Spring of Hope

This year we approach Spring in an extremely different mood from the last. In 2020, the world entered into lockdown as it battled existential threat from Covid. When there seemed no hope, vaccines are created. I am profoundly moved by mankind's ability to adapt and survive. As nations roll out the vaccinations at encouraging rates, I hope and believe that normalcy is in the horizon.

Looking back at my state of mind in worst months of last year, I see how I was swallowed up by darkness. Being a naturally excitable and impressionable person, I was easily affected by downbeat sights and news. Even views of low traffic on the road and darkened hotel windows were enough to depress me. I felt that the world stood on a cliff, that I was no more than an anonymous speck on its surface, and as soon as it took a plunge I would be nothing but collateral damage.

But being so impressionable meant that my mood has since been lifted as Singapore emerges strong and healthy after the worst passed. Life has more or less resumed, with crowds thronging both neighbourhood and city shopping malls. People want to get on, to spread cheer, to reach out to family and friends. Or in even more basic terms, people want to experience moving about in a crowd, which comes as naturally as how animals move in herds. Instinct for joy takes over and triumphs over melancholy.

And so I found myself succumbing to the grips of materialism. It started small, involving repeated Daiso-diving and purchases of cheap clothing from websites like Shein. It developed to long minutes oggling at second-hand designer stuff on Vestiaire Collective and Reebonz.

It all started from a trip outside with my sister in November. She was wearing a tacky dress, but paired with a Prada bag, she was a vision of chic. One designer bag had the effect of cancelling out the tacky appearance of her dress, conferring her with elements of style. Fascinated by the sight of her with the bag, I began toying with thoughts of getting a designer bag for myself.

The closest I got to buying the bag was when I made a low-ball offer to a seller. I felt chagrined when I made the offer, as I was quite conscious that I was betraying my principles. I was relieved when the offer was rejected.

Why, oh why, do I act the way I do? I find myself a most frustrating psychological case study. On one hand, I am very obsessed about saving money. On the other hand, I am capable of straying.

I initiate actions while projecting all kinds of disapproving thoughts towards myself, but none of these thoughts prevent me from those actions.

Yes, I would define the condition as being SERIOUS, yet NOT DEAD SERIOUS.

I am naturally frugal-leaning but at the same time not above temptation.

If there is an Olympics for saving money, I would not qualify.

There is something about this I dislike. It signals a weakness in me. I would like it so much if I could be Olympic-level about anything. I do want to be Olympic-serious about things.

This is food for thought. It indicates that while I see the value in my anti-consumption goal, at the same time I am in love with something else in conflict with that goal.

I want to be that beautiful woman with a gorgeous bag. I want to be beautiful.

I need to break the psychological connection between beauty and the $1,000 bag. Rationalise more rather than to act on impulses. How easy it is to buy something but how difficult it would be to throw it away in years to come. If I make a new purchase without throwing out anything, wouldn't I be a hoarder whose every incremental acquisition is fueled by vanity?

We drag ourselves down with the mountains of physical possessions we pull into our lives. When anti-consumption is the path to freedom.

covid thoughts

The ravages of disease has burnt off many of our old ways and will bring new things to come. My generation saw the death of the home land-line telephone and the office fax, ushered pagers in and out. I am the very first generation of digital natives, when I joined the workforce, emails are already a way of life, but the generation before me still needed superiors to approve before emails are sent. It is during my young adulthood when credit cards become an essential mode of payment. My generation saw air travel become banal and commonplace. Now, a new age dawns on my generation due to Covid.

I have always placed a premium on space and bought the biggest home that my money could afford. During this season of WFH, I have a private study the size of a proper bedroom to carry out my work. There is enough room for a single sized mattress where I lie on whenever I need a nap or when I am on war-mode.  It gives me the peace and privacy to facilitate maximum concentration and creativity. Not everyone is as fortunate as me, I know of people who have gone into the lockdown without as much as a study desk, citing lack of space as a reason. Reluctant resignation to shrinking home sizes is a development of our society for the worse. It represents several steps backwards whereas our country should be advancing with time. After covid, the importance of residential size would be reinstated. We would look at pantries masquerading as kitchenettes with disdain. We will frown on bedrooms of substandard sizes. We would write off homes lacking home office space with disdain. The absurdity of shoebox-sized apartments will become glaringly self-evident. We do not want to be struck by cabin fever when a next lockdown occurs. If it has happened, it will happen again.

Society would place more premium on home decor than ever before, as this is where we will spend a lot of time. For those of us who can afford it, we would aspire to a hotel-like experience at home by upgrading our home-ware. We would demand more of practical and technologically fanciful kitchen gadgets, as home cooking and baking enjoy renaissance. We would increase purchase of exercise-from-home equipment.

The way in which our recreation takes place would change. Cinema theatres, already a sunset industry, will die out, consolidate or reinvent themselves. Netflix, already a killer of networks, will reign supreme. We would become more sceptical of gyms, at least, among those of us who are not die-hard or hard-core. As these lock-down days convinces us that life goes on and perhaps even better when it is spent inside the house, we would exercise greater selectivity in the places of recreation places we go to, whether it is a cafe or a restaurant. The F&B industry has to offer more in terms of experience and ambience than ever. Staycations would no longer make sense, as we have had a taste that sedentary recreation can well be conducted at home. The foreign tourist will no longer be greeted wholeheartedly as a welcomed wanderer, but will be viewed with a degree of wariness.

I sigh to contemplate that my generation has seen the last of the physical handshake. This social etiquette will be relegated to antiquity. I wonder what the masters and mistresses of etiquette would re-introduce in its place.

We would become more suspicious of other physical beings, and rightfully so. I may belong to the last generation to see air travel as casual and frequent. Days where public transport is necessarily crammed and passengers press onto one another, squeezing shoulder to shoulder may be gone for good. Post-war, betterment in medical care had made the world oblivious to the threats posed by crowds in terms of sanitation and disease-control. Now, we are regaining our awareness that the stranger in proximity is a risk. We realise that commuting is itself a wasteful drain on energy and resources and will seek to minimise it.

As WFH forces all of us to work remotely, it becomes clear that technology can supplant physical presence in many situations. Office space face a dire existential threat. Video conferencing software will become a permanent fixture in all work settings.

On the other hand, physical spaces that support the new virtually-conducted economy will flourish. Data centres will thrive, logistics centres and providers will continue to boom. When we realise that we can shop from home efficiently and securely, e-commerce is killing physical retail. Physical retail must attain e-commerce outreach as a matter of life and death.

Shopping centres have to re-invent themselves to offer that can neither be remote nor conducted at home. As department stores fade away into history, shopping centres will host services like physical massage therapy, beauty services (nail, face, spa), hair grooming. They will house shops selling high-end products like jeweller y, products that are best experienced in a tactile manner such as skincare, toiletries and cosmetics, or intimate items such as lingerie. F&B, which have grown in presence in shopping malls over the past decade, will increase its dominance. One thing I am truly looking forward to see is change in the dining format in shopping malls. Due to high rental, tables in an average F&B outlet are situated unacceptably close to one another, flouting desired standards of personal space. In many entry level eateries, customers are giving tiny stools to sit and discouraged from lingering. When department stores die out, the additional space could be used for enhanced F&B experience.

Covid tilts us towards a Brave New World scenario by accelerating death of the hard currency. I call it ominous because it is supplanted by digital cash, which leaves us open to surveillance. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I fear the dark. When the eyes are hidden in the dark and you are the one out in the open, you become the prey. There is nothing in the least interesting about the mundane things that I spend on. From my recent purchases, anyone spying on me can only conclude that I am one very basic Singaporean woman. Over the Covid period, here are the list of things I bought online:

- skipping rope for home exercise
- Sulwhasoo skincare products
- vitamins from iHerb
- two jars of chocolate spread
- a pair of binoculars to admire the scenery from my window

Yet, wouldn't it be nicer if no tracks are left behind?

the Black Swan wears a Crown named Virus

World-shaking disaster has swept us up. A black swan that wears a Crown named Virus is on the loose, ravaging nations across different continents, seeking whom it may devour. From the isolation of my home, I record the following thoughts:

1) Society is only as strong as its weakest link
Bangladeshi or Indian laborers in Singapore are people seen but never looked at. They are just there to do jobs that no one else wants to do. Terrible socio-economic factors have driven them from their homes to seek employment overseas, and it is assumed that being here is already a privilege enough for them. From a benign perspective, they add interest to the multi-cultural landscape with their presence and activities in enclaves like Little India. From a less kindly view, they are people whom we wish not to share public transport with, for fear of their odour (after being out in the elements doing hard labour).

Nobody cares about how they live. As long as no one is starving or unclothed, nobody cares if their living conditions is cramped or rather dirty.

Now, our collective attitude to this segment of society is wreaking revenge on us. Covid19 is rippling through the foreign laborer community creating the biggest disease cluster. If we die, you die, so says Covid19.

You give me poor living conditions which foster the spread of disease while you live in comfort, now it is time for payback. You exploit my cheap labour, taking disproportionate socio-economical advantage at my expense, now is time you pay the fair price.

2) Are we at the precipice of war?
Singapore went into lock-down on Tuesday, 7 April 2020. We were ahead of the game in the early phase, with people going to work and roaming the streets as if it were normal. We were praised worldwide for our elegant approach to the pandemic. Cases were isolated, closely traced and monitored, which engendered confidence of control.

Around mid-March and early April, it emerged that things were worse than it seemed. First, infected overseas returnees brought a wave of bad news. This was followed by the surfacing of foreign laborer clusters. Soon, it became apparent that the severity of the epidemic has escalated. The country shut down to enter into what it calls a Circuit Breaker phase. In effect, it is a soft lock-down, with only limited types of movement permitted. New restrictions are being introduced on daily basis since the start of the Circuit Breaker.

Commercial buildings are deserted and forlorn. Hotels close, shrouded in darkness. The MBS casino that overlooks the Singapore river is a canvas of black, which has never happened and we hope never to see again. Streets are empty, with the number of flouters even fewer than what can realistically be expected. In contrast, private homes hum with life, with the windows of residential buildings glowing in various hues of orange, yellow and white. I have never seen a scene like this in my lifetime. An ominous undercurrent stalks the awful quiet that we have descended into.

My home is well-positioned on a high floor that offers 270-degrees view of the western part of the country. I bought the place exactly because of its high perch, yet I have never ever bothered to soak in the view. Now, under house arrest like the rest of my country, for the first time ever I truly stopped to watch. I sat by the floor to ceiling window, observing the traffic on the Ayer Rajah expressway with keen interest in the traffic volume in times of shut-down. I see cars on the road at 1 am in the morning. Where, I asked myself, are these people going? Other people's lives have always fascinated me. Now, this attitude is colored by sadness. The sight of every empty public bus stirs up unease in me.

I live in a state of chronic low-level anxiety. Reading the news and following forums fill me with alternating pangs of dismay and indignation, but I continue to obsess ceaselessly about the latest developments. I feel helpless as I am buffeted by the tidal forces of global change. Will the world devolve into a Cold War over the Covid19 pandemic, or worse things that shall not be spoken? What kind of political and economic change will this pandemic unleash on me, on us?

3) Out of sight, out of mind
It is during these times when one realises that such a huge majority of things we do is in order to be seen. Being vain by nature, I enjoy fantasizing about clothes and shoes and bags, cosmetics and skincare products and facial treatments. I enjoy dressing up, being out of the house and going to town. But now that we are all under house arrest, none of these things matter.

I told my dermatologist that I would be deferring a treatment. Why, I told him, should I glam up when there is no one to look at me during this terrible season? This pithy rhetoric is so coldly cynical yet throbbing with truth. Glamour ceases to be when the audience recedes; those who chase glamour are destitute when eyes turn away.

4) My little investment portfolio
I have built up a little portfolio over the past months which has contracted in value as the global stock market took a plunge. Every single investor out there has been similarly impacted - we are all in this together. I am not extremely disturbed, but my assumptions about the definition of long term has been shaken. Life is long, the world is big, who is to say that assumptions stay? Yet, assumptions are all we have, with our only mitigation being a concurrent consciousness that assumptions can be overturned anytime.

I am trying to stay sane by giving myself as much structure as I can; I am not ready to aim for upbeat, sanity is all I ask for at this moment.
But my mind is a stray beast with an appetite for news of gloom and doom. And this stray beast thrives in an atmosphere of physical isolation.
What will become of me in the days to come, of us, of Singapore, of this world?

There is a price to be paid for everything

You cannot give what you do not have.

To do good to others, one would first need to accumulate the goods that can be shared with others.

These days, the trend is for the individual to view himself as a supreme being, the one and all. According to this life philosophy, the individual is the be-all and end-all. Good is achieved whenever he or she is able to live a life without intentionally causing harm to others. For these individuals, they argue that as long as no harm is being done on others, they are morally entitled to do anything under the sun. There is no sense of responsibility towards the community or civic duty - one comes and goes as he pleases.

When I write this, I am highly aware that 95% of readers would find this philosophy laudable. They clap their hands to applaud this philosophy - the "do-no-harm" philosophy.

What would this same audience of readers think of events such as the Dunkirk Evacuation? Why I cite this seemingly random event is because it is a fairly recent war movie that moved me. Another movie that was unforgettable for me was Hacksaw Ridge, based on the war hero Desmond Doss.

In Dunkirk Evacuation, British civilians with sea craft volunteered to fetch soldiers stuck on Dunkirk Beach at the risk of their own safety. Desmond Doss volunteered as a war medic despite being a Conscientious Objector, sacrificing his own safety beyond the call of duty to save many lives.

Will this generation ever produce selfless acts of heroism? Is altruism dead? It is logical to deduce that it is - because individuals think that the noblest act is the preservation of himself above all other motives.

Many people still want to be heroes, but the ones who want to be are the ones who don't know the true meaning of heroism. What's more, many people crave heroism without being fully self-aware of it.

I am referring to the vandalism in street protests. Vandals do not view themselves as bad, in fact, they see themselves as brave. They may even justify to themselves that their action must be bad in order for good to be achieved. In other words, ultimately they still see themselves as heroes.

Are these vandals willing and able to pay the price? Which is arrest and jail?
Would they able to look back on their lives, after having paid the price, and judge themselves as having done GOOD?

Going back to the theme of this entry, you cannot give what you do not have. Once you have embarked on a course of action, you would need to pay the price for it. And if you have not set aside the payment for it, it would be wrenched from you involuntarily. Maybe sometimes due to pure luck, one can escape the consequences, but what point is there to rely on luck.

If we can only truly exercise good after having lived an exemplary life, conversely is being bad an output of a wretched existence?

All the street vandalism is an outward expression of inward rage and deprivation. Society needs to address this. One group of people can only advance so much at the expense of another - once social disparity rises to an unacceptable level, upheaval begins.

So ... in the midst of this ... the prevailing belief is still that the highest good is no more than to live and die unto oneself? I find it highly ironic. And most of all, an unsustainable belief system.

Life lived in a sea of numbers

It has been a while since I last updated. It is because life has been a tsunami, has been a landslide. I feel myself dying to my old self everyday.

Somehow, I feel myself growing stronger. I no longer feel the pangs of anxiety that I was susceptible to when I was younger. I am not perfect, but I can feel myself evolving.

Treating Myself Well - Creating my own Enjoyment
10 years ago, I would wear myself down wondering about "What could I be doing instead of this? Where should I be instead of here?" What other people are wearing, eating seem infinitely more interesting than my own life. I practically lived my existence wearing the lenses of "What should have been", and boy oh, boy, was I a miserable person through and through.

So what have I been doing over the past two months? I have broken the tenets of frugality. Over the last two months, I have:

- Gone to have Afternoon Tea in three posh places, averaging at about USD 40 per establishment.
(Fullerton By the Bay, Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Goodwood Park Hotel)

- Bought two pairs of shoes - Melissa rubber flats, which I declare the best in terms of comfort-attractiveness-practicality scoring in the entire universe.

- Bought an entry-level designer handbag - Coach, shoulder-carry flap handbag with hardware in an exquisite pale gold, approx USD 400

- Ate out at restaurants at least 8 times (hello Thai Express, Soup Spoon Union, PS Cafe, Canton Paradise, Swee Choon Tim Sum, Tim Ho Wan)


What happened?

I want to be good to myself. I want to feel that I am enjoying something. I have the sense that if I do not treat myself in this manner, no one else would do it on my behalf.

There is something very sobering in this realisation. This realisation is accompanied by a sense of urgency to treat myself well. With all the feeding, I am now 2 kg away from my dream weight. I am dealing with this because I know that nothing in life is for free, but in the meantime, I am having a very good level of self-awareness about my behavior and actions. Ultimately, I am managing the situation well enough.

As for the shoes .... they were purchased as replacement of an outgoing pair. But why must it be 2 incoming for 1 outgoing? Yet, they make me quite happy. In fact, I dream of obtaining another two designs from the same shop. I feel a little foolish about this vanity, I feel that I am a little too old to play dress-up. Clothes and shoes do not change lives, it is a renewal of mind that transforms. But well ...

As for the designer handbag, it looked so lovely when I drape it on my shoulders. It upgraded my appearance instantly. So, what is done is done. We all need some beauty in our lives.

Am I Nothing But a Stream of Numbers?
I spend a lot of time contemplating and planning my personal finances.
I stare at my Excel intensely. I have an all-consuming fascination for this.
If I were to rate myself over the past 1 yr 10 mths, I would give myself a B for how I have conducted my affairs.
I cannot be graded A because I did get carried away with some useless cosmetics (just how many lipsticks does a woman really need, we are each born with just one pair of lips and cosmetics are perishables!).
I bought too many paintings on a trip to a certain Southeast Asian country.
That stupid Fitness First membership that I subscribed to on impulse, which I never broke even on. That holiday trip in August which was ultimately pointless.
Still, I do stay on track on an overall basis, and my mind remains very focused.

Recently, I thought, after yet another session of Excel-staring, that I have metamorphosed into a data table, that my life has converted into a cash flow projection.

In fact, sometimes I wish that I can be hyper-rational, be almost robot-like. Notice the movie genre of the robot-hybrids superhero - we look up to their superhuman abilities. Being a robot would save me from many errors, defects and sub-par decisions. It would render me insensitive to beauty, which is many times nothing but conceit and an inflation in perception. Being robotic can distill everything to clinical-like simplicity, burn away the fluff and the dross. Coldness and indifference should bring me to a higher level of excellence. And I do crave for excellence - yes I do.

After I have accumulated the amount of capital that I aim to, completed this Capital-Formation Stage, I would allow myself to be more human.

I want to think about the meaning more and deeply. Meaning of everything.

Having the room in ones life to seek meaning is a supreme luxury. I want to be able to put myself in that position to chase it.

That is after all, what most people are after whether they realise it or not.

Of the inequality among nations

So I went on a short trip over the Singapore National Day holidays. I had not intended to go on any holidays this year for two reasons. The first is that I have intended 2019 to be a year of ultra-austerity, to test myself how far I can go and to push myself towards the edge. The second was that I have some work that makes it inconvenient for me to be out of the country. I agreed to go on this trip due to a momentary lapse of judgement. I was feeling down over some personal affairs and thought that a trip could cheer me up.

On retrospect, did the trip cheer me up? I have since a few years ago concluded that it does not matter where a person is physically as long as he/she has a strong mindset. As long as I am in an environment with a reasonable standard of tidiness and cleanliness and a good level of comfort and privacy that is conducive to organised thinking and focused thought, the physical locality does not matter. I do not buy into the hype that you must sip a cocktail by the beach or a resort poolside to "get away from it all". I do not subscribe to a "change of scenery" concept. What I do believe in the utmost is in mind over matter. So no, the trip did not cheer me up more than I was able to elevate my own mood. All it did was to provide me something different to stimulate the senses, and I do agree that there is intrinsic value in variety.

It was interesting watching the work dynamics in a resort and at the spa. This was an upmarket place of business where the clientele are generally nice, affluent people who are polite and have money to spend. Perched on a hill, the resort abounds with tropical greenery and has a quiet and peaceful ambiance. The staff-to-guest ratio was high so that each employee can specialize and not be overburdened, which translated into their calm and pleasant demeanor. 

Wouldn't it be wonderful to work at such establishment? I thought that working in customer service in upmarket places would be a good deal for barista FIRE. But I checked my own thoughts and rebuked myself for being naive. Everything looks good if one does not scratch beneath the surface. There are always unpleasant politics in any environment no matter how menial the job is. And the lushest environment becomes mundane and boring, losing its charm once one gets accustomed to it. Interestingly, though my attraction will never evolve beyond a passing thought, I am not the only person in my social circle who commented that working in the upmarket segment in the hospitality industry can be fun.

I am not proud of how I spent my time in the resort. I would have preferred to be more productive, but I did manage to clear a hundred pages or so of a book called "Why Nations Fail". Why are some countries more prosperous than others? Does this prosperity last? It was very fitting for me to be reading such a book when the context was that I was the affluent tourist from a rich city state visiting a tourist spot in a less developed country.

How did I deserve to be where I am, doing what I do? I am keenly aware that it is because my government has performed better than another government. The political-economy of my country has outperformed that of my neighbouring countries, which account for a large part of who I am. As the saying goes, without a nation, there can be no family formation. Without a family formation, there can be no individual. Without my country making me what I am, I would not be able to take a plane to go somewhere to get some resort R&R. In a less developed country, I could still be a white-collar worker, get on the middle class of that country, but earn low wages when compared to international standards.

Political stability breeds economic growth. When economic growth is threatened, it will generate political instability. I believe this explains the fundamentals of the unrest in Hong Kong now. There is fierce debate on social media where Hong Kongers deny that the root of their anger is economics, claiming that what they are fighting for are political rights. What they do not see is that political rights is just another word for economic rights. You can be confident about your livelihood and your right to your economic assets only after you have secured what you deem to be the political might to defend them.These go hand-in-hand.

To put the same thing in another way - if most citizens have good housing, a fair and meritocratic employment market and a good income, and there is assurance that their social rights to these will be safeguarded, no one would be on the streets right now. Demonstrators are fundamentally worried that they will never get on the property ladder in their lifetime, that they will never find a dwelling whether they can form their own family nucleus. A residential property is not just a physical object, it represents life itself - having one determines whether one gets the chance to form a family, whether one develops a bond to his nation. It is the very symbol of a person's fate and future. If there is no hope for the future, then there can only be hatred and the destruction that it will bring.

Do the fortunes of nations last? Nothing does. Great civilizations crumble and fall, and each successive generation can be worse off than the one before. Creation and destruction is a constant cycle as long as this world remains. I am grateful for what I have, at the same time I want to be mentally prepared for challenges of changes.

Tell me what you wear and I will tell you who you are

Many stray thoughts cross my mind everyday, seemingly random but coalescing into my world view, like the separate dots of a Pointillism painting shaping up to a landscape. One of these is how well-dressed people were in the past comparative to the current age.

I go this observation from watching a lot of Nazi-era documentaries on Netflix - binging on these on some weekends. For no reason other than I am somewhat interested in World War II history and that Netflix is so rife with material on this era. On film, non-dignitary citizens were dressed smartly by today's standards. They wore clothing which evince structure and design, there was attempt at embellishment even in the garments of ordinary folk.

I have seen a very short footage of street scenes in New York in the 1900s. People had carriage - they walked with straight backs and with their shoulders back. They wore hats and suits on a normal day. Why has it all seemingly gone downhill from there?

Fashion evolved at breakneck speed from the 1940s. The trend is towards slouchiness, which is synonymous with sloppiness. Slouchy clothes that serve as enabler of slouchy posture and slouchy attitudes.

I have a theory for this.

If you knew that you may die suddenly, abruptly and young, would you treasure each day more? And part of treasuring life is to look ones best. You would take the pains to dress well today if it is plausible for tomorrow not to come. It would make sense to put on your best dress frequently if you were aware that the average lifespan was a constraint on this frequency.

Of course, this is just one of many reasons why fashion has gone casual. Modernisation, mass production of clothing and participation of women in the workforce are forces that make casual clothing a staple in busy lives. No one can afford to dress fussily on a daily basis when there are no ready pairs of hands at home to prepare, launder and maintain these clothes. But I still believe that the sensitivity to death was a determinant of how people dressed and affected attitudes about clothes.

I visited Versailles Palace once. The museum guide described how Marie Antoinette fled through one of the passageways of the palace. In my mind, vivid images of a opulently dressed woman in incredibly exquisite, intricately crafted clothes escaping through the halls with absurdly decorative shoes on her feet. If you were a queen, all the more you would consciously choose to be fabulously appareled everyday, for who knows, you could be captured by your enemies and executed summarily any day. So adorn yourself in resplendence while the good times last.

There was a scene in the first Hunger Games, when Katniss put on what was apparently her best dress to attend the ceremony to pick the Hunger Games gladiator. When striking the gladiator lottery is akin to a death sentence, one should be dressed in ones coffin-best.

 We live in a world where cheap clothes, fit and ready for the landfill, abound. Everything is made of depressing material like nylon, polyester, acylic and rayon. It is increasingly hard to find even a full cotton dress. Few consumers seek out natural fibres like wool and linen - the plasticky sheen and texture of man-made, petroleum-derived fabric is widely and unquestioningly accepted. Clothing made of silk have become a specialty item. Even if silk has never been common in mankind's history, our prosperity relative to our ancestors should rightfully make it more accessible for us. Yet, it remains a niche item that few modern consumers have a keen sense of appreciation for. For the average modern consumer, every piece of garment is meant to buy-and-throw-away, so fabric can be flimsy and the workmanship can be poor. Nothing needs to last because fashion changes rapidly and demands wardrobes to be renewed constantly.


***
My Frugal Philosophy

More than 15 years ago, as a young girl, I went to local fashion shop Bysi and bought a cute little top with a heart-shaped neckline and drawstring embellishment at the chest. It was cotton, and it lasted till today. About one or two years later, I bought another cute little top from Bysi that had a pinched-waist, which was similarly made of cotton. Both are cherished possessions and still-active serving members of my wardrobe.

Recently, I visited Bysi at Bugis Junction, inspected a few tags. The few tags that I examine all say 100% polyester.

It is better to have fewer pieces of clothings of higher quality, than to have more at lesser quality. No wonder it has been easy for me to stop buying clothing over the past 8 months - everything that I came across in the retail scene has been disappointing.

So no, I am not a fan of local darlings like Love, Bonito. I simply dislike the sensation of polyester against my skin, is it such a crime?

It seems like when we aim for quality, we will ultimately end up saving money. We buy less, and the fewer things we own last longer. This is interesting food for thought.