emblebi

There's a big difference between Singapore and London. In many other countries, you can move between cities to find the place that fit you better. From London, you can go to say, Manchester, Edinburgh, or even the rest of EU is open to you.

In Singapore, you can move between neighbourhoods. The neighbourhoods are more or less the same. Once you've lived there for a while, you go to the same place that you've been to hundreds (or maybe thousands) of times after work. It all got really really boring after a while. The typical (expected) long working hours in the society doesn't help either. All you do is work, eat and sleep. And shopping. After 10 years, I too left and would never return.

No, this is the real reason from the article:

"I describe my time living in Singapore as sterile. Nothing particularly bad happened but it wasn’t particularly good either. Daily life was convenient but it was only the bare minimum of living. I had everything I needed to be comfortable but I didn’t have anything that inspired me. Even though there wasn’t a language barrier, I encountered a hefty communication barrier. In my experience, people were polite but conversations rarely moved past surface-level niceties. Of the conversations that I took part in and overheard, the vast majority of them were about work. I routinely watched people work 15 hours days and stress over strict deadlines. Yes it was living and they were making progress but it wasn’t holistic and people openly admitted to me that it wasn’t fulfilling."

And it's true. It's a country of 716.1 km2 (276 sq mi). For locals, life there is mind-numbingly boring and stressful. I too left and would never return.