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Normal life in Singapore is starting to feel like a bad deal
Lawrence Wong says Singapore must “defy this global trend”. Lee Hsien Loong says, “Do not lie flat. It is such a waste.”
But before calling it a waste, maybe ask what exactly people are being told not to withdraw from.
Because a lot of people are not refusing some rich, meaningful life.
They are refusing a bad bargain.
The script is familiar by now. Do well in school, get into something respectable, keep upgrading, stay employable, try to secure housing before prices run away again, get married at the “right” time, have children only if the numbers do not look suicidal, and meanwhile be useful to your parents, your employer and your future family all at once. And if that arrangement feels crushing, somehow the conclusion is still that you need a better attitude.
At some point, “resilience” just becomes a polite word for swallowing a worse deal.
And no, this does not mean all ambition is fake, or that family is meaningless, or that effort is for suckers. Some people genuinely want a demanding career, a family, a bigger life. Good for them. This is not an argument against responsibility. It is an argument against pretending the current script is neutral.
Because more and more of what gets sold as success now comes bundled with dependency. A better job often just means less time and more of yourself handed over. Higher pay disappears into a more expensive baseline. A nicer flat can mean a bigger mortgage and one more thing you are scared to lose. Even the genuinely good things — marriage, children, a more comfortable life — arrive tied to higher stakes, more vulnerability and more pressure to keep the whole arrangement standing.
Underneath all this is fear, and I think that matters more than people admit. Fear of falling behind. Fear of disappointing your parents. Fear that you are no longer marriage material if your salary stalls. Fear that housing slips out of reach. Fear that one retrenchment, one illness, or one bad year is enough to throw the whole thing sideways.
That is why I think “lying flat” gets misunderstood. People hear it and imagine a person giving up on life. But sometimes it is not that dramatic. Sometimes it is just somebody looking at the trade-offs properly for the first time.
Because once you get used to a certain standard of living, it stops feeling like comfort and starts feeling like necessity. Then you are no longer just working to live. You are working to maintain a whole arrangement you are scared of losing. That is why some people stop chasing. Not because they want to rot, not because they hate work, not because they reject adulthood, but because they can see the pattern and they are no longer convinced the trade is worth it.
At that point, the more rational move may not be to chase harder, but to need less. Less prestige. Less lifestyle inflation. Less obsession with turning every decision into salary strategy, property strategy, school strategy or status strategy. Maybe the calmer life is not the one where you keep winning inside the game, but the one where the game has fewer ways to get at you.
And this is not even uniquely Singaporean. Across East Asia, you keep seeing different versions of the same exhaustion. South Korea has the N-po generation. China has tang ping and bai lan. Japan has more severe forms of withdrawal like hikikomori, which is not the same thing but still tells you something about what prolonged pressure can do. Taiwan has fewer slogans, but the demographic retreat is obvious enough. Different forms, different severity, same broad message: when normal life starts feeling too expensive, too conditional and too easy to fail at, more people begin pulling back.
So when people “lie flat”, maybe they are not rejecting life. Maybe they are rejecting unnecessary dependence. Maybe they are trying to build a life with fewer points of failure — less debt, less performance, less comparison, less of that constant low-grade panic that one wrong move and the whole structure starts shaking.
And no, not everyone can opt out. Plenty of people have parents to support, children to raise, bills to pay, no cushion at all. But that does not weaken the point. It makes it worse. If so many people feel trapped in a script they cannot safely refuse, then the problem is not just attitude. The problem is the script itself.
A decent society should not need to shame people into participating in normal adulthood.
If more and more people are stepping back, maybe the first question should not be, “Why are they so weak?”
Maybe the first question should be: why has being normal become so expensive, so exhausting, and so easy to fall out of?
So no, I do not think “lying flat” is automatically admirable. At its worst, it can become stagnation, avoidance, even despair.
But I also do not think it is automatically a moral failure.
Sometimes it is just the first sane response to an insane cost structure.
Maybe the real waste is not that some people are refusing the script.
Maybe the real waste is building a society where refusal starts to look like the healthiest reaction to it.
Do you think “lying flat” is weakness, or just what happens when the price of being normal gets too high?
