While everyone was traipsing round the world during the holiday season, I stayed home and watched the world go by, in posts, reels, streams and stories. When did the world become such a stage where everyone is an actor in their own movie?
In between these bouts of voyeurism, I visited local places, read books and watched movies, made by professionals.
In the interests of being on-trend, and I apologise for taking more than 15 seconds of your time – which is the gold standard for video content these days – I will attempt to summarise my thoughts gathered over the holidays in three bullet points.
Be The Standout, Not The Standin
One day, I decided to explore “rural” Singapore. I shared this desire with my friend in New Zealand, who promptly rolled about the grass, laughing. “Is there any rural left in Singapore?”
Well, turns out there is one last “kampong” (village) left standing. It’s called Kampong Buangkok. It’s really easy to miss. Sandwiched between highways and HDB high blocks. A gravel path. Wooden houses. Fruit trees spilling over fences. A rooster crowing in the distance.
High-rise housing blocks can be seen from a plot of land co-owned by Madam Sng Mui Hong (pictured). It is located in Buangkok off a section of Yio Chu Kang Road. (Photo: CNA/Nuria Ling)
It somehow feels out of place, yet in sync, like it has always had a right to be there. It’s been there since 1956, founded by Sng Teow Koon, who leased land to families at low rents.
What’s remarkable is that it’s survived the massive development Singapore has undergone. That’s because the founder’s daughter, Sng Mui Hong, often referred to as Singapore’s “last kampong landlord”, has resisted every offer by developers, eager to monetise the 12,248 square meters left of the land. Today, it is said, about 30 families live here and continue to pay low rents.
It’s a quiet statement of personal choice, resistance against the norm, standing out and standing up for what matters to you personally. In a world where everything is being sucked up by machines and crushed into a pulp of sameness and standardization, folks like her may be the heroes of our time.
The Lost Art of Letter Writing And Keeping Open Minds
I normally stay away from books which are told via letters. For some reason, probably due to some early childhood trauma, I find it hard to read other people’s letters. However, conscious that I need, from time to time, break out of my own algorithmic bubble, I decided to pick up “The Correspondent” by Virginia Evans, in which a woman’s life is told through her letters to others.
It made me want to write letters again.
She makes a case for writing letters in one of her correspondences. “Imagine all that you have said to another, all the commentary you have exchanged with friends over drinks, over the phone with colleagues and distant relatives, all the prattle sent quickly, mindlessly over email, messages typed into your cellular phone, and really the sum of this interpersonal communication is the substance of your life, relationships being, as we know by now in our old ages, the meat of our lives; but all of that is gone. Vanished!”
The unexpected joy I found in something I would normally eschew made me realise that keeping an open mind has become one of the biggest challenges of our time.
Algorithms keep us in our own bubbles, information is so readily available that we know everything about anything, social feeds with impossibly beautiful images raise our expectations – how do you keep your mind open when it’s constantly manipulated and filled with so much clutter?
And yet the best way to travel is with an open mind.
Be Prepared For “One Battle After Another”
If you haven’t watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another”, do so. It’s been described as a “breathless action thriller” but it’s more than that. It’s epic. It’s brave. It’s naughty. It’s funny. It’s ironic. It’s rebellious. A fellow movie buff described it as “the type of ‘anti-hero hero’ for this current moment, that we didn’t know we needed.”
It is this generation’s “Easy Rider” – a statement of rebellion in the current zeitgeist. It’s also a love story.
Watching it – especially that crazy, head-spinning, heart-stopping car chase on the rolling hills – made me think that travel in 2026 will be very similar. It will be “one battle after another” as we await where technology, politics and economics take us and within travel, as we figure out how best to manouevre our way up and down those hills.
Spoiler alert: In the movie, the newer, faster car does not win.
Happy 2026.
