What are your favourite ideas? What ideas are you excited to share — even if they don’t come up everyday? What epiphanies have impacted what you do each day?

On August 30th, we hosted the “Ideas & Epiphanies” dinner. The group decided together that this would be a good platform to share the big ideas that are constantly on their mind — to be heard, find some resonance, and perhaps, decide what to do next.

While our topics ranged from sexuality to religion to government, we observed that many of our topics involved voicing frustrations and injustices, and suggesting solutions or how money and energy should be directed.

More of our topics and questions are below!

LGBTQ Youth
What resources or role models do youths have?
How might we offer grassroots support and information?
How might we make education and government more inclusive?

Voting Reform
What is the impact of current voting systems and structures?
What influences “surprising” decisions (like Brexit, Trump’s popularity)?
How might we design the voting system? (Age limits? Vote weighting based on estimated time to be affected by decision? Greater issues/policies education? More engaging information? Showing contrasting opinions? Paying politicians more? Educating around self-awareness and confirmation bias?)

Government & Tax
Tax is “unhappy revenue” (versus the “happy revenue” of providing and being paid for services)
Which governments generate sustainable happy revenue? How?
How do governments get set up to do such a thing?

Race & Bias
What does racial bias look like in Singapore?
What historical events, policies, etc might contribute to the current situation?
How might we reduce racial separation? (ie put less emphasis on race generally, like on the ID card)
What is the fear?
How do we support people experiencing difficulty due to race?

Religion & Tax
What past events or reasons make religious institutions pay less takes? (In the US, no tax for religious institutions was a way of keeping state and church separate, of preventing churches from influencing voters and policy)
What makes something charitable or a social cause?
How do we quantify the value of churches and religious institutions on society?
How is fair tax decided and evaluated?
In Japan, Buddhist temples are already starting to be taxed.

Women & Wage Gap
How can we invite more women to talk about salaries and self-worth? What might the impact of that be?
Are wages increasing? How do we measure that?
What other factors are at play in wages? (Salaries are offered based on past numbers; Gaps in resume, for childrearing)
How is money and self-worth linked? What messages are being sent? What opposing messages are there?
Is there an inherent disrespect for motherhood? (In work and outside of it, it is often perceived as less important and less effortful than work)
If, hypothetically, every person was sexist, and a business has 25% women and 75% men, about 1/3 men will experience sexism, and each woman would experience sexism 3 times.

Individual work and growth
What helps when you design your own day and make all decisions on next actions and directions?
What do you to do get motivated or unstuck? (big ideas playlist, practice gratitude, find others to trust)
How do you break down big ideas into small steps?
How can you frame your work so that you get feedback, tangible information, and intrigue more frequently?

Where do ideas come from?
What do you do when you are stuck?
For you, do ideas come while relaxing, doing menial taxes, while focused, while exploring diverse content, in dreams, in conversation etc?
How do you get back to being creative (after a block or break)? (Practice metaphors, keep an inspiration log)

Robots
What would you provide in a world with an abundance of smart, robot labor?
What do humans provide better than robots? ie, what do humans want humans to provide for them (that they wouldn’t trust a robot to do, at least not in the shorter long term)
Manna (short story) describes a world where robots tell humans what to do (they are the managers, humans simply execute)

What’s next?
An event or platform to share passionate non-everyday ideas
A space for controversial and uncomfortable or unpopular ideas