The diagram you have seen is wrong 🌸
You know the one. Four overlapping circles... what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for. Find the magic centre and there, supposedly, sits your ikigai.
It is a lovely graphic, but not ikigai.
That Venn diagram which should be ovals but that's another story, was never Japanese. It came from a Western blog post that borrowed the word and bolted it onto something called a purpose diagram. And I understand why it spread... There is something tidy about a framework that promises that purpose can be located, like a treasure marked with an X... ikigai though is both simpler and more profound, a felt sense more than a specific thing.
Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a reason for being, your purpose in life... from the Japanese iki 生き meaning life and gai 甲斐 meaning worth.
It is smaller than you think
In Japan ikigai is rarely about your job at all. Researchers who interviewed people in Okinawa, one of the places folk live longest and best, found ikigai in startlingly ordinary things. A garden. A morning walk with a neighbour. Being needed by grandchildren. The first cup of tea while the house is still quiet.
Nobody mentioned being paid. Ikigai was woven into the small textures of a life, not extracted from it like a mineral.
And I find that enormously relieving. Because if purpose has to be the perfect overlap of passion and profit and world-saving, most of us will spend our lives feeling like we have not found it yet. But if ikigai is simply a reason to begin the day, then it is already here. It always was.
Both a feeling and a doing
The Japanese psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya, who wrote the foundational book on this, described ikigai as having two faces. There is the feeling of ikigai... that sense that life is worth living... and there is the source of ikigai... the things that give you that feeling.
I love this, because it means ikigai is both noun and verb. Something you sense and something you do. You do not think your way into it. You live your way into it, one ordinary morning at a time.
Ikigai is plural
You do not get one. You get many, scattered across a life. A few may fade. New ones arrive.
Ikigai is grown
It is not discovered fully formed. It is cultivated, slowly, like anything worth tending.
Ikigai is small
The kettle. The garden. The dog at the door. Purpose hides in the unglamorous.
The ikigai risk of AI
This is the thread I pull on every week. We are handing more and more of life to machines that are brilliant at efficiency. And efficiency, lovely as it is, has a habit of removing the very frictions where ikigai tends to live.
If a tool does the thing you used to find meaning in doing, you become more productive and, sometimes, a little more hollow. This is the ikigai-risk, or i-risk of AI... the slow erosion of human purpose by the very things built to help us. I do not think the answer is to refuse the tools. I think the answer is to stay awake. To keep asking, before we automate something away,is this a chore, or is this secretly one of my reasons for getting up?
Imagine if we treated our reasons for living as carefully as we treat our diaries. What might we refuse to optimise?
So what do we actually do? 🌸
Worrying is easy. Over the essays, a few small practices have grown up alongside the worry, and they are the part I am proudest of;
Purpose Prompting
Before you ask AI to do a thing, ask yourself why you are doing it. Bring your why to the machine, not just your task. The prompt starts in you.
Purpose Proofing
The companion move. Run the output back past your values. Does this still sound like a human who means it? If not, you have automated away the wrong bit.
Hatarakigai
Hatarakigai (働きがい), the worth of working. Untangling meaning from money, and asking what work is actually for... but also, what if the way we earn money and spend several hours each week, was also a major source of ikigai for us? How fabulous that would be for both us and the world around us (love Rutger Bregman's push for moral ambition).
Purpose was never going to come from a framework. It comes from paying attention, on purpose, before the convenience makes the choice for you.
xxx
I write about this every week over on Sarah Seeking Ikigai ↗, over 140 essays and counting.