Welcome to Ideothetic Flow, my newsletter sharing my reflections on finding balance, sufficiency, and security.
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Hi!
Alcina had to travel to Tokyo for a conference, so we used the opportunity to have a short holiday in Tokyo without the kids for a few days. Its the first stretch of over 24 hours where neither of us have been parenting, and its definitely been a much needed break for us from being in that constant rush of parenting two kids.
My battle against scrolling social media.
The past 2 years, with Levi being very young, and having very unpredictable windows to do things, even entertainment, has left me with a bad habit of getting stuck in scrolling short form content like instagram explore pages or tiktok.
There’s nothing wrong with these per se, I know many (including my wife) find them to be both entertaining and informative, especially when we’re stuck waiting for a child to do something or fall asleep. But, lately I think its become a habit to flick the app open the moment there is any short pause, or if I’m feeling some discomfort in whatever I am doing. I then feel guilty about spending time on it when I have so much more I want to be doing instead.
I decided to make use of Lent recently to effect some serious change, and set myself a challenge not to touch any short form social media content. While there still continue to some small slips here and there, I’ve been largely successful at avoiding getting myself stuck scrolling through a feed, and have had more time to do deeper forms of entertainment. Most notably, learning to play “Champagne Problems” on the guitar, which I haven’t touched for awhile.
Creating my own content feed
However, there were still many intermittent moments where I’d like something to fill the void, doing absolutely nothing is still too hard for me. Whenever it feels like a moment I might previously have opened instagram, I try to open a random page on one of my various notebooks instead. This got alot easier now that I moved my note taking onto my tablet, so I can access these anytime.
I’ve seen the most value of this in martial arts training. I often take short notes at the end of each class. At the same time, my social media content feeds are full of various martial arts tips. It feels like I’m learning something when I watch them, but the ideas are rarely internalised. I realised that its not a big shift to be replacing those tips with my own notes instead - but these are lessons that I’ve actually experienced and can review (and also paid for). I do feel a difference in retaining knowledge from lessons, and being able to apply earlier lessons in live practice more easily, or at least remembering the mistakes I promised to avoid next time.
Embracing discomfort
The biggest difficulty in keeping up with this practice is our natural instinct to seek what is comfortable and easy.
Going through my own notes is uncomfortable. They lack the perfect UI of a social media app, and the high production value of a content creator, which make it easy to access. My disorganised chicken scrawlings are such an eyesore in contrast. There’s no clear accessibility, where should I start reading? How do I know if they make sense (especially compared to what an “expert” says online)?
It is also uncomfortable worrying that I’ll be out of touch with the world. Social media is a source of what is happening around. The latest restaurants and products, or interesting events. Its uncomfortable to feel like an ignorant frog in a well.
But, comfort only gives an illusion of usefulness, or worse, masks uselessness. Even though so much information is nicely packaged and presented to me, when I audit myself, I realise that only a very small proportion of it actually contributed to me, and the rest was clickbait, over-hyped, or repeated. I’m not really worse off by not having come across them.
Good Samaritan Food Donation Bill
The last public consultation for the Good Samaritan Food Donation Bill took place last month, and it seems we are on track for this to be tabled in parliament this year. This has been in the making for the past few years, and I'm glad to see it reach this point.
Random Singapore laws - GST Amendment Bill 2024
I'm starting a new section highlighting a random bit of Singapore law I came across each month. Non-lawyers often think we know every line in the statute books, while in practice we usually rely on bunch of broad principles, and a number of specific laws that we work with in great detail. 99% of the laws in the books are not regularly dealt with by lawyers in practice, even if they might be relevant to something in our daily life. I tend to come across these not in my work as a lawyer, but when volunteering as a legislative assistant, and thought it would be interesting to share some of the things I come across.
Considering most of my network are lawyers, I'm curious to know if this something people would find interesting (let me know!), but at least one person has said they would read it (thanks Cheryl!)… so here goes.
This month, I’m sharing the GST Amendment Bill 2024, which was passed in parliament last month.
Previously, government agencies would make their own interpretation whether a fee they charged would be subject to GST. However, this led to uncertain application of the GST rules, and an audit found that 18 different government fees were wrongly charging GST.
To fix this, this GST Act was amended to make the Ministry of Finance the central interpreter whether a government fee requires GST, and the act now clearly states which government fees are not subject to GST
I found two things interesting about this:
The practical effect of this change is minimal, only about $7.5m of refunds needs to be made. The government sets the prices anyway, so if they didn’t charge GST but priced those fees higher, it might be the same result. But, making this amendment and refunding the wrongly charged fees is significant in reinforcing a core principle of society - the government must be empowered by a principled application of law before it can do anything to us.
Why does the government even need to tax something it charges, it all goes back to the state’s pocket anyway? Even as a lawyer, I don’t fully understand the legal nature of a government. From this I learnt that the tax laws apply to government agencies in the same way they do any GST registered business, and if they provide a service, they have to charge GST on it. From the parliament discussions, I learnt that GST should be charged by the government if it was a service that could have been provided by or outsourced to a private company, and thus for fairness, should be treated in the same way.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts, start a conversation, or simply connect over a chat. You can reply this email, leave a comment, or reach me at jameschanwz@hey.com.
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Take care and have a good week!
James