From Comprador to Creator: A Singaporean's Reflection and Awakening

Author: eigen moomin

Translation: TechFlow

We are descendants of those brave ones who left everything behind—fleeing war, escaping famine, or simply seeking a better life—and migrated to this island.

They built a well-functioning nation, a place that tamed chaos and gave us orderly lives. This order allows us to live methodically, without ever needing to perform any truly courageous act. Of course, you still need to work hard, but we have also become the first fully “self-domesticated” immigrant nation. We ourselves extinguished the ambition that once drove our ancestors—hungry and dream-filled—to cross oceans in pursuit of a better life.

This is a wealthy land, and has been for decades. Our people are diligent, hardworking, and well-educated. Our universities are nearly world-class, and will only improve. We are fortunate to be the only country in the world with a rational government and an efficient bureaucracy.

Yet after half a century of relentless effort, turning barren land into fertile soil, where are our “crops”? Where are the homegrown companies we can proudly point to? Where is our “Ericsson” or “Nokia”?

Our self-description has evolved over time. From the original “entrepôt,” a trade hub connecting China and India’s wealth, to a “manufacturing base,” where we carved silicon and refined oil. Today, we’ve shed factory uniforms for suits and lab coats, upgrading from a “base” to a “hub”—in finance, biotech, and all the buzzwords favored by The Economist.

Yet despite changing times, the core relationship between Singaporeans and work remains unchanged. We remain the world’s finest “compradors.” As a service economy, we train our youth to serve banks, funds, labs, and factories. From once acting as middlemen for Western firms unlocking Eastern wealth, to now packaging Eastern firms for entry into a world still dominated by the West. The old “boss” is gone; a new one has taken his place—perhaps he looks like us, but we remain merely his workers.

As for our local small “bosses”: who among them is truly admirable? Every so-called “success story” ultimately boils down to rent-seeking.

Here, you can earn large sums while delivering minimal value. Identify a policy trend favored by the government, start a consultancy promising to deliver on its buzzwords. Apply for grants, do no real work, just give dazzling talks and host “workshops.” Or, if you’re not good at talking, import OEM products from China, slap on your own brand, and sell at double the price as a “local entrepreneur.” As for property tycoons, modern history has already passed judgment on those who built fortunes on land.

Our brightest minds don’t create—they’re too smart for that! We Singaporeans are clever enough to know the safest return on investment is watching what others do, then doing it better. We’re good at math—we intuitively understand that entrepreneurship’s risk-reward ratio is far inferior to being an investment banker, consultant, lawyer, doctor, or software engineer, all of which offer higher Sharpe Ratios. Look at the data: 90% of startups fail!

And when that hollow feeling—that “we are a nation without proud corporate fortresses”—creeps in, we write articles, produce polished CNA documentaries explaining why we can’t innovate. That way, we can comfortably do nothing, because at least we’ve “professionally” diagnosed our problems.

Of course, the issue lies in culture. It’s always about culture. I could name thousands of economists and commentators, cite hundreds of minds smarter than mine, but in the end, it all comes down to that simple word: culture.

Smart People

Our education system is ruthless—it rewards perpetual winners while excluding those on the verge of failure. Anyone who commits the grave sin of failing even one exam must pay the price, forced onto a long detour through life in Singapore (unless, of course, they’re rich enough to afford overseas studies).

By the time you finally enter university, you’ve survived two grueling rounds of competitive exams, each claiming to equip you with essential skills and knowledge for modern society. But in truth, the most important lesson they teach is: never become the one who gets eliminated.

Facing such a system, the rational response is to climb relentlessly upward, avoiding the bottom-tier “chipper.” But when every exam score determines your future, who can afford to underperform in anything? The opportunity cost of doing one extra worksheet or spending an hour in tuition is another side project abandoned, another skill unlearned, another door to a long and uncertain future shut forever. It artificially confines what should be a rich and varied life to a single track of academic excellence, culminating in becoming a professional in a field where credentials guarantee reward.

Perhaps you’re among the 1% who never struggled in school—you’re truly lucky! You had enough bandwidth to discover what you truly love, to try something new. Maybe fifty students per cohort are like you. And of them, half will enter government, begin glamorous careers, and vanish from sight. The other half will leave Singapore for the U.S., never to return.

Luckily, the rest of us remain smart and diligent enough—our excellent education taught us how to solve any problem for our boss. But without great leaders to set direction, do we even know what problems we want to solve ourselves?

Smart People Without Taste

For 18 years, you excelled. Then, upon entering university, the script suddenly changes. Studying for “A” grades and being a “well-rounded student” is no longer enough to qualify as “excellent.” Now, you’re supposed to “follow your passion,” “create something meaningful.”

But of course, there was no time wasted cultivating passion or a sense of meaning. University leaves even less time. Courses are harder, people smarter, more driven. So you adapt to the new script, hastily learning how to perform on this new stage.

You sign up for the university’s entrepreneurship program and practice being entrepreneurial. You learn all the buzzwords, master presentation techniques. You post brilliant content on LinkedIn, exaggerating every major achievement. You help the school meet its key performance indicators (KPIs), proving it produces successful entrepreneurs—a goal aligned with government-driven innovation initiatives. After completing a government-funded, year-long internship in Silicon Valley (the holy land of startups), your resume gains another shiny badge. Congratulations, you’re now a school-certified entrepreneur.

Note a small irony in Singapore—even the birth of an entrepreneur seems state-directed. This isn’t grassroots encouragement for eccentric dreamers, but a carefully choreographed dance, where Type-A kids check off tasks from a script imported from across the ocean. Even those who perform well enough to mimic entrepreneurship end up with uninspired projects: “Uber for hawker centers,” “Amazon for Singapore,” “yet another tutoring marketplace,” “yet another HDB rental platform.” Where is the ambition? Why do these ideas always stop here?

Give a Singaporean several hundred thousand dollars, and he’ll build a tuition center. Localized, derivative—extracting value from existing problems rather than solving them.

Smart People With Taste, But No Belief

Eventually, your taste evolves. Maybe after a few years in your career, maybe during university, you begin to see through all the nonsense around you.

The problem now is that your brilliant ideas and insights are trapped beneath layers of self-sabotage. You need absolute certainty before speaking up, and even then, every idea comes pre-packaged with its own rebuttal. You avoid conversations where you might be challenged; you stay silent in meetings unless completely certain; you step back in discussions where someone might know more. Today, there’s a widespread reluctance to express opinions—even simple statements feel risky.

The primary consequence is that we miss countless opportunities to do interesting things. When you don’t present yourself to the world—even imperfectly—you deny others the chance to shape your image, beliefs, and interests. When someone needs help or advice, they naturally turn to those who exist visibly in the world. If you don’t write or speak up, you exclude yourself, rendering yourself irrelevant. Our timidity shrinks the surface area of our presence, creating the small tragedy each of us experiences daily.

The deeper tragedy is that this is precisely why we remain stuck in the comprador role. Not just because our greatest dream is to work for foreign firms or execute others’ ideas, but because we don’t believe our own ideas deserve to exist unconditionally. We’ve been thoroughly trained into habitual deference, hesitation, and error-avoidance, losing basic faith in our own observations.

I hope we can change this. I hope we can embrace our hesitations, our mistakes, and boldly declare our beliefs. The ultimate goal is agency—no longer serving as compradors, but beginning to steer our own destinies. But agency begins with intellectual autonomy—the conviction that when you see something, seeing it matters, and you can say so without apology.

Without this fundamental belief, we’ll always be compradors. We know everything, yet have no right to decide anything.

Smart People With Taste and Belief, But No Will

I deeply fear becoming someone who can only survive within Singapore’s system, over-specialized to thrive only here, destined to wither elsewhere. I believe I’m smart enough to do what I want; I have taste to discern what matters; I even have enough confidence in my observations to write this perhaps overly stylized article for public reading.

But do I have the will to act? How many hours have I spent pondering these issues, endless lunches and coffees with friends agreeing that “something must be changed by someone”?

I’ve gradually realized: You can’t wait for someone else to change Singapore. Everything you enjoy today—even that godlike behemoth, the government you curse when you fail and pray to when in need—exists because someone spent their life building it. If you hate the status quo, either act yourself, or stop pretending complaints solve anything.

Doing anything difficult requires sacrifice, especially when the alternative—comfortable Singapore life—would almost certainly make you happier. But I hope to stop dreaming of the comfortable life everyone desires, and start dreaming of a difficult life I’d willingly embrace. A life where I’m no longer a Singaporean living safely, afraid to commit to anything, but someone who believes in their ability to create whatever they imagine, and ultimately brings it into reality.

My first 22 years followed a set path: attend the right schools, harbor the right ambitions, pursue the right goals. In university, like everyone else, I burned all my summers interning at big tech firms, chasing that coveted full-time offer. I had everything every model Singaporean dreams of: a high-paying job that affords a comfortable life outside work.

But I turned it down, choosing instead to try my luck in San Francisco. I traded my final university year—the carefree time meant for celebration and camaraderie—with weekends spent working in an unfamiliar city. There, I was alone, knowing barely anyone. I have a beloved partner, someone I know I’ll spend my life with, yet I chose to be separated by oceans for years ahead.

I write this not for show, not to win your admiration for the “sacrifices” I made for “struggle”—others far braver have sacrificed more for less. Rather, I write this because I’m proud of the only truly brave thing I’ve done in my life: meeting that “comfortable Singaporean” on the road—and killing him.

Talk is cheap; you have no reason to believe me. But when I return, I will have created something worth ten years of my life.