Louis Teo

Wife: what you thinking about. Me: *sheepishly* im doing moon math Wife: haven’t heard that term in years Me: exactly

Young people in Singapore are broken because social, cultural and economic factors decades in the making broke them. The Singapore TFR crisis is easily explainable by biology. Females of a species reproduce when resources are available to support population growth. They reproduce less under stress when resources are scarce. The current crop of 25-35 year olds have been psyoped into a permanent scarcity complex, notwithstanding the country’s apparent relative wealth vis other countries. To understand how this happened, we have to study the generations above us, and the prevailing social and economic narrative of the time. In the 90s, Singapore experienced an economic boom. Our parents - the 30 year olds of the time, were sold the narrative that opportunities were aplenty and to elevate your family, you simply needed to have kids and educate them to seize the opportunities. In typical Nanyang / Confucianist fashion, children became the tool of an Asian family’s ascension. My vintage (I’m 32) was certainly brought up that way. Children of white collar workers were min maxed to ascend towards becoming lawyers, doctors, bankers etc. Children of blue collar workers were min maxed to ascend towards white collar workers. Your life isn’t your own - you are simply a conduit for ascension. So rmb you have piano at 4pm, math tuition at 7pm and tennis tomorrow at noon to try for DSA to RI. And thanks to the beauty of the great bell curve grading, it’s not about how well you do. It’s how well you do relative to your peers. Tis unironically insufficient that you succeed, others must fail. In short, it was PvP in an environment where it appeared that there were still significant spoils to the winners. And indeed, the generation before us suffered too at the hands of those before. But as their opportunities for ascension got squeezed, the second pillar of our trauma was introduced. Working mothers. Sure it became harder for one breadwinner to elevate his bloodline but with two breadwinners, they could together achieve an imitation of the Merdeka Dream. The cost? Only the children’s upbringing. Child rearing became commoditised. Mummy was replaced by some combination of Yati, Ahma and an alleged ex-SAP school teacher that guarantees straight As even to the most retarded child. "Sorry - it’s the only way we could achieve the 5Cs. But we do all this so you can live a better life, as long as you study hard." But when it became the children’s turn - our turn, what levers are there left to pull? There are none for all the levers have been pulled to generate our up only economy and real estate, which had the side effect of pulling the ladder up behind the previous generations. To the victors, the spoils were promised but even after the grueling PvP, there were barely any spoils left for the winners. The PvP was all for naught. And so Singaporeans live a relatively good life by global standards - tis true. But not the life they were promised. And so they have difficulty imagining a route to a better life for their children. The people in power fundamentally misunderstand this, as they live in their 8000 square foot GCBs built atop 15,000 square feet of land. You do not need that much space to have sex and raise kids in absolute terms - tis true. But biologically you cannot convince the 30 year old dual income couple paying 50% of their income towards a mortgage for a 700 square foot two bedder that they are 'doing well' and should have more children. Our parents could live in a HDB (1400 sq ft btw they stopped making those), point at a GCB and in good conscience tell themselves and their kids that if their kids follow the golden path, they could live there one day. Today - they cannot. And so because zeitgeist of young Singapore has shifted from optimism to pessimism, the average young woman refuses to reproduce. Social media is a contributor sure - but tis simply biology at work, reproduction happens when the female feels like there is abundance. The anecdotal observation I have made that supports this? Every woman I know in their 20s and 30s that married into money has children and want at least 2. 3 if they live in landed. They have no retarded girl-boss ambitions (even though they might have the capability to) and put the upbringing of their children first. It also explains why female hypergamy in Singapore is in full swing. Marrying a wagecuck, even a high-earning wagecuck, simply allows you to live a glamorous DINK life. If you want to be a mother - which your biology urges you towards - you simply must marry into money. And the only way for a man to have real money is to be born into it, or gamble and win. This has significant knock-on effects for the men which I could rant about another time, but it largely stems from the dual issues of feeling perpetually financially inadequate and the first order distaste of the blatant hypergamy at play. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk, back to my vacation with my wife and very expensive kids.

1/ Some thoughts on the new MAS consultation response that pretty much everyone has been asking me about lately. TLDR: Targeted at closing a loophole exploited by some CEXes, custodians and MMs. Builders/LabsCos are ok but some things to look out for due to broad language.