I picked up Ikigai for the usual reason. I want to understand the meaning of life, why some people are happier than others, and how you actually win at this thing.
It did not answer those questions the way I expected. It is an easy book. You can read it in a couple of sittings, and it is not deep. It does not go heavy on one idea, the way a book on habits or on focus does. It takes a handful of ideas and lays them side by side: purpose, flow, logotherapy, food, movement, friends. Some books go a mile deep on a single concept. This one goes an inch deep on ten of them and shows you how they hold each other up.
That is the kind of book I like, because it is the kind I want to write. I am putting together a book of my own that connects many different things, and I read Ikigai partly as a study in how that is done.
What the book is actually about
The authors went to Ogimi, a village in Okinawa where an unusual number of people live past ninety, and asked them what they do. Nobody said “I have a mission.” They said things like: my garden, my friends, I teach the children, I cook for the festival. The reason to get up in the morning was small, local and daily.
Then the book fills in the rest of the picture, and this is the part I enjoyed most, because it connects things I had met separately:
- Logotherapy. Viktor Frankl’s idea that people do not mainly want pleasure or power, they want meaning, and that someone with a why can bear almost any how. The book does not ask “what is the meaning of life?” so much as “what does today need from me?”
- Flow. Csikszentmihalyi’s state where time disappears because the task is clear and a little harder than you are used to. The book treats flow as the everyday face of ikigai.
- Food and movement. Eat until you are about 80 percent full, in small portions, with variety. Move lightly all day long instead of hard for an hour.
- People. The moai, a small group of friends who stay with you for life.
- No retirement. In Ogimi, work gets smaller and gentler as the body slows. It does not stop.
None of these is new to me alone. Together they say something I had not put into a sentence: a good life is not one big thing. It is a lot of small things pointing the same direction.
The thing that stuck
What held my attention was not the diet. It was how different the Japanese are from everyone else, and how obviously different every nation is.
The Japanese garden. They walk, they stretch, they do a little all day. We, and most of the West, do the opposite: sit all week, then train hard for an hour and call it done. Their idea of movement is closer to a way of living than a workout. The same goes for flow. In Japan it is not a peak state you chase at the weekend. It is how you wash a bowl or tend a plant, with your whole attention.
I started to think of each nation as a circle of people with a shared temperament. Not a stereotype to hide behind, but a way of seeing the patterns.
My brother is Egypt. I am Germany.
My brother is a little clumsy in how he works, and I mean that kindly. He finds shortcuts. He is the kind of person who yet7ayel 3ala el nezam, who finds the way around the system. His philosophy is kol haga betemshy bel hob: everything can be sorted out with some charm and a bit of goodwill. And often it can. He gets things moving where a rule would have stalled.
I am the other way. I am systematic. I work hard. I am direct, sometimes more than is comfortable. I do not go around the system, I build it, and then I follow it. I am not sure if that is really German or if I just like the idea, but it is how I feel when I put us side by side.
If my brother is a small picture of the Egyptian way and I am a small picture of the German way, then each of us is carrying a different gift and a different cost. His is flexibility, survival, reading the room. He knows how to get from here to there when nobody has drawn the road. Mine is structure, focus, finishing. The cost of his is that things do not last. The cost of mine is that I can miss the road that was never on the map.
This is the part I would borrow from Japan, and the part I think we could give back:
- From Japan to Egypt: calm, focus, discipline in small things, how they eat, and a reason to get up that is not a career.
- From Egypt to Japan: the instinct for getting by, improvising, reading people, surviving when the rules fail.
Neither circle is complete. Seeing them next to each other makes you want to borrow.
My own ikigai
The book’s famous diagram has four circles: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. I should say that the diagram is not really an old Japanese tradition. It is a later Western adaptation, and in Japan the word is usually smaller and warmer than that. But as a question to ask yourself, it works.
So I asked.
What I love. My mornings. I sit and read with no distractions. I love the gym and I love padel. I love my work.
What I am good at. Finishing things. Getting things done. People come to me for help, and for connections.
What the world needs. Value, work, impact. I teach people and I build systems.
What pays. The same work. For me the circles overlap more than they don’t, and if I had to keep one thing it would be Catalyst. It is where most of my time goes, and it covers most of what I want.
I will be honest about flow, too. I plan my days tightly, so I rarely lose track of time. I mean to keep track of it. The closest I get is in the morning reading hour and in the gym, and maybe that is the lesson: flow does not need a loose schedule, it needs a protected hour.
On meaning, the book did not change my view. It agreed with it. And what I take as winning is more or less what I took it to be before: a reason to get up, work worth doing, people who matter, a body that works. The book gave those four things the same shelf.
What I would say about the book
It is easy to read and it is not deep. If you want a rigorous account of why Okinawans live long, this is not it. It is a collection of stories and borrowed science, and the diagram has been oversold. But if you want a gentle map of how purpose, flow, food, movement and friends connect, it is a very good one.
For me the best thing it did was give me a way to look at people. My brother, myself, Egypt, Germany, Japan. Each of us is one part of a larger picture, and the useful question is not “who is right?” but “what can I borrow?”
So this week I am going to borrow one thing from each side. From Japan: move a little all day, not just hard for an hour. From my brother: loosen my grip when the system is the problem, not the answer.
What would you borrow?