What’s your ikigai?
A fascinating Japanese concept can be both very useful and very detrimental
What are your reasons for living? What gets you going in the morning? What is your purpose in life? These are tough questions about which philosophers, novelists, and now increasingly scientists have been working for literally millennia.
There is a single Japanese word that encapsulates all such questions: ikigai. According to the Oxford English Dictionary ikigai is “a motivating force; something or someone that gives a person a sense of purpose or a reason for living.”
So a very good, and deceptively simple question is: what’s your ikigai? Though to be precise I should ask what are the components of your ikigai, since the idea is that there may be, and in fact very likely are, multiple things that gets you out of bed on Monday mornings (other than the fact that you have to, or else).
The history of ikigai is, like many things in Japan, long, complex, and fascinating. It apparently dates back at least to the 14th century, when it was used to remind people of their social roles within what was then a rigidly hierarchical society.
In modern times the term was popularized by Natsume Soseki in his novel Kokoro, published in 1912.* The title means “the heart of things” and the book…
