I wake at 5:00. Gym check-in at 5:15, timestamp on the story — every day, weekends included. My friends call it the 5:15 Club. I'm probably the most disciplined person they know.
This column exists because discipline wasn't enough. I studied in the States, worked on Wall Street — one of the most switched-on jobs in the most switched-on city — and I was all-in on hustle culture. The first place I ever found quiet was a Zen temple on Lexington Avenue, Thursday sits. I picked Thursday because it was newcomers' day and I could mini-socialise afterwards. Even my rest had a KPI. That's when I knew.
Years of training later, I was still the only man at the beach with his shirt on. The answer wasn't more discipline — it was the half of the equation nobody taught me: switching off. What I've learned since fits on one ladder — working hard < a good diet < good sleep < managing your stress < learning how to shut down and just feel.
I've run the whole self-optimisation menu — keto, low-carb, all of it. Somewhere along the way I became the man in New York turning down the drink: the one who made the table feel a little bad, a little lazy, and I genuinely didn't mind. Ask me if I'm ready to get wasted and I'll tell you straight — no, not really; I'd rather go home and sleep. It's also a matter of arithmetic: if I drink with everyone, every time, the act of drinking with anyone stops meaning anything. Make it the default and no person — and no occasion — is ever special enough to be worth it.
This isn't a recent conversion. I landed at Carnegie Mellon in 2017 as one of the oldest freshmen in my dorm, and my first hall introduction was, more or less: hey, if anyone wants some booze, come find me. The RAs pulled me aside — we don't do that here — and that small culture clash taught me more than the semester did. The pull was never the alcohol; it was the access — the thrill of being the one who could get his hands on the thing nobody else could. That's the whole trick behind a “celebratory” drink, and it's the same reason a sliver of Ibérico ham, or the chocolate a friend hauls back from Spain, tastes like an occasion: you keep the hard-to-get things for the rare days. Make them the everyday and the magic evaporates.
And once you understand what alcohol actually does inside you, you can't unsee it. Drink in earnest and you reshape your gut microbiome — the one you spent years building. And that microbiome isn't luggage you're carrying: a growing body of research keeps tying it to your mood, your behaviour, even your personality. So the morning after a real night out, you're not quite the same person you were. Which leaves me one stubborn question: how do you build a life when you're a slightly different person every week?
I've since worked out what's actually cool once you're grown. Being energetic all day. Not being bloated. Not being on first-name terms with the hospital, or the diseases that put you there. Not needing a substance to feel like yourself. And I don't say this from a pedestal — I've been the one who was hooked: I smoked, I was dependent on nicotine, and I quit for good in 2025, because that is not how I want to live. The real flex isn't tolerance. It's not losing yourself — your steadiness, your ability to function — because some small, trivial thing is missing from the night.
I write The Slow Sunday Journal for people like me: educated in Singapore, wired to earn every break, world-class at switching on. Nobody taught us the other half. This is that class.
The rest of the week I run SGAI Studio, building AI for Singapore businesses. The full professional story lives there.