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Five years ago, at a networking event as the founder of The Hidden Good, I met a man 8 years older than me. He looked me straight in the eye and said “I’m glad you’re doing this (referring to The Hidden Good). I look back at my youth and just have regrets for not doing it right.” I don’t think I had seen as clear a look of regret in my life and promised myself that very second to live my best life always, regardless of the circumstances. Tomorrow morning at 11am GMT+1, I take my final flight back home to Singapore. This chapter closes, four years of my youth in the western hemisphere, and a new one begins, where I try to find my roots again.  The reflection is important because a lot has happened – I am most definitely not the same man who left on that first flight out to Chicago. Have I become better? Am I just more confused? These are questions I try to answer as I write this post.

I think the most profound realization I’ve experienced in the past four years is how difficult it is to live a good life. Existentialism is a question that pursues anyone, religious or not. Why are we here and if we choose to do good, how can we best do it? The past four years have brought me on a roller coaster, having to put myself in contexts where similar solutions don’t always produce similar outputs. I recognized that there are parts of me that needed to be corrected: biases I need to work against and lifestyle choices that don’t fully convey principles I believe in. Chicago and London provided me with great grounds to make those mistakes and learn from them, being surprisingly forgiving of individual flaws as long as the individual was willing to commit to improvement. The truth was that I learnt it was more important to try to be good than to think one was good at all. There is value in learning about the different ways people try to be good. I’ve relooked Christianity, detached from the prosperity dogma that plagues hyper-capitalist economies, to understand why people do good in those contexts. I’ve explored modern and ancient philosophers, to understand how we ought to live our lives. I’ve come to two eternal patterns that I believe to be closest to satisfactory: the pursuit of truth and beauty. To be true to yourself and to others liberates you from the nagging annoyance of falsely constructed interactions. When you pursue truth, you find beauty, the most real manifestation of patterns in this world. Whether that be from standing in the Atlas Mountains in North Africa or watching the tango in Buenos Aires, beauty reminds you that there are things in this universe that do make life worth living and celebrating. Truth and beauty are magnificent reasons to live, and powerful drivers to do good in this world.

I’ve always thought of myself as a sociable person. I had a hard time in school as a kid because I never felt like I fit in anywhere. I was an individual being forced to fit into structures and systems. Those who did fit themselves in succeeded by the standards of the system. I could play the game, sure I won a trophy or two playing to the system’s needs. But after a while, my frustration manifested in the various projects I involved myself in.  In Chicago and London, I was loved by my friends for being an individual, not a product of the Singapore system. I found other individuals, unique beautiful people who cared about what they did and the people around them, and who inspired me to find more people like them. As I visited the 45 countries that I did, I had the pursuit of the spark of humanity that connected us all. How can we be both individuals and part of a collective called humanity? What connects us and what draws us together. I don’t have an answer, many thinkers such as Yuval Harari and Jordan Peterson seem to think they’re close, but I am on that journey and will continue to see the world for what it is. I am so blessed to have friends, real and honest, who are thriving in all parts of the world, and who I am glad to care for and have reciprocated such care to me.

The world can be difficult. I have stumbled many times. I have made many mistakes, not all of them forward falls. I try to be as honest as I can about them here, but there are many that even I don’t have the courage to tell others about. Yet, I know that one day I must tell these stories because pain is part of growth. Struggle is part of growth. Overcoming fear is part of growth. These are lessons I thought would have been relevant in the army, but because these weren’t lessons I taught myself, they never fully sunk in.  I have learnt to deal with loneliness in a world that is so full of people. I have learnt to appreciate that good things take time. I have learnt to accept that people take their own paths to the same destination. But all of them came from difficult moments in my life, in the most dramatic parts of the world.

The universe can be an epic drama and frequently we try to distance ourselves from it to protect ourselves from over-sensationalization. Intellectual apathy is preferred over empathetic investment. There is merit in the latter. As I go back to Singapore, I am fired up because I know there are issues in Singapore I can help address. Singapore is a hyper-legal, hypermasculine society that needs to better support creative deviants, economic fallouts and intellectual challenges. It is also vibrant, diverse, full of opportunities, rich with purpose and with a young story worth watching unfold. The complexity of it all provides the backdrop for the important work to be done to improve the lives of real people.  This is an environment I’ve been preparing myself to come back to. For the past four years, I’ve been trying to connect every lesson back home. Now I finally get that opportunity. Now, I can finally get into it.

I’m so excited.