A Word for What Makes Life Worthwhile

4 days ago

3 min read

What makes you want to get up in the morning?

Depending on the day, the answer might be family, absorbing work, a garden that needs tending or a morning on the water. It might also be a shaggy dog hopefully waiting for breakfast and the first walk of the day.

The Japanese have a word for it: ikigai.

Commonly translated as “a reason for being” or “that which makes life worth living,” ikigai can sound like a single defining purpose.

In ordinary Japanese usage, the word is more expansive, encompassing family, friendship, work, creativity, service to others and the pursuit of an interest. Several forms of ikigai may coexist, and their importance can change throughout life.

The word appears in the Taiheiki, a Japanese epic written in the 14th century. Over time, ikigai came to express the value found in living and in the people, responsibilities and pursuits that made life meaningful.

The modern exploration of ikigai owes much to Mieko Kamiya. In her influential 1966 book, Ikigai ni Tsuite, the Japanese psychiatrist drew on her work with patients at Nagashima Aiseien, a sanatorium for people with Hansen’s disease on an island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Many had endured serious illness, separation from their families and rejection by society.

Kamiya wanted to understand how, after such losses, a person could still feel that life was worth living. She distinguished between a source of ikigai and the feeling it gives rise to. A child, a vocation or a creative pursuit might be the source. She called the resulting sense that one’s life has value ikigai-kan.

Her work shared ground with Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl focused on how finding meaning can help people endure suffering. Kamiya explored the feeling that life is worth living: what creates it, why it sometimes disappears and how it can be restored.

Both saw meaning as deeply personal. Someone who appears successful may feel adrift, while a person living with considerable limitations may remain strongly connected to life through someone to love, work to complete or a responsibility that gives shape to the day.

Outside Japan, another version of ikigai became widely known through a diagram of four overlapping circles: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. According to the diagram, ikigai lies at the center, where all four elements meet.

The familiar image is a recent Western interpretation. It began as a 2011 diagram about finding purpose and was adapted in 2014 with ikigai at its center. Books and social media carried it around the world.

The diagram sets a high bar for ikigai, suggesting that a single pursuit should bring pleasure, draw on talent, benefit the world and earn a living, all at once.

Ikigai can instead be found in the relationships, interests and activities that make daily life worth living. It may be found while fly fishing, aboard a sailboat, along a hiking trail or on a yoga mat. Each has its own pull and its own reason to return.

For others, it may be painting, woodworking, cooking, music, reading, swimming, gardening or researching local history. Caring for family can be an ikigai. Writing can be one. The morning walk, the weekly card game, the community project and the friend who expects your call may all count.

What matters is what these pursuits create: absorption, mastery, anticipation, connection or the feeling of being useful.

Ikigai can take on new importance when life changes course. A move, a new job, the beginning or end of a relationship, retirement or a loss can rearrange our days. An interest may deepen, a friendship may grow closer, or a weekly ritual may become something we look forward to.

What makes life worth living can change as life does. Ikigai has room for that.