I lived in Japan for 18 years. Japan is not known for people following any of the advice in this article
> Stop seeking your One True Passion
1000s of examples of Japanese people following their passion to extremes exceeding most non-Japanese expectations.
A famous example would be Jiro from "Jiro Dreams of Sushi"
Japan is a place where lots people give their lives to their company. I've met plenty of Japanese who work 10am with 90 minute commute (so 8:30am) to 10pm (and 90 mins back) 5 days a week, all year. These people have families but they readily admit they spend more time with coworkers than family and are in many ways closer to them.
While I'm not a native Japanese speaker, I've lived here for a decade and communicate in Japanese 98% of the time at work.
"Ikigai" is just a combination of "ikiru" (live) and "kai" (worth doing). The existence of such a word does not imply any more of a coherent or commonly followed philosophy than the existence of the English phrase "purpose in life" or the loanword "raison d’être" does. Pretty much everything I've seen about the "unique Japanese concept of ikigai" appears to be almost entirely made up by non-Japanese people.
Not that it's necessarily a bad or useless concept, but claiming this particular formulation of it is ancient Japanese wisdom appears to be a marketing effort.
I would posit that the ability to distil complex concepts into concise phrases is prevalent across various cultures and languages. Isn't it true for our Western idioms, like the popular 'YOLO' or 'Carpe Diem' (or even the very French 'raison d'être' itself)?
These terms, mostly void of any formal philosophical roots, are ways of defining and affirming the value of life within our linguistic and cultural contexts. Who's to say that future generations, whether foreign or native, won't feel a sense of novelty or exoticism in analysing these phrases of old, much like the discussion surrounding 'ikigai' today?
Quite right. I have a longstanding interest in Japanese Budo and hence count myself as somewhat knowledgeable on certain ancient aspects of that culture. There is always a tendency by westerners to read/invent more than what is in the culture itself. And then the charlatans/hucksters/shysters (both japanese and non-japanese) get on the act and ruin everything.
This "Ikigai" hype reminds me of the earlier hype about "Naikan Therapy", "Morita Therapy" etc.
I have not understood the need of a purpose in life until I found myself in situations where direction evaporated. It is discomforting, surprising, and enlightening. This happened a few times, and I learned something new each time. It's a journey of self-discovery. Thinking of it both in grandiose terms as well as in the little habits was helpful.
It's also helpful to see what others do in such situations. Some common situations where the purpose in life changes:
- retirement
- kids moving out of the house
- hitting a grand goal (i.e. buying a house, trip of a lifetime)
- financial sufficiency or independence
- finishing college
Ikigai is a neat lens for exploring this part of self.
"until I found myself in situations where direction evaporated."
This is the important part. Most people simply work themselves to death and never find the time to ask these kinds of questions. Or, they did ask themselves these questions at one point and realized working themselves to death was a more pleasant route than struggling with such existential problems.
Osho [or Watts?] once noted that men die at 50 from heart attacks because they get all the things society asked them to get, the external pressure of society is no longer pushing them, and they are no longer running from themselves, iirc.
I've been starting to think about this as i've got maybe 4-5 years left to prepare, it's not that comfortable of a thought. I read an article in the WSJ about new empty nesters and one guy described it as similar to getting fired. Like he had worked so hard for 18 years and then one day he gets "by dad, see you at Thanksgiving" and it was over. haha (but not really haha)
These days, with a record number of post-graduates living with their part, empty nesting is probably a hope for many.
For me, I want my son to be successful and happy, for any definition of the former he wishes. I would not compare it to being fired. It’s unsettling to wait while they figure out life, because you know you cannot short circuit experience by living and failing and succeeding.
I never realized how hard being an empty nester would be, I just thought it would be hard for different reasons.
For most of my life I kept thinking I was looking for financial independence, knowing full well I’d continue to work if I hit it. But this posed a problem: why work hard toward that if the day-to-day wouldn’t change much? Eventually I reconciled this when I encountered Epictetus: I was actually looking for a mental freedom to find my own meaning, identity, and grow my capacity to choose the good on a daily basis. It was less about the total dollar amount and more about the perception of my own agency.
In fact, I’d much rather grow the meta-skills that let me flourish in life across multiple dimensions than have a bunch of cash land on my doorstep. This is either wise or the type of thing you tell yourself when you haven't had outsized success. But, I also realize the former is 100% more resilient even if it is much harder.
From here, the fog has started to lift, and I can continue the work of uncovering my resilient core of personality.
I'd rather have a bunch of cash. Then I wouldn't need to work and could do want I want. So many things I'd rather do than work, e.g. spend more time with my family, take classes, read more, exercise more, etc.
Dealing with this kind of angst most of my life, I've found great value in this and similar philosophies. However, it should also be noted that Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world (not that far ahead of the US though).
“One of the highest in the world” IS comparing it to other countries. It is in the top 20 and towards the top in the developed world. Hardly an inaccurate or false statement.
Japan's at 25th place for suicide rates with 15.3 suicides per 100,000 people, which means it's definitely up there, but not “one of the highest in the world”. The US is worse.
I believe you are likely looking at old data from the pandemic, which saw a drop in suicide rate around the world. Japan’s 2023 (and 2022) suicide rate is higher than that:
At ~50k deaths last year the USA has a smaller rate per 100k people than Japan. Not like it matters at all in the scope of this discussion, but again, it is completely accurate to state that japan has one of the highest rates in the world, and a rate that has traditionally been higher than the USA (and is today). Hope that helps.
While the most recent global data from the WHO is from 2019, the pandemic has influenced suicide rates worldwide. In order to know Japan's suicide rates for 2023, you would need a comprehensive comparison involving data from all countries for that year. Such a complete dataset for 2023 is not available, so you can’t really make a conclusion without engaging in speculation.
There’s a recent (2023) novel translated from Japanese for which this is a central concept in the plot (since I read it in translation, I don’t know if Ikigai is mentioned in the original). It’s entitled What You Are Looking For Is In The Library by Michiko Aoyama. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1335005625/donhosek
I first learned of it thanks to reading all the shortlist books from this year’s Tournament of Books https://www.tournamentofbooks.com
This was a nice reframing of the concept of ikigai as I've heard it, and a quick consult of Wikipedia for ikigai [0] shows that it's largely accurate.
I'd also throw out there that one can derive a lot of purpose and meaning in life from religion as well. I certainly do. There are many motivating factors in life, and some core religious beliefs can do this quite effectively, in a positive manner.
I've found if you substitute the word meaning with the word feeling, almost all content about meaning makes a lot more sense.
The purpose of life is to live a life full of feeling.
> Many of us think that finding our passion will magically give our life a purpose. Instead, find feeling in your daily experiences and interactions.
> Embrace lifelong learning. -> Conduct yourself in a way that gives you the feeling of self esteem.
> beyond the point of comfort, financial success should be seen as a potential byproduct of living a life full of feeling.
> Instead of pursuing a grand life purpose, optimize for wanting to wake up in the morning. Live a life of curiosity and connection. Trust that success will be a byproduct of the feeling you find in daily experiences.
I don't really understand. Is the article saying that how to find meaning in life is by rejecting grand narratives and finding meaning in small things? That sounds to me like saying that how to find meaning in life is by... finding meaning in it. Don't get me wrong, it does seem correct to stop seeking your one true passion, embrace lifelong learning, letting go of lofty financial goals, and stop feeling like your only goal should be saving the world. But I'm not clear on why or how we should, in the "ikigai worldview", find meaning in doing these things.
Really, it seems to me that the implication in the article is that the question "how do I find meaning in life?" is basically the wrong question to ask, that life is not the kind of thing that has meaning, and that we should instead just focus on being happy, which can be accomplished by small things. That would make sense to me.
Though I prefer the western idea that there is a grand life purpose. The 4 "ikigai principles" are perfectly compatible with there being a grand life purpose - that there is a grand narrative in which we are partaking doesn't mean that every individual person has be some world-renowned entrepreneur or something. An analogy - a team of stonemasons working on building a cathedral may each individually be working on a small piece of the final building that, to the individual, doesn't appear very meaningful or important. But the sum total of the work of all the stonemasons culminates in something grand and beautiful.
I like the idea of finding micro-habits, activities and relationships that are fulfilling.
While Ikigai may have been repurposed by the West, its new incarnation and Venn diagram seems like a pretty valuable tool for young people to navigate life, even if it's a radical semantic shift from the original Japanese. It also has the merit of trying to awaken peoples' ambition, to raise the ceiling on what they think they might achieve, and how to get there, which Anne-Marie's originalism lacks.
This deeply resonates, but I am also inherently biased towards seeking meaning and long-run impact. There are various western schools of thought that add up to the same thing, eg Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.
Sometimes I see posts on HN and elsewhere that seem to be divorced from a "meaning"-full perspective. I don't mean someone who finds different meaning than I do, but someone who doesn't think meaning matters at all. Sometimes it comes out as "I don't understand why anyone would have kids when it's much easier to just get brunch" or "I don't understand why work that impacts people is more valuable than one that doesn't" etc. FWIW, I sometimes check those folks comment history and they don't seem to be particularly happy despite (or maybe because of) the fact that they removed all onus of meaning from themselves.
>Sometimes it comes out as "I don't understand why anyone would have kids when it's much easier to just get brunch"
If I have kids, I derive meaning from providing _them_ with the ability to derive pleasure from brunch. Then, they have kids and those kids go derive pleasure from their kids having brunch. It's brunch all the way down.
It is amusing that the arguments for this are like "it reduces anxiety" and "it's good for your heart". Like... yes... in that it makes you happier or more fulfilled or whatever, and therefore it has those effects? But if what draws you to a philosophy is the health benefits... you're fucked.
Seems like the health benefits would typically be viewed as the byproduct of the practice. I doubt many people explore philosophy directly for their health.
This kind of reminds me of something Mariko told the Anjin in the show Shōgun. He wanted to leave Japan and be free of rituals and she said something like "If you're always chasing freedom you'll never find yourself."
Looking at the term "Ikigai" as if it's some sort of dogma or a way to improve one's life sorts of defeats the point. East Asian philosophies are not for achieving "meaning of life" and other mundane goals.
This is hardly a novel idea in the rest of the world. It is an ancient one and widespread. It is discussed by many philosophers and is discussed in many religions.
It strikes me that westerners have lost the roots of their culture and are having to relearn it from elsewhere.
"ikigai doesn’t limit someone’s value in life to career and financial status"
Ancient Greek philosophers and their successors frequently discussed happiness and how to live life.
Assuming it is being explained correctly here, that is less anti-wealth than Christianity ("it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle" etc) but similar in rejecting financial status.
Buddhism regards wealth as an attachment so I would have expected a slightly different attitude.
From middle eastern (possibly Hellenised) culture before Christianity read the book of Ecclesiastes.
"What does a man acquire from all his labor and from the anxiety that accompanies his toil on earth? For all day long his work produces pain and frustration,) and even at night his mind cannot relax! This also is futile! There is nothing better for people than to eat and drink, and to find enjoyment in their work."
Thats a very hard simplification in a complex modern world.
A world like now never existed before: Millions of people living in cities were they are not able at all to live in nature or can't afford to move away or into the cities.
A world with high speed communication.
A world with unlimited possibilities.
A world were you grew up without ever having to learn were your water comes from and how your food is made.
The world doesn't need most of us, this was never the case in the past. I'm a smart person, i'm not needed because there are still enough even smarter people.
And regarding your quote of the Christians: They don't live it either or never lived. The dark ages produced a lot of christian focused 'art' full of gold.
And in the past, if you had any mental illness, you just might have been killed or put in shackles.
> Thats a very hard simplification in a complex modern world.
Although I think the issues are complex, I disagree that the complexity of the modern world itself leads to this.
One of the core features of modernization has to do with the substitution of local communities with regional and global institutions. That alone changed many things.
It also does not help that our civilization keeps making this mistake: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call... ... that is, the effort by modern institutions to make sense of the world in a legible way leads to imposing simplification on the world. The world was already complex, even in pre-modern times.
> The world doesn't need most of us, this was never the case in the past. I'm a smart person, i'm not needed because there are still enough even smarter people.
If we take a person's worth as a _quantity_, sure. We can reduce every person into a set of stats, similar to D&D character sheets, and every person fits into roles based upon those stats. Those stats make things more legible.
Each person, however, has a _quality_, and it is here one's unique purpose and contribution can be discovered. I didn't learn this from ikigai specifically; as one of the comments talked about, some form of this was widely known in pre-modernized cultures. Carol Sanford has been writing, talking, and practicing this as applied to the modern world for decades.
There's also the work of Christopher Alexander. His writings and work convinced me that modernity did not have to be designed this way.
I don't think that Oioioioiio was saying that each person doesn't have intrinsic worth (quality, as you put it), more like that each of us has such a small piece of the puzzle now. In the past if you lost a community member who had critical knowledge and skills it would endanger the survival of the community. Now there aren't a lot of communities where that would be the case.
I wasn't talking about intrinsic worth at all. That kind of framing is still looking at things in terms of quantity rather than quality. I'm talking about the difference in the very worldview and paradigm. I am certainly not just talking about the material production someone can contribute.
The unique contribution someone can make isn't necessarily about the survival of the community. When I say unique, it means once that person has passed, there will never be again that particular contribution -- at the very minimum, the environment, relationship, and moment is unique, as is the person. As such, the community also grows and changes over time, a living system as much as the individual people within the community are themselves living systems.
I wasn't talking about a contribution from just existing. I'm talking about bringing the inner purpose seeded deep in oneself and lining it up with the outer world.
So why were people considering these questions so long ago? It s not the modern world that is the only problem.
> And regarding your quote of the Christians: They don't live it either or never lived.
Lots of people have. Not everyone was perfect, but it was an aspiration, and there are whole traditions of monasticism and other service based on it. It is no accident that the word organisations that help others is derived from a Christian theological term, charity.
> The dark ages produced a lot of christian focused 'art' full of gold.
The dark ages were not dark.
Art is one of the things that contribute to the community, and its creation leads the artist to fulfilment. Public art (which is what religious art usually is) is the opposite of hoarding private art.
> A world with unlimited possibilities.
Very few people have access "unlimited possibilities". Financial constraints, legal constraints, personal constraints..
'Charity' or helping others exists in all other cultures too. Thats not inherentliy christian.
Nonetheless, ikigai is more than just what christians wanted. Ikigai means different things for different people and the zeitgeist and your cirumstances are having a big part in it.
Dark ages were dark in sense of we have not that many records of it, there were little change.
'Art' was stuck and pressured from church and others. Art became art after all the revolutionary ideas and probably achieved the proper unlimitness of art today.
> And regarding your quote of the Christians: They don't live it either or never lived. The dark ages produced a lot of christian focused 'art' full of gold.
There have always been Christians who at least tried to live it. They're in the minority and they weren't and aren't the ones you hear much about (or from) but that's kind of the point.
The world has never needed us, in my opinion. Other human beings may find you useful, love you, whatever, and you may find some kind justification for your own existence, but the world itself has never cared about people.
> This is hardly a novel idea in the rest of the world. It is an ancient one and widespread.
This (like so many other things) is a very ontologically tricky proposition due to the deceptive distinction between abstract and concrete "is-ness". It is true that at least one Human in each country possesses at least some knowledge of such things, but how well distributed is the knowledge? The so casually deployed symbol "is" makes no distinction, and Humans generally do not have the ability to consider such things.
Even weirder: Hard Whorfism "is" "false".
> It strikes me that westerners have lost the roots of their culture and are having to relearn it from elsewhere.
Absolutely agree....perhaps this is (at least in part) because we never learned in the first place (other than abstractly, and even there only for a small percentage of the population) the difference between abstract and concrete "reality", because such things are not taught in standard curriculum in school (see also: financial planning, how to be nice, categorization in general (ontology/taxonomy), etc).
I often wonder if all of the sub-optimalities in our "advanced, 'scientific' culture" are purely coincidences / oversights. That people seem to so reliably (in frequency, and form) have an innate and very strong aversion (a lot like how religious or anti-religious people get nervous/agitated if one is to call into question the truth of scripture) to discussing such matters in the context of concrete reality makes me more than a little suspicious.
> a lot like how religious or anti-religious people get nervous/agitated if one is to call into question the truth.
You're recognizing the same bias. It's not that there are oversights so much as there are widespread ideas believed to be definitive.
Rather than teaching people the "right ideas," at this point I feel it's critical that people learn how cognitive biases work, namely, authority bias.
On the matter of beliefs, Crony Beliefs is a gem https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/
I agree it is a problem, but I do not think teaching people about cognitive biases will solve it. It is very hard to apply it to yourself, and any kind of critical thinking is hard.
A lot of people will not even make the effort. The motivation comes from existing values and beliefs, which will have been subject to biases themselves!
Not claiming this is ethical, but the biases can be used on the person to generate the motivation and emotional response
to recognize that they don’t want to suffer from exploitation of the biases
As for the reason it would help the issue, if the person is not susceptible to these, they will not be susceptible to the industries, governments, teachers that exploit these.
They’ll recognize it before falling for it.
As for the difficulty level, it could be made simple. They aren’t complex, they are just unknown
> I often wonder if all of the sub-optimalities in our "advanced, 'scientific' culture" are purely coincidences / oversights. That people seem to so reliably (in frequency, and form) have an innate and very strong aversion (a lot like how religious or anti-religious people get nervous/agitated if one is to call into question the truth of scripture) to discussing such matters in the context of concrete reality makes me more than a little suspicious.
I think you are right, but I am not sure what the underlying problem is. I wonder whether there is a bit of cowardice there and a fear of where the line of thought will lead - not wanting to turn the stone over for fear of what you will find. Our scientific culture is afraid of facing facts.
Sometimes truths have to come from the outside for them to be accepted by the closed minded.
As the Enlightenment already absorbed eastern concepts into the western plane to some degree already (see the roots in Hume for instance), the relationship of westerners with eastern concepts as like hiring a consultant to tell you all the things that your employees were already saying, but which were ignored since they were merely grunts.
Is the history of the Enlightenment's link with eastern concepts documented anywhere?
Clearly Hume uses eastern concepts ("I" am just a bundle of thoughts; causality is just a projection; etc). And the anti-Aristotelianism of the Enlightenment (hostility to concepts such as substantial form) could be seen as eastern too. I'm not sure if this history has ever been documented though.
The Enlightenment is seen as paradigmatically western, and in a way it is, and yet it tried to reject pretty much the entirety of western philosophy that came before it -- perhaps even under eastern influence.
Yeah, the story is always more complicated than what you generally hear.
I've never read about the eastern connection to the Enlightenment in any place, but lots of references pop up. A translation of the play Shakuntala by Kalidasa seems to have created a bit of stir for instance, even inspiring some of the structure in Faust by Goethe.
With all of these examples. The trick seems to be in 'how'. Everyone can read this article, or a Buddhist text, or some Stoic essays, and agree and think it would be a good idea.
The 'how' to get there, seems to be the gap.
Everyone agrees having 'purpose' is great. The 'how to find a purpose' is the problem. Not just intellectually 'decide on a purpose', but 'believe in a purpose'.
There is no procedural method or recipe in which would lead to someone finding their purpose like that. This purpose isn't a purely objective and externalized thing. To do otherwise, it would be no different than partaking in one of those FB quizzes that would, based upon some input, spit out which Harry Potter House you belong to, or what kind of D&D class you have.
You have to take the time to allow yourself to be aware of what's going on within yourself, and what's going on in the community around you. This "awareness" isn't the same as collecting data, or constructing thoughts that interpret things. It's not an easy thing to convey, since many people will take what I'm saying here and turn it into yet another recipe. And if I then say, it's more like mindfulness meditation, then all sorts of ideas and interpretation gets added to that, making it far away from I'm saying here.
I'm not very articulate about this. But maybe Carol Sanford's _Regenerative Life_ would better able to convey just how to find your unique contribution to that which is greater than yourself.
For years I denied all self-help books for missing the "how" part of the equation, this is now my main focus. All things considered, even if you have the intentions, the goals, the how to, I feel that most people do not have the consistency of themselves or a clear enough mind free from changing moods to pursue a purpose. [Another major part is not knowing how to listen to or access the Intuition regularly].
For me something like looking at life from a constant meditation on your future self [Alex Harmozi] or Gurdjieff's Self-Remembering or Vigyan Bhairav Tantra: Meditation Technique No. 33 allows this kind of consistent clarity.
zen would say the harder you try the further away you'll be. You do have a purpose only as much as you don't. ..."sense" isn't the right word but it makes sense to me, it's more like just something you realize.
There was a question some months ago on the Academic Bibical Reddit asking what religious text non-religious people there liked the most and it was by far the most popular with them.
I read a bit again recently because someone quoted part of what I quoted with regard to work and education, and it really does feel contemporary. That said, it is not that uncommon for ancient texts to feel relevant. I do not read a lot of ancient texts but one I did recently, pseudo-Xenophon's Constitution of the Athenians had several things, including a great passage about the rich and democracy.
There is a lovely reading of it by David Suchet that is on Youtube.
Sure, but it's not like humans in all parts of the world haven't been proposing models for understanding happiness in some form or another since before the written word.
If it were possible to compare every model for happiness ever conceived, they'll likely have a few things in common. Mostly, they will propose factors that are familiar within a group's common frame of reference, those factors will address that group's common experiences and habits, and the formula will project a roadmap for making changes in those habits to realign the experiences with "happiness."
In other words, "we all tend to do one thing, but doing another is probably better, and it's easy to forget, so here's way to remember." If it's useful to anyone at all, it's of value. If it's useful to larger group, then a utilitarian might say it has greater value. But even the assessment of value is culturally-dependent, so it's kind of pointless to argue about the virtues of different models on the basis of their cultures of origin.
So of course different cultures present things differently. It doesn't have to mean anyone is losing the roots of their own culture. Foucault would argue that being anything other than a part of your own culture is impossible. Even if you reject your own culture, you're rejecting the culture you're a part of, and that becomes a part of that culture. You just can't _not_ be who you are, where you are, and a product of your experiences.
If the differences in habits among various cultures become more apparent in a direct comparison, that's mostly down to the different frames of reference that determine the signs and signifiers used to express and internalize the models. But within each culture, the mechanisms themselves are often fundamentally the same. We manage resources as a group, we figure out who's us and who's them, we defend the group against threats, and we generally aim to reproduce. Whatever else goes on, our culture is how we communicate among ourselves what to expect from each other as we all go about those activities. It gives us the language we use, which Pinkerton et al might go so far as to say shapes the very ideas we have about ourselves and each other, including our "secrets to happiness."
The point is, there are many models for understanding happiness. Some we know more about because they've established a large socio-economic footprint, like the major religions, and some are more academic thought experiments, like what the ancient greeks tended to get up to. Others are more directly products of and by their host culture. Ikigai is this. If people find it accessible and useful, that's nothing but great. Is it a very Japanese way of looking at it? Sure. Is it some innate universal truth and wisdom? I dunno, but I bet someone pushing that narrative has a book or a seminar to sell.
In any case, for most purposes, the meme is probably enough. Do what you can to do what you love, that you're good at, that helps you survive, that helps your group survive.
In "westerner" kindergarten, they simplify it even further: do only
what is necessary, helpful, and/or kind. Don't even need a graduate philosophy degree for that.
Ikigai is one of these concepts, that I suspect to be mostly substituted by western life coach BS, which mostly means common sense application of modern-ish western philosophy to daily life including work. Unfortunately, when it is presented through the lens of someone who has lived in Japan for 7 months, this hardly changes my biased view.
There are 4 regions in the diagram that have no labels. These are all one step away from the Ikigai. Each of these would be "close but not quite" for a different reason.
Edit: Haha, as I read on it's not necessary to find the "one thing".
still not sure what to think about the popularized ikigai venn diagram but thought this talk by Everything Everywhere All at once directors at SXSW recently covered some interesting and entertaining perspectives on the idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBANXz79fDg
> Stop seeking your One True Passion
1000s of examples of Japanese people following their passion to extremes exceeding most non-Japanese expectations.
A famous example would be Jiro from "Jiro Dreams of Sushi"
Japan is a place where lots people give their lives to their company. I've met plenty of Japanese who work 10am with 90 minute commute (so 8:30am) to 10pm (and 90 mins back) 5 days a week, all year. These people have families but they readily admit they spend more time with coworkers than family and are in many ways closer to them.