I initially thought it was because I ran out of action minute, and was about to upgrade my plan
Lucky I came here before hitting the confirm payment button
I agree on that, I would like to add that for some of the time, consuming helps us create better. Different kind of consuming activities actually have different leverage on creating value
1) Lots of the things I do in everyday life is just to consume: buying, watching, following, etc. These things either consume my money, or my time. These things make me feel good, but it does not generate real value. In order to get rich, I need to create things. I also start to realize that great people are great because they started to create things at a very early stage of their life (but not consuming things as they advocate, think about celebrities, entrepreneurs etc), so they are able to practice and perfect the value creating skills to the extreme.
2) I start to realize that the world is binary in nature : I create to sell, I buy to consume. I either at the buyer side, or at the seller side. And in this current society, there is a huge buyer side trap, the whole idea of consumerism and social media is to trap you inside the buyer side, so you keep buying, you keep consuming. I really need to break free from this trap.
This blog post was written before COVID-19, but the idea feels even fresher during this pandemic era
You are in fact very right, but there is one critical issue here. If we are talking about marriage. Culturally there is a "lifespan" of value to both genders. A Man's valuable lifespan can be well over 20 years, from age 20 all the way to age 40.While a woman's valuable lifespan maybe only less than 10 years, from 20 to 30.
This is because of the "stake" people are seeking when looking for a marriage between genders. Women are seeking wealth, social status, personality and whatever it may take to maintain a stable marriage ( family).
While men, in most cases, are looking for prettiness, good-looking or whatever superficial. This kind of value lifespan and marriage purpose mismatch is the whole problem of marriage issues in China.
A divorced, less pretty (compare to those in 20s), mid-aged woman is very hard to find another marriage. Even if they did not even marry before, it is still hard for them.
A lot of women in China who are well-educated, well-paid, in their 30s still have problems in finding partners (This is what Chinese society called sheng nu, or "women that left behind":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheng_nu).
Statistically speaking, women are indeed more than men, but the mating process is not statistic.
I doubt that this will ever work in countries other than China because women (and marriage) in other countries are mostly protected by law, while in china, women are not so well protected. Also, culturally speaking, a divorced woman is very hard to get marriage in China. While a divorced man is easy. In society, People think that "divorce" somehow depreciated the value of a woman, while "divorce" means nothing (sometimes positive thing) for a man. Also, after marriage, Chinese woman will not focus mostly on work or career promotion but rather on family, so in the long term, they are
1) financially attached to the husband
2) emotionally attached to the husband.
This makes them want to "fix" the marriage rather than abandon it, even if the fix is superficial and (maybe) temporary.
But as more and more young women (born after 80s and 90s) are married, this kind of issue may be mitigating. Because young women tend to be much well-educated and wealthy
I am not sure also. Singapore is not old enough currently to see any discontinuity between government's percetion and people's true needs. But I think "lack of free speech" is not the same as dictatorship. Singapore still allows multiple political party, and democratic elections. It is just that the PAP is too strong that no other party has the equaling power to win people's votes
Out of all the criticisms of Singapore, the most mentioned is the lack of free speech/media.
But if you have lived in Singapore for a while you will probably find that this is not the case.
It does not even affect most people's life in a tiny bit (unless you are into politics). And certainly Singapore is not 1984 stuff. People are really happy here.
Besides that, some of the "free speech" online are actually either falsified or in very explicit languages specifically targeted at raising culture hatred, and hatred towards foreign immigrants. They are not targeted at solving problems
Somehow, the reason that keeps people leaving Singapore is not the lack of free speech, but something else. Most of my foreign friends from University had left Singapore, either to US or China. For them, the biggest problem seems to be high living cost, no space for personal development and no job satisfaction. How to retain these talents may be a bigger issue here