There’s something about travel that strips away the comfortable fictions we tell ourselves about where we live. The moment you step off a plane in a different city, walk through a different airport, navigate a different system, you become suddenly, acutely aware of what home is—and what it isn’t. Travel forces a kind of involuntary accounting, a mental inventory of all the small things that work and don’t work, that flow and stumble, that welcome and repel.

The Two Faces of Comparison

Comparison gets a bad reputation, and sometimes deservedly so. We’ve all heard the criticisms: it breeds ungratefulness, entitlement, a smug sense of superiority. The person who returns from abroad and can’t stop talking about how much better things are “over there” becomes a tiresome cliché—someone who’s forgotten where they came from, who looks down on their own people, who mistakes the privileges of being a tourist for some kind of universal truth about a place’s worth.

But there’s another kind of comparison, one that doesn’t diminish but clarifies. This kind isn’t about judgment; it’s about recognition. It’s about seeing that certain things—infrastructure, systems, public services—can actually work, not because of some inherent cultural superiority or vast wealth, but because someone decided they should work and then made them work. This comparison doesn’t make you hate home. It makes you ask: why not here?

The Maddening Closeness of Similar Ingredients

Here’s where it gets complicated, where the frustration becomes something more precise and harder to shake. The most maddening comparisons aren’t between places that are worlds apart. They’re between places that have essentially the same ingredients but wildly different results. When the gap isn’t about resources or capability but purely about execution—that’s when comparison moves from observation to something that sits heavier in your chest.

This is what anyone traveling between Changi and NAIA understands viscerally. You’re comparing two countries in the same region, both tropical archipelagos, both with colonial histories, both navigating post-independence development. Two airports serving the same function. And the contrast is stark, immediate, impossible to ignore. Walk through Changi’s gleaming terminals—the efficiency, the cleanliness, the intuitive wayfinding, the sense that every detail has been considered—and then navigate NAIA’s chaos. The components are all there: gates, runways, immigration counters, baggage carousels. What’s missing is the execution, the follow-through, the commitment to making it work as it should.

The same realization strikes when you board a train in Japan. The system itself isn’t alien—trains, tracks, stations, schedules. But the execution transforms these ordinary components into something that feels almost miraculous. Trains arrive exactly on time. Stations are clean, clearly marked, intuitive. The system operates as if passenger dignity is non-negotiable. And the Philippines has trains too—the LRT, the MRT, entire rail systems that theoretically serve the same purpose. The infrastructure exists. But anyone who’s ridden both systems knows they’re not the same, not really. The constant breakdowns, the inexplicable delays, the overcrowding that goes beyond busy into genuinely dangerous.

You can see the same pattern in Jakarta with Transjakarta, a bus rapid transit system that actually functions, moves people, operates with reliability. And then there’s Manila’s Carousel—the same concept, the same blueprint to copy, but execution that falters in all the familiar ways: inconsistent service, lanes that aren’t really protected, a system that never quite coheres into something people can truly depend on.

Being in the Game but Playing It Poorly

This is what breeds a particular species of frustration: you’re in the game. The Philippines has airports, railways, bus systems, the same basic infrastructure toolkit that other countries work with. The gap isn’t about what you have; it’s about what you do with what you have. And recognizing this is both hopeful and infuriating in equal measure.

It’s hopeful because the solution isn’t impossible. You don’t need to invent new technology or wait for unlimited resources or become a different country. The trains exist. The buses exist. The airports exist. You just need to execute better, to maintain what exists, to make the basic decision that things should work and then actually make them work. The template is right there—the Japanese railway system worked even when Japan was rebuilding after the war. Transjakarta functions in a city as chaotic as Manila. Changi was built from the ground up by a country that also started from scratch.

But that same proximity is precisely what makes it so frustrating. You can’t comfort yourself with the idea that you’re not equipped to compete, that the standards are unfair or irrelevant. The standards are completely relevant. The context is often nearly identical. What you’re confronting isn’t impossibility—it’s underperformance. And underperformance is so much harder to accept than impossibility because it implicates choice. It suggests that things are the way they are not because they have to be, but because someone, somewhere, has allowed them to be this way.

When you experience the precision of Japan Railways—the conductor bowing before leaving each car, the seven-minute delay meriting a formal apology—and then you board the MRT during rush hour, squeezing into a car packed beyond any reasonable capacity, wondering if today will be the day it breaks down again, the comparison isn’t abstract. It’s immediate and physical and impossible to ignore. You’re not observing a gap between different worlds. You’re observing a gap between potential and reality, between what could be and what is. And that gap is filled entirely with execution, with the daily, unglamorous work of maintenance and improvement, with the decision to care about public infrastructure as if the people who use it matter.

The Paradox of Proximity

Every time you move between these systems—stepping off a punctual train in Tokyo and mentally calculating contingency plans for the MRT, riding a functioning Transjakarta bus and thinking about the Carousel, walking through Changi and steeling yourself for NAIA—you’re not just moving between different countries. You’re moving between two versions of what’s possible with the same essential infrastructure. One version says: this is how you treat people, this is how you make things work, this is the standard we hold ourselves to. The other version says: this is what we’ve accepted.

Here lies the paradox that travel illuminates so painfully: being in the game means it’s possible, which is genuinely hopeful. We have trains like Japan has trains. We have bus systems like Jakarta has bus systems. We have airports like Singapore has airports. The pieces are all there. That should be encouraging. That should make change feel within reach.

But executing it this poorly, with all the same components everyone else has, with the models right there for reference, with neighboring countries showing you exactly how it can be done—that’s what makes it uniquely, specifically, maddeningly frustrating. Because the solution isn’t distant or theoretical or waiting on some technological breakthrough. It’s right there. It’s been done. It’s being done right now, in places facing similar challenges, by people working with similar constraints.

It just hasn’t been done here.

And that difference—between what is and what so clearly, demonstrably could be—is everything.