Some of my wife's family has lived there and Indonesia for a while, and it is agreed that out of all the places in SE asia, it is a good place to make money and potentially for schooling when young, they plan on moving when retiring.
Jakarta is the city in SEA i know the least. I spent 3 days there as a cheap backpacker 10 years ago. I remember spending a substantial amount of time in traffic.
Some places are better than others, if you lived in SCBD or Pondok Indah (where I am), and your office is close, it kind of feels like some parts of tokyo, but with a little more green space. Traffic is pretty crap though (morning and eveing when people are coming from work), but go-jek or grab biking doesn't make it too bad. Pollution is still bad during the work week, and if you do it alot best to get one of those face masks people tend to wear a lot in Asia anyways. MRT is coming online soon (alot of test runs on the tracks now), so that will make it alot easier geting around esp from south to central jkt.
Plenty of restaurants, bars, and clubs, I manage to have a good time when I out (pretty introverted though, so I tend to not go a lot in general, maybe a couple of times every month, but I tend to order food via gojek at least like every other day), though I try to avoid places that allow smoking indoors. I also tend to avoid eating any street food unless I have something I can take that my stomach can handle (but I'm like that in the US as well ha). It's also nice to be able to take a quick flight to some of the Islands and relax (Bali is ok, but super crowded with tourists compared to other places).
Never was really interested in backpacking unless it was hiking in mountains purely, so I don't really know what would appeal to that perspective.
You can make decent money in Singapore as an expat. But the range of salaries i've seen here is quite a bit larger than in most of the west.
As for the rest of your comment - interesting. Thank you for taking the time to write that up. I am no longer a backpacker and i travel and look at places differently nowadays. I have to check out Jakarta again.
I live in Singapore currently, have been here since 2013. There are things that i miss from my home country (Switzerland), but overall life here is good.
I noticed this as well, do you have a college degree? I've noticed companies over here place even more emphasis on having such (even despite paying less than in the US, at least regarding work relating to writing software).
> I live in Singapore currently, have been here since 2013. There are things that i miss from my home country (Switzerland), but overall life here is good.
Do you go back and visit fairly often? I found that friend's and family were more likely to want to come to me or meet me somewhere outside than the US so I haven't really found the urge to go back to at least visit.
I visit home about once a year.
Not having to shoulder the cost of an aging population would work very well for SG.
One (surprising) way Singapore addresses the cost of caring for an aging population is Singapore's "Maintenance of Parents Act"[1] which basically permits parents to sue their adult children for alimony.
[1]http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_1614_200...
"Pool of citizens aged 65 and older grew to 14.4% this year, from 9.4% in 2007, as lifespans increase and births stay low"[0]
[0] https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/spore-ageing-at-faste...
I find this very funny in reality because as someone from the US living in SE asia for nearly 4 years, I pretty much prefer everywhere else in SE asia than Singapore, though I guess if you look at from a monetary standpoint I can understand.