At a recent Bloomberg forum, Singapore’s former foreign minister George Yeo was asked about the city state making the lists of the richest and unhappiest countries. He let slip what may be founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew’s coldest legacy quote: “We can promise economic development, infrastructure, education, whatever. But never promise happiness.”Yeo added that unhappiness may even be a precondition for achievement.

In the national pledge, citizens of Singapore promise to achieve “happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation”. Sixty years on, we have nailed prosperity and progress. We have the hospitals, the schools, the trains that run (mostly) on time. Shouldn’t we be happy we pulled off the feat of rising “from third world to first”, as the title of Lee’s memoirs goes? Apparently, happiness is an aspiration but not the promised land.

Speaking as a Singaporean, none of this shocks me. We’ve long known our national default setting is “achieve”, not “enjoy”. But it raises an awkward question: if happiness was never on the to-do list, what exactly have we been grinding away for? In the first place, how did we end up here?

Historian Wang Gungwu, on a recent podcast, may have offered an explanation. He set out the old Confucian “mandate of heaven” concept whereby capable, caring rulers govern well and good subjects know their place and don’t complain – a political operating system that struck me as remarkably similar to the one in Singapore.

Which brings me to my theory, submitted with the usual disclaimers about my own confusion and audacity: Singapore’s version of applied Confucianism got us from third world to first. Personal happiness was never in the road map. At its core, Confucianism was never a philosophy about how to be happy.

It was a philosophy about how to be governable. Read it as a management manual rather than a moral one and the picture clicks into place: everyone gets a role and your job is to perform your role well under a hierarchy that is drummed into you from birth. Singapore even tried adding Confucian studies to the national curriculum in the 1980s.

I was back in Singapore recently, and by day three I was reminded of the national sport: competing for a seat. On the MRT at 8am, at the hawker centre at noon and again on the ride home at 6pm. Three times a day, the city reminds us there isn’t quite enough to go around, so we all have to be quicker or better than the next person.

As I sipped my warm soy drink, however, it struck me this was never really about seats. It’s a daily rehearsal for the multi-stop race Singaporeans are conditioned to take part in: study hard, graduate, work, apply for a BTO (Build-To-Order flat), get married, have kids, get them into a good school, keep their grades up, get them into university, then watch them retrace your steps.

A society where everyone knows their lane is easy to manage – and that, not individual well-being, has always been the point. Nowhere is this clearer than in our national exams, where teenagers compete to validate their self-worth, in a tradition going back 1,400 years to the Sui dynasty.

Singapore’s version of applied Confucianism got us from third world to first. … At its core, Confucianism was never a philosophy about how to be happy. It was a philosophy about how to be governable Scholars back then didn’t compete to differentiate themselves in a marketplace of ideas. They competed to align as closely as possible with whatever the emperor wanted so as to be granted the privilege of serving as a loyal extension of imperial authority. It was essentially selection masked as competition. This is still very much alive today, except that the emperor has been rebranded as a government scholarship.

However, the cast meant to perpetuate this order may be quietly walking off the set. Singapore’s total fertility rate hit a record low of 0.87 last year, down from 0.97 the year before. If there was never a promise of happiness, perhaps some Singaporeans have decided they cannot, in good conscience, promise it to anyone else either – least of all their own child.

Wang’s explanation offers a clue here: the mandate of heaven depends on people being satisfied with good governance and people have always had a way to deliver their verdict. Previously, that meant rebelling and toppling a dynasty. Today it’s quieter: it could be a friend taking a job overseas, a couple moving to Thailand, a woman deciding not to have a second child, or a first. Nobody storms the palace. People just stop showing up for the roles assigned them.

Lee never promised us happiness, and to be fair, he never pretended otherwise. But without it, life in Singapore starts to look like a very long, very efficient commute to nowhere in particular.