09/08/2026
I did the maths on being Singaporean, and it broke my brain a little.😱
Out of 8.3 billion people on Earth, only about 6 million of us were born onto this red dot. That’s 0.07% of humanity. By land, we take up 0.0005% of the Earth’s surface. We are a statistical accident that decided to become one of the safest, cleanest, most functional countries on the planet.
Some of my favourite things about growing up here have nothing to do with any of that though. The smell of fried fish drifting through an HDB corridor around five o’clock, when you know someone’s family is cooking dinner. The dialects underneath our English, Teochew, Hokkien, Hainanese, Cantonese, that still tie us back to our grandparents. Reserving a hawker table with a packet of tissue paper, or honestly my AirPods, because I trust nobody will touch them. A kopitiam auntie who tops up my kopi o kosong without me asking.
We built all this from nothing. No natural resources, just people, and a stubborn refusal to be small. Fifty odd years later, look at us.
I’m not going to pretend it’s perfect. A lot of what we built came from economics first, and I think the next chapter for us is figuring out what success looks like beyond the numbers, our emotional health, our mental health, the parts of us a spreadsheet can’t measure.
Thank you for staying warm while you grew ambitious, Singapore. For building a global city without losing your kampong heart. For proving a nation can grow up fast and still remember to take care of its own.
What’s the one thing you LOVE about Singapore that gets you everytime? Tell me below, I want to read all of them.
