The Hunger Games
Let me tell you where I have seen real hunger in Singapore.
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.