What’s more, no one likes it when a foreigner comes in and tells us that we should have the perspective to realise that our lives are way better than the ones the impoverished in other countries lead. Not our parents, not our friends, not our government, and most definitely not Nas Daily. Without this relentless need for self-preservation, we have nothing.īecause of this, our sense of identity-aka our unwillingness to accept anything other than our own experience of life as the truth-becomes so strong that nothing can change our minds. We are raised to only think of ourselves in what is a highly individualistic society. For what values we do have, we are unable to fathom making space for anything other than what we ourselves believe in (take 377A and the response of church leaders for instance). In Singapore, we have also become not so much a people of values, but a people of material possessions. For the anti-establishment crowd in particular, there is nothing to be grateful for.
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Nothing is enough unless the ERP is abolished, Ministers make $10/hr, and HDB leases run on forever. We strive for career success and affluence, yet we don’t stop for one second to think if any of this is what we really want to achieve in life.ĭoing ‘better’ and having ‘more’ has become so embedded in our culture and worldview that whenever someone tells us that we should stop to appreciate what we have, we can only respond with resentment.
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That, in a nutshell, is the very ethos of Singapore. Remember when you got a B in a primary school exam and proudly told your parents that you did better than 80% of the class, only to be told off that you should be comparing yourself with those who are better than you, instead of those who are worse? We are 5.6 million separate individuals, nothing more. But don’t be fooled into thinking that your allegiance lies in your race, colour or creed. There are 5.6 million people in Singapore. In fact, I believe the real reason why so many of us despise him is because he threatens our sense of national identity.īut what exactly is our national identity, and why does Nas threaten it? Yet this is also too simplistic an explanation for why so many of us hate him so much.
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However, he received a huge amount of backlash from locals who assumed that his videos were sponsored by Singapore Tourism Board (STB), probably because it was so closely timed with Crazy Rich Asians, which was infamous for being heavily sponsored by STB.Īll the same, many think that his excitable, carebear-like personality makes him irksome and somehow disingenuous. In his recent videos of Singapore, he pointed out many good and impressive features of Singapore, which he claimed was an “almost perfect country”. While there was nothing wrong with this message, it was the overzealous manner in which they did so that was irritating, just like Nas from Nas Daily fame. They were cute, fluffy, pastel-coloured, bursting with optimism, and always encouraged you to see the best in life. With their unbridled enthusiasm for anything and everything, it shaped the outlook of excited toddlers, all while irritating the hell out of parents who had to sit through the entire programme wishing they were deaf and blind like Helen Keller. The cartoon bears were at their height of popularity in the 90s.