In the series of "Life after..." by the Straits Times published 14 Sep 2026, producer/director Desmond Tan, 51, was commenting on his Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. Due to his workload, he would survive on 2 hours of sleep, 2 cups of coffee and 2 cans of Red Bull. In his interview, he mentioend that there was a prominent director of commercials also had the same type of cancer, who has since died.
Not only that but the list included other colleagues with breast, pancreatic, lung and colon cancer. In his own words, "many of us are relatively young and healthy. That really got me thinking that there is something wrong with the industry." He continued that, "I actually think that sleep is very underrated and people do not talk about (it) enough."
In the same newspaper, there was another article with the title "Weighing a promotion against work life balance". The question that was asked if whether it is worth to give up a promotion for better work life balance. The answer from Don Leow, the HR director at the National Institute of Education seems to lean on the job nature. If the work involves more work, more people issues and more pressure, plus there is no authority, no resources nor support to do the job properly, then the trade-off may not be worth it.
Employees should consider discussing the workload, resources, travel, flexibility and even the timing to ensure the addtional responsibility is still within reason from the perspective of health, relationships or even the ability to perform well.
What say you?
We can probably say "yes" to the promotion if we are starting out on our career, in our 20s or 30s. Perhaps when we reach our 40s, then we have to seriously consider if the extra $ is worth the personal sacrifice. What I found over the years, is that there is no such thing as "free lunch".
Sadly, this is in contrary to how life works - the 40s is when we gather the 10-20 years in the industryto reach the director-level position. Once we reach there, then opportunities abound where another 1-2 interviews will get us to the Holy Grail salary of exceeding $10k per month but this may entail higher work pressures and the late-night (after 11pm) global meetings.
Should we or should we not move up?
Not an easy decision to make but do consider carefully as per what Don Leow says: that we should weigh this carefully against our life and our relationships. After all, occupation is in the outer circle - lose the job and we can always find another job (if we have proven our worth), but lose the relationship or self (physical, mental, spiritual) and it is tougher to recover.
In Desmond's case, it is to beat Stage 4 cancer...way more difficult than finding a new job.