What should I do next?

This newsletter is having an existential crisis.

credits: dall-e

When I started this newsletter, it was a way for me to rediscover what I loved. For a good 3+ years, I had been focused on running Rice Media's content business, and it had been a while since I actually wrote something.

At the time, I wrote about what I cared about the most—the journey I had been through learning to manage people and run an organisation for the first time. I wanted to create something others like myself would find useful, and thought I could do it in my own way, through a mix of narrative storytelling and musings on personal development.

While these are subjects I still care deeply about, I've been thinking more and more about what's next. I've found myself drifting more towards narrative storytelling and losing interest in the 'self help' space.

Part of this is, I've always felt somewhat uncomfortable writing about myself. I live in this weird space where I value my privacy, but at the same time I can't help but write. Putting words on paper is how I process my life, it's how I filter the universe.

The other part is that I often feel like a fraud writing about self help-ish topics and finding better ways to live, because I know that in many ways I do not have my own shit together.

For a while, I considered that maybe I could just own this angle. I could write about how I'm absolutely struggling with some of this stuff, and that I'm not coming from a place of having figured it out. But this didn't quite resonate either.

So rather than ask myself what I wanted to do with this newsletter, I asked: what do I love doing?

And I didn't think of this as a chill question. Not someone just bumping me on the shoulder and going, hey man, what do you think would be cool to do for fun?

Instead, it was more like someone grabbing me and shaking me and going, no, I mean LOVE doing, like you would fucking do it for 0 money, like if you knew you had 2 years to live and had nothing to lose and could not fail and it was fun and it felt like 100% you. What the hell would you do???

I promise that asking yourself this question in these two very different voices really makes a difference.

I landed on a few things:

• I love connecting with people and hearing their stories

• I love the process of learning to ask better questions, questions that get me closer to understanding why something is the way it is, or why the shape of someone's life has evolved that way

• I love the process of discovering the questions that help others to shift their own understanding of themselves and/or the world

• I love feeling like I'm expanding my experience of life, whether it's through things I'm doing, new ideas I'm wrestling with, or listening to other people's stories

• I love how everything is quiet when I'm writing, and the process of trying to get better at making my words simpler yet more meaningful

Next, I asked myself, what do I care about right now?

This was much harder to answer, but very broadly I think I care about helping myself and others to make sense of our lives, and to find ways to do life differently, more courageously, more honestly, more delightfully.

After talking to myself for a few days, I began to form some idea of the direction I wanted to take this newsletter in.

The pitch, in one line, is:

I want to interview and write about Singaporeans in their 30s and 40s who experienced destabilising life events that reshaped their beliefs about themselves and the world.

Why 30s and 40s?

It's just because this is the demographic that I relate to the most at the moment. And in our Singaporean context, it's also (in my mind) the age range at which we might have built some version of a stable life, begun believing that we've got it all figured out, and that it can only get good from here.

But what happens when you're wrong? When life surprises you, or you surprise yourself?

What does it take to get to the other side? What do you learn along the way? What does this look like when we're talking about work, religion, relationships, family, physical and mental health, sexuality, money, and so on?

And what does this look like for "ordinary" people? My personal observation is that media narratives tend to lean towards more sensational stories, eg. young people who've been through traumatic life events or founders who overcame certain challenges to find success. Not that these stories aren't powerful or valuable, but they're not what I'm interested in unearthing at the moment.

Anyway, let me know what you think. Is this a compelling angle? Would you want to read such stories? Does this make sense because you know such people whose stories deserve to be told?

As always, you can also reply directly to this email or comment on this post to share your thoughts. Over the last year or so I’ve had the joy of getting to know some of you who subscribe to my writing, and this is something I would love to do more.

PS. For some reason I got a sudden bump in subscribers after my last newsletter, so I just wanted to say hi 👋🏻 to all of you who are new here. Welcome to my tiny corner of the internet.

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