blood trail on my floor. If I ever hand over money again, it goes out as a gift, and I will never ask about it, and I will not be waiting.

That’s what three of these buys you. It’s expensive tuition, but it took.

My son is out $500 and still thinks his friend will come good.

I’m out a lot more than that, and I still open a stranger’s profile wondering if his mother was real.

He nodded when I told him. He understood me completely.

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 finalist. 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.