Grace Yeoh wrote a piece in the Straits Times about why lifestyle journalism still matters when the world is burning. It hit close.
I’ve been writing this blog since 2006. In that time, I’ve written about fixing iPhones, planning family trips to Perth, DIY bicycle crankset replacements, and the best credit card to pay your MCST fees. The most trivial stuff imaginable.
And I wrote all of it while things were falling apart somewhere.
During COVID, Singapore’s death toll was climbing. I was watching Crash Landing on You. During the crypto winter, I lost $32,000 in the Luna collapse, got retrenched from Poloniex, and still showed up for the office Christmas lunch buffet the next day. Right now, the US and Iran are at war, and last week I published a post about planning a Sydney trip with AI.
Grace calls this “resistance against doom.” I think she’s right, but I’d put it more simply: it’s just living.
The article’s sharpest point is about what she calls the “suffering Olympics.” This hierarchy where watching a movie is more socially acceptable than following influencer drama. Where a $500 Michelin meal is judged more harshly than a handbag. Where someone always has to ask, “How is this news?”
I’ve felt that guilt. You scroll past headlines about bombings in the Middle East, then spend 20 minutes comparing strawberry farm prices in Perth for your kids. There’s a voice that says you should feel bad about that.
But curbing your joy doesn’t reduce anyone’s pain. It just makes two people miserable instead of one.
The Bergen-Belsen story is the one that stays with you. Women in a Nazi concentration camp, liberated by the British army in 1945, were sent cartons of red lipstick. Not food. Not medicine. Lipstick. And it worked. It gave them back something that starvation and torture had stripped away: the feeling of being a person, not a number tattooed on an arm.
I read The Little Liar last year, a novel set during the Holocaust. Fiction gave me a more vivid understanding of that suffering than history books ever could. And here’s the thing: reading that novel was itself a lifestyle act. Consuming a story for emotional enrichment, while the real world had its own horrors unfolding.
That’s the real argument. Joy isn’t the opposite of empathy. It’s a prerequisite.
People who follow K-pop and fashion trends while staying aware of atrocities aren’t ignoring reality. They’re just not performing suffering for an audience. The ones who police everyone’s joy, who demand constant visible anguish, they’re the ones channelling energy into the wrong thing.
I think about my own blog. It’s a mess of topics: property, book reviews, concert experiences, iPhone troubleshooting, family vacations. None of it is important in the grand scheme. But every post is me solving a specific problem, or documenting something I enjoyed, or figuring out how something works. It’s the texture of daily life that Grace talks about.
And honestly, the posts I’ve written during my hardest times (getting retrenched, losing money in crypto) sit right next to posts about staycations and JJ Lin concerts. That’s not cognitive dissonance. That’s just a full life.
Grace ends with a line about dehumanisation. “When the goal of the aggressor is often to reduce both victim and bystander to a statistic or object, to feel fully is to resist that dehumanisation.”
I’ll buy that.
The world is always going to be on fire somewhere. Planning a trip to Sydney with your kids, fixing your bike, figuring out the cheapest way to pay condo fees, those aren’t distractions from what matters.
They are what matters.