On purpose

Every year, quietly and without ceremony, the Philippines loses a portion of its most capable young professionals to places that make it easier to stay.

For most, the answer points away from government. This is not new. But it matters more now than it usually does. Trust in public institutions is not at a high point. The gap between what government promises and what it delivers has become a familiar fixture of public life – expected, almost accepted.

For young Filipinos deciding where to invest their careers, watching institutions struggle is not exactly a recruitment pitch.

And yet. Some of them choose it anyway.

The choice is not irrational, but it requires a particular kind of reasoning. The pay is lower. The resources are thinner. The pace of change can feel impossibly slow. Nobody goes into government for the easy wins.

What they go in for – the ones who mean it – is the scale.

Government touches everything. Not just policy in the abstract, but the actual texture of people’s lives. The speed of justice. The integrity of public money. The quality of systems that ordinary Filipinos depend on without thinking about until they fail. To work inside that machinery, even in one small corner of it, is to be connected to something whose reach no private career can match.

That is not a minor thing to trade away.

But here is what nobody tells you before you walk in: the work is never finished. Not in the way that sounds like a complaint – in the way that it is simply true. Institutions are not projects with completion dates. A process improved today will need improvement again. A system built well will eventually need to be built better. The standard keeps moving, as it should.

It is, in the most literal sense, an endless pursuit of perfection you are never going to reach.

And you have to be OK with that. More than OK – you have to find it energizing. The people who thrive in this work are not the ones waiting for the moment it finally gets easy. They are the ones who understand that an unsolvable problem is not a trap. It is an invitation.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. That is the operating logic of anyone who lasts in public service. Not naivety about outcomes. Clarity about purpose.

This generation of young Filipinos inherited institutions they did not design and did not break. They are not responsible for the dysfunction. But they are the ones who will determine whether it continues.

Cynicism is the most understandable response to dysfunction. It is also the least useful one. The brain drain from public service is not just a story about salaries. It is about the quiet departure of exactly the people institutions most need – young, trained, capable, with enough runway to see real change through.

Strong institutions are not built by accident. They are built by people who choose to build them. Every generation gets the institutions it builds. This one is still deciding.

This generation is not short on capable people. The Philippines produces them constantly. What it has not always managed is giving them a compelling reason to stay inside the public system rather than around it.

That is a solvable problem. And it starts with naming the choice for what it actually is.

Not a sacrifice. Not a consolation prize. Not the path you take when better options fall through.

A deliberate decision to work on the most consequential problems in the room – at exactly the moment when that work matters most.

The problems aren’t waiting to be discovered. They’re already here. They’ve always been here.

The only thing still undecided is who walks in.

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Luigi Bonoan currently serves as Assistant Ombudsman at the Office of the Ombudsman. He is also a faculty lecturer at De La Salle University, teaching Constitutional Law, Election Law and Geopolitics and International Law.