What no one tells you about rebuilding your life in a high-performance city like Singapore (2025)

I used to think that rebuilding your life meant making external changes. New country. New job. New goals. Tear down what wasn’t working and construct something shinier, more aligned, more you. That was the idea.

And on the surface, that’s exactly what I did. I moved from a soft, slow life in Chiang Mai to the structured brilliance of Singapore. I left low-cost freedom for high-performance ambition. But what I’ve come to realize—years into this shift—is that rebuilding your life in a place like Singapore doesn’t just change what’s around you. It rewires what’s inside you.

No one tells you how deep it goes. No one warns you that you’ll have to dismantle not just your systems, but your assumptions. Your identity. Your inner compass. Especially in a city like this—where everything moves fast, where the expectations are unspoken but enormous, where success isn’t celebrated as much as it’s silently required.

In a recent piece I wrote about leaving Chiang Mai for Singapore, I described the shift as moving from external freedom to internal structure. But that’s just part of the story. What I want to share now is what happens next—what happens after the move, after the honeymoon, after the rush. What it really costs to rebuild your life in a high-performance city like this.

It’s a cost I didn’t expect to pay. But I’m grateful I did.

I’ve been living in Singapore for a few years now. I run a business from here, and by most measures, things are going well. I’ve grown financially. I’ve built stronger systems. I’ve stepped into a version of myself that’s clearer, more deliberate. But underneath the surface, something else has been happening—something quieter, harder to explain.

As I said in a recent YouTube video, I’ve been getting everything I thought I wanted: more opportunities, more progress, more experiences. And yet, I’ve been feeling… flat. Exhausted. Disconnected. Not all the time. But enough to notice. Enough to make me question whether I’m still chasing happiness in all the wrong places.

Because here’s the thing: Singapore is built to help you win. It’s efficient. Intelligent. Well-resourced. It rewards clarity, discipline, output. But what I’ve learned—often the hard way—is that if you’re not careful, it will also seduce you into confusing those things with meaning.

And that’s where the real work of rebuilding begins.

You see, I arrived in Singapore ready to go all-in. I’d spent years in Thailand living cheaply, moving slowly, sitting with a kind of loneliness that no one on Instagram talks about. I’d had the time to reflect. To reset. And when I came here, I was ready to build.

But what I didn’t realize was that building, in a place like this, isn’t just about growing something externally. It’s about protecting something internally. Because this city doesn’t just accelerate your ambitions—it tests your soul. And if you’re not actively guarding your center, you can lose yourself in the very thing you came here to create.

Let me explain what I mean.

The longer I stayed here, the more I started noticing the patterns. Everyone’s busy. Everyone’s productive. Everyone’s quietly exhausted. It’s not burnout in the loud, collapse-on-the-floor kind of way. It’s a quieter thing. A functional freeze. You keep going, you hit your targets, you answer your emails. But somewhere along the way, you forget how to feel.

You forget how to rest without guilt. How to be still without needing to justify it. How to say no to an opportunity without fearing you’re falling behind. Because here, the air is thick with ambition. Everyone’s doing something. And if you’re not constantly leveling up, you start to wonder if you even belong here.

I felt it in subtle ways. At dinner tables where the first question wasn’t “How are you?” but “What are you working on now?” In co-working spaces where people wore their overwork like a badge of honor. In the way I started scheduling my life down to five-minute increments, not because I had to, but because it felt like I should.

This city trains you to run fast. But it doesn’t always teach you when to stop.

And so I kept going. I chased more goals. I launched new projects. I optimized my habits. I told myself I was building a better life. And in many ways, I was. But I was also becoming someone I didn’t recognize. Someone who had everything on paper, but couldn’t feel it.

That’s when I moved to Tiong Bahru.

If you’ve never been, it’s a quiet neighborhood in Singapore—a blend of old-world charm and gentle rebellion against the city’s onward march of progress. As I shared in my video, there was something about the place that made me feel… human again. The cafés weren’t just places to caffeinate. They were gathering spots. The trees weren’t landscaped—they were lived with. The architecture didn’t scream ambition. It whispered memory.

Tiong Bahru reminded me that it’s possible to exist without striving. That stillness isn’t laziness—it’s wisdom. And it gave me a glimpse of something I’d lost: rhythm.

For a while, I let myself slow down. I stopped chasing. I walked more. I talked less. And in the space that opened up, I started asking harder questions. What am I really doing all this for? Who am I becoming in the process? Am I building a life I actually want—or just performing one that looks impressive?

Those questions hurt. But they were necessary. Because underneath the momentum I’d built, I started to see something deeper: a set of inherited assumptions about what success means, and what it costs. I had internalized the myth that achievement leads to happiness. That if I just reached the next milestone, bought the next thing, booked the next trip, I’d finally feel the way I was supposed to.

But I didn’t. I felt flat. And I know I’m not alone.

Whether you live in Singapore or San Francisco or Sydney, we’re all swimming in this same current. We’re told to optimize, maximize, accumulate. We’re bombarded with images of other people’s perfect routines, perfect bodies, perfect success stories. And quietly, we start believing that we’re failing if we’re not constantly becoming more.

But more of what? And for whom?

That’s the real cost of rebuilding your life in a high-performance city. Not just the financial cost, which is real. Not just the opportunity cost, which is endless. But the existential cost. The cost of waking up one day and realizing you’ve become wildly competent at living a life you don’t actually want.

In the time since I left Tiong Bahru, I’ve moved to a different neighborhood—Robertson Quay. It’s more central. Busier. Closer to the pulse of the city. But I’ve brought the lesson of Tiong Bahru with me: that pace is a choice. That presence is a practice. That happiness isn’t something to chase—it’s something to cultivate.

And that’s where the rebuilding really begins.

Because once you see the trap, you can’t unsee it. Once you recognize that chasing happiness through achievement is a game you can never win, you start playing a different game entirely. You stop optimizing for success, and start aligning with your values. You stop comparing, and start connecting. You stop performing, and start living.

For me, that’s looked like rethinking everything—how I work, how I rest, how I relate. I’ve started prioritizing relationships that nourish me, not just networks that elevate me. I’ve begun to embrace stillness as productive, not indulgent. I’ve created systems in my business that allow me to scale without sacrificing my sanity. And most of all, I’ve stopped expecting life to feel good all the time.

As I shared in the video, one of the most powerful ideas I’ve learned came from Rudá Iandê’s Out of the Box course, where he talks about the illusion of happiness. He calls it the hedonic treadmill—the myth that we’re supposed to be happy all the time, and if we’re not, something’s wrong. But happiness is just one emotion among many. And when we allow all our emotions, even the hard ones, to be sacred—we start living more honestly.

That’s what I want now. Not just a successful life. Not even a happy one. But an honest one. A life where I’m deeply engaged, even when it’s hard. A life where I’m connected, even when I’m tired. A life where I don’t have to keep proving that I belong, because I’ve already chosen to belong to myself.

So if you’re reading this—whether you live in Singapore or not—ask yourself: what are you building? And at what cost? Are you chasing something because it’s yours to chase, or because you’re afraid of what might happen if you stopped?

Rebuilding your life doesn’t mean upgrading everything. Sometimes it means subtracting. Sometimes it means remembering. Sometimes it means saying no to the version of you that everyone applauds, so you can say yes to the one who actually sleeps at night.

This city taught me that. And for that, I’m grateful.

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