Every day is the end of an era in Singapore
Singapore's nostalgia media is really disempowerment media.
“Snow City is closing. Here are 5 other attractions gone forever,” writes CNA in a story about the end of the country’s first indoor snow centre — better remembered by most as the most exciting of field trip destinations.
Such nostalgia media is everywhere. On the same day, baking company Gardenia announced that it would be ceasing production in Singapore, laying off 141 employees as the company shifts operations to Malaysia. Singaporeans of a certain age will likely also remember it as the bread factory that made for the most boring of field trips.
Weeks earlier, the manufacturer of Singapore’s national beer announced that it would be ceasing production in Singapore after 96 years, affecting 130 staff and triggering a flood of mourning. Asia Pacific Breweries Singapore announced that production of Tiger Beer would be moving out of Singapore.
In a similar vein, underground club Headquarters announced that it would be closing after 10 years. This marks the latest in a long, long string of nightlife closures that have made nightclubs a dying breed in the nation, and mourning them is itself a subgenre of the subgenre that is nostalgia media.
Food establishments are the ones that draw the most grief, such as the closure of this Cantonese restaurant beloved by Qantas pilots.
This extends to Facebook and TikTok. At over 230,000 members, the Facebook group Heritage SG Memories is one of the country’s largest online communities, while some of the most popular Singaporean TikTok pages pump out an endless stream of nostalgic archival material.
As the CNA listicle on Snow City so handily points out, loss and nostalgia has become a reliable cornerstone of local journalism. After all, Singaporeans have been mourning everything from Merlion statues to that Borders bookstore at Wheelock Place to HDB playgrounds for time immemorial, with an endless stream of obituaries and think pieces to match.
I too have been guilty of writing articles of this subgenre, like when I wrote about fans of The Projector proclaiming that it “feels like the end of an era” during the indie cinema’s closing party. (The new Filmhouse has thankfully opened in its former premises.)
I’ve even been guilty of pre-mourning, by writing in early 2025 about Haw Par Villa’s operators trying to revive flagging interest in that quirkiest of Singapore spaces before their lease ended at the end of that year. The question of what happens to it now hangs in the air still.
In my view, part of why this kind of nostalgic grief story is so enduring in the local media isn’t just because Singapore has rapidly urbanised and is going through constant urban renewal.
Yes, Singapore’s pace of urban development is unusual. Something that most do not realise is that Singapore is home to 10 of the world’s tallest skyscrapers that have ever been demolished as at 2024 (including the tallest if you exclude the World Trade Center). This is partly the result of policies giving developers more floorspace to work with if the new buildings are more mixed-use. All of this is indicative of how willing we are to tear down perfectly fine buildings to make something newer, more efficient, more modern, rather than adjusting or adapting what’s already there.
The pace of change plays a role, but the other half of the story is that all of this mourning over what we’re losing is also a sense of disquiet towards what we’re replacing it with.
Nostalgia media is disempowerment media
What I always find striking about speaking to folks who worked in manufacturing — like workers at the Tiger Beer brewery — during the middle point of Singapore’s economic ascent is how such a job afforded them all that they needed: enough to buy a home, raise a family, and transition comfortably into retirement.
To be sure, it wasn’t all roses. Part of the reason people were company lifers back then was also because it wasn’t abnormal for companies to include insane clauses like the need to give one year’s notice before resignation. And not everyone secured these jobs.
But, it marks a stark contrast to the economic anxiety that has increasingly permeated working life on the island since the Asian financial crisis of 1997, that made it clear that it was far from certain that endless growth and ever greener fields were on the horizon for every country in the region. These days, as Singapore’s bygone manufacturing era gives way to offshoring, thought leaders of every stripe bellow out to every podcast and news outlet that will listen that one cannot be complacent, and that there are no industries safe from disruption.
This economic disempowerment is a common theme.
Many of Singapore’s iconic and historically significant places have made way for luxury condos and new but utterly forgettable malls that all blend into each other with the same combination of fast fashion (Uniqlo) + chain eateries (Toast Box, Stuff’d) + food court (Koufu) + tuition centres.
There’s a reason these REIT-operated malls keep being built; they’re obviously very financially successful compared to the older model of strata title malls with less curated and therefore quirkier tenant mixes. At the same time, this gradual homogenisation of urban space is also choking what little uniqueness different neighbourhoods had to offer.
Nostalgia media here is resentment over how market forces trample over the spaces we inhabit, at a pace that feels faster than we should tolerate.
I remember when the bridges of Clarke Quay were full of youths pregaming before they hit the clubs (yes, I’m a millennial). Now, nightlife districts are less for partying than they are for tourists and the rare post-work drink. Gone are the days of bar-hopping, partly because of cost, but also because even the idea of a nightlife district is fading away. The consequence is that these districts have become a husk of what they used to be, replaced with more of this sameness.
In reality, all nostalgia media is really just different shades of the same kind of resentment towards how relentlessly late-stage capitalism is transforming Singapore, and how little power we have to stop it.
The sixth C
This subgenre of nostalgia media is so enduring for precisely the same reasons that we’re so keen to destroy old things for the smallest increases in efficiency and profit. In multicultural and multi-religious Singapore, there is perhaps no god more important than almighty Capitalism.
The 5 Cs of Singapore (cash, car, credit card, condominium, and country club membership) was a term used to refer to the things that all Singaporeans aspire towards, and thus, the deeply rooted materialism in Singapore culture. Here, Capitalism is the not-so-secret sixth C.
These 5 Cs have changed somewhat over the years. The end of the country club (and their golf courses) is itself the end of an era of a particular kind of upper middle class aspiration, though that hasn’t stopped some people from trying to bring it back, albeit in a more space-constrained form. Through it all, that materialism has persisted, at the expense of so many other things.
This is the railroad that you should either get on board with, or piss off: Get into a good school, get into a good job, get a good house, get a good family.
The vast majority care not for your inefficient, unprofitable, and insufficiently capitalist endeavours like plays or bookstores or indie cinemas (though I hope the new Filmhouse proves me wrong on this). Most do not care for heritage conservation or accessible nightlife. They appear to care less about broadening the social safety net than about how many sheltered walkways have been built. They do not care about solidarity among workers, as they mostly care about getting ahead (and getting their kids ahead of the curve while they’re at it). Materialist concerns define every facet of life in Singapore.
Of course, the tragedy is that not everyone thinks this way all the time. Everyone cares about something that isn’t purely efficient, whether it’s their favourite hawker stall with the perpetually grumpy uncle or those childhood memories of video gaming in a LAN shop. This is why nostalgia media resonates. The materialism coexists with the faint realisation that at its core, unbridled capitalism corrodes culture (which is sadly, not one of the Cs that matter).
Even the Singaporean chasing the most cookie cutter of marriage-to-BTO-to-babies lifestyle yearns for accessible and thriving third spaces. But this yearning is eclipsed by their yearning for accessible tuition centres.
And even the hyper-capitalist wage slave yearns for a world where he gets more than a day’s notice that he’s being laid off. But this yearning is eclipsed by the yearning for minimal consumer protections and maximal corporate freedom (Singapore regularly tops the rankings of best places to do business in the world) to better enable the endless consumption that makes his life worth living.
A familiar exchange always crops up in discussions of these “end of an era” stories. As many mourn the loss of the thing in question, just as many pop out to say well, that thing deserved to go away because it just didn’t understand the rules of the game.
Without confronting this materialism and placing limits on it, the solutions we propose for saving the things at least some of us care about (like the Culture Pass) are just bandaids, because we dare not reckon with this most Singaporean of beliefs: That something unprofitable, old, or inefficient isn’t really worth saving, even though these inefficiencies are what make it worthwhile.
Until we shake the grip of this thinking, we’ll have to put up with nostalgia media and its many sister genres like ragebait articles exhorting you to be “hungrier” and not get complacent (another capitalist trope), and stories about high flyers ditching their “stable” or “corporate” roles for their true passions (the distilled essence of middle class wage slave aspiration).