Ikigai: Your Reason for Being Is Not Your Productivity

If you’ve ever seen that Venn diagram with four circles labeled what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, you’ve seen the Western version of ikigai. That diagram doesn’t come from Japan. A Western blogger stuck the word on an older purpose chart, and it took off from there. The Japanese word is a lot simpler than that, and honestly, a lot more radical.

Ikigai is an everyday Japanese word. It just means the thing that makes life worth living, the reason you get out of bed in the morning. Not your passion. Not your marketable skill. Not some sweet spot where purpose meets profit. Just the thing that makes you willing to start another day.

Okinawa, where people are famous for living a long time, became the poster child for it. For some of the elders there, it’s a garden. For others it’s the walk to the market, or the grandchild who comes by on Sundays. None of that is productive the way we’re taught to measure productive. You can’t scale it, you can’t sell it, and it won’t impress anybody at a dinner party. It’s just a small, quiet reason to keep showing up.

I think about this a lot, because I think the Western version has done real damage to women over fifty. It tells us our reason for being has to be a career, a calling, a Purpose with a capital P. If you can’t pitch your grand mission in an elevator, you’re wasting your potential. Retiring without a project is lazy. A Tuesday with nothing to show for it is a Tuesday thrown away. It’s exhausting, and it’s wrong.

When I first moved to New York City, people kept asking me what my plan was. What was the big goal, what was I building? And I’d rattle off the list. The teaching, the business, the books, the Substack. Because somewhere along the way I’d decided I was worth whatever I produced.

But most mornings, my ikigai isn’t any of that. It’s coffee by the window while the city wakes up. It’s my daughter laughing in the next room. It’s the walk to the subway when the air is cold and sharp and I know, all the way down, that I’m alive in a place I chose. None of those things are accomplishments. They’re the actual reason I get up. Everything else, the books, the teaching, the writing, grows out of that soil. But the soil itself is quiet. It’s just a woman drinking coffee, glad to be here.

So if you’re over fifty and feeling the pressure to find your purpose, try a smaller question. Don’t ask what your grand calling is. That question freezes people. It’s too big and it carries way too much weight. Ask what made you willing to start today. Maybe it was the cat who needed feeding. Maybe you wanted to know what happens next in the novel on your nightstand. Maybe it was the smell of rain, or lunch with a friend, or just plain stubbornness about not letting a hard season have the last word.

Whatever it was, that’s your ikigai, today. Tomorrow it might be something else, and that’s allowed. It isn’t a life sentence. It’s a small, honest answer to a small question you get to ask every day: why bother? Because the coffee is good. Because your kid laughed. Because the city is waking up and you’re part of it. That’s enough. It always was.

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