SINGAPORE: Back in the day, once folks got their university degree and landed a good job, the next thing on their list was usually “climbing the corporate ladder.” They wanted bigger paychecks, larger desks, cooler job titles, and more prestige. That was the common goal. 

Now, however, some mid-career workers in Singapore are deciding to ditch that ambition. 

In a recent Reddit thread, these workers revealed why they no longer care about moving up the ranks.

The discussion started after one user shared that they realised pushing for “more responsibility, a better title, and more money” is no longer worth it.

According to them, every promotion now seems to come with a price: “more stress, less energy, less patience, less presence outside work.”

“It feels like you earn more on paper while losing parts of your actual life,” they wrote. “What’s confusing is I can’t tell if this is maturity, burnout, or me becoming complacent. Part of me thinks I should still be hungry and pushing harder. Another part of me wonders if chasing growth for its own sake is how people wake up one day successful and quietly miserable.”

“I’m curious if anyone else went through this shift, where career progress stopped automatically feeling like the right answer. Did you lean in harder, step back, or redefine success completely?”

Life outside work

In the discussion thread, one Singaporean commenter said they stopped chasing promotions once they learned that everyone has ‘very finite time and energy.’

“I want to have more energy for my family, friends, hobbies, and my other interests. I want to pick up a life skill, hug my pets, travel to different places, read, and do my arts and crafts,” they wrote, seemingly hopeful about what life has in store for them outside of work.

“A job is just a means for me to earn income to supplement everything outside of my job. I see some people at the management level earning high income and having plenty of authority at work, but they’ve totally got no life/no hobbies—nothing going on outside of work. 

“I see all these people, and I thought to myself, that’s not who I want to become. If anything, even with lots of money, that’s a damn miserable and sad life.”

Taking a pay cut

Another user shared that they chose to leave a higher-paying role in exchange for better work-life balance.

“I resigned from a job that brought home S$5.5K SGD after CPF, and now I only bring home S$3.7K SGD. In exchange for better work-life balance and physical and emotional mental health, it’s so, so worth it.”

They added, “The only downside is my dating options are pretty much nonexistent when women find out about my salary, but so be it.”

Realisations during the pandemic

A third explained that their perspective didn’t change even after they had a kid, but when the pandemic started, and their company began work-from-home arrangements, they felt “liberated” and realised for the first time that work isn’t everything.

“It just went downhill from there,” they said. “You could be giving 200%, and everyone thinks you are amazing, BUT it does not translate into any increments, bonuses, etc.”

“I still work because I have bills to pay, but I don’t give 200%, I don’t give 150%, I don’t even give 100% (unless it’s a crunch time type of situation). I’m probably just giving something in the 50-70% range on a daily basis …. sometimes worse.”

Stepping out of the rat race

A fourth Redditor, now 38 and single, said they stopped focusing on career growth after securing their housing.

“Once my BTO mortgage was completed, I just didn’t want career growth anymore, and I started prioritising my well-being,” they wrote.

“I want to seek something more meaningful in my life instead of continuing to be stuck in the corporate rat race. Ambition is definitely still there to find ways to earn more than what I did in corporate life, but I want to find something that I have control of my time with and not something repetitive.”

Reassessing life after a health scare

A fifth individual wrote that a health scare forced them to rethink their priorities.

“After a bad experience where my health got compromised, I’ve redefined my priorities as 1) my own health, 2) my family, and 3) my job,” they said.

“I’ve turned down opportunities and ensured I can knock off on the dot and not bring work home so I can be fully present with my children.” 

“To me, success is being able to have good health, a close relationship with the people who matter to me, and doing things I find meaningful at work. I don’t care about prestige or a high title. I don’t need to be super rich.”

Read also: Intern struggles to say no as boss keeps inviting them to S$11-S$17 lunches daily: ‘How do I tell her I don’t want to eat lunch with her?’

This article (Mid-career workers reveal why they no longer care about climbing the corporate ladder: ‘I want to pick up a life skill, hug my pets, travel to different places’) first appeared on The Independent Singapore News.

MAY 4 — Malaysia has just launched a new 10-year national education blueprint 2026-2035. Many have lauded the ambitious nature of the plan. Equally, many have warned about the many challenges of implementation. Malaysia’s ambition to become a global education hub is both laudable and logical. With a strong multilingual base, strategic location, and decades of investment in campus infrastructure, the foundation is solid. 

The visible presence of Malaysian universities in international rankings, driven by a concerted push for publications, proves the strategy has momentum. However, in today’s hyper-competitive arena, where rankings increasingly value the impact and relevance of research, a simple “publish or perish” treadmill is no longer enough. To rise decisively, Malaysian universities must strategically pivot from quantity to quality, and from visibility to genuine global influence.

The first, and most critical, shift must be in the culture of publication itself. The current incentive system at many institutions often rewards quantity and journal prestige points (e.g., Q1 journals) above all else. This has yielded growth, but risks creating a factory-like output of incremental studies with limited resonance. The new strategy must incentivise research ambition and rigour. 

This means providing protected time, seed funding for high-risk/high-reward ideas, and celebrating papers not just for where they are published, but for their citation impact, policy influence, or public engagement. Universities should actively foster interdisciplinary research clusters — mixing engineers with economists, medical researchers with data scientists — to solve complex problems. This is where groundbreaking science often happens.

The author argues that Malaysia’s new 10-year education blueprint can strengthen the country’s ambition to become a global education hub only if universities shift from prioritising publication quantity to research quality, SDG-driven relevance, meaningful international collaboration, and stronger support systems for academics and innovation. — Wikimedia pic

This leads directly to the second pillar: authentically embedding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into the research DNA. SDG alignment is not a branding exercise; it is a powerful framework for relevance. Malaysian universities are uniquely positioned to lead on SDG research that speaks to both local and global challenges. Think of pioneering work on sustainable palm oil alternatives, climate-resilient urban planning for tropical megacities, equitable healthcare models for ageing societies, or biodiversity conservation in Asean rainforests. 

This requires moving beyond tagging existing projects with SDG keywords. It demands strategic hiring, creating SDG-focused research institutes, and aligning postgraduate programmes to train the problem-solvers of tomorrow. Research on local issues with global parallels will attract international scholarly attention and partnerships organically.

Speaking of partnerships, the third pillar requires transforming international collaboration from a transactional metric to a transformational engine. The goal should not be to simply add foreign co-authors to papers. The strategy must be to build deep, equitable consortiums around shared challenges. Malaysian universities should position themselves as indispensable hubs for research in the Global South and on tropical themes. 

Pursue joint PhD programmes, co-supervision networks, and shared laboratory access with top universities worldwide. Crucially, they must also become better at telling the story of their research. A powerful publication in a specialist journal is just the start. Investing in science communication, policy briefs, and media engagement to translate findings for public and government consumption amplifies impact — a factor rankings are increasingly attuned to.

Furthermore, universities must empower their greatest asset: their academics. The academics must be suitably empowered to bring change. This means reducing excessive administrative burdens, streamlining ethics approval processes, and providing robust grant-writing support. Simultaneously, they must be ruthless in upgrading critical infrastructure — not just labs, but high-speed computational resources and open-access publishing funds. Most important is the art of people management, especially how to effectively motivate them. 

The race up the ranking ladder is not won by playing a short-term game. It is won by building a vibrant, confident, and impactful research ecosystem. For Malaysia, the opportunity is not merely to appear in the rankings, but to redefine what excellence from a non-Western hub looks like: excellence that is scientifically rigorous, globally connected, and passionately relevant to humanity’s pressing needs. The rankings are a symptom of health, not the cause. 

By strategically focusing on quality, SDG-led relevance, and deep partnerships, Malaysian universities will not just climb the ladder — they will help build a new one. If universities can embrace such path, that would effectively silenced the growing critics of the ranking investment.

* Professor Datuk Ahmad Ibrahim is affiliated with the Tan Sri Omar Centre for STI Policy Studies at UCSI University and is an Adjunct Professor at the Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies, Universiti Malaya. He can be reached at ahmadibrahim@ucsiuniversity.edu.my 

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.