If you have ever seen a Venn diagram with four overlapping circles labeled “What you love,” “What you are good at,” “What the world needs,” and “What you can be paid for,” you have seen the Western distortion of ikigai.
That diagram does not come from Japan. It was created by a Western author and grafted onto a Japanese concept that means something much simpler and much more radical.
In Okinawa, where the concept originates and where people live longer than almost anywhere on earth, ikigai simply means: the thing that makes you get out of bed in the morning.
Not your passion. Not your monetizable skill. Not the intersection of purpose and profit.
The thing that makes you willing to start another day.
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For some Okinawan elders, their ikigai is their garden. For others, it is the morning walk to the market. For others, it is the grandchild who visits on Sundays.
None of these are productive in the way the Western world demands productivity. They are not scalable. They are not monetizable. They are not impressive at a dinner party. They are small, quiet, daily reasons to keep showing up.
I think about this often, because the Western version of ikigai has done real damage to women over 50.
It tells us that our reason for being must be a career, a calling, a “purpose” with a capital P. That if we cannot articulate our grand mission in an elevator pitch, we are wasting our potential. That retirement without a project is laziness. That a Tuesday without measurable accomplishment is a Tuesday wasted.
This is exhausting. And it is wrong.
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When I first moved to New York City, people kept asking me what my plan was. What was my big goal? What was I going to build? And I would answer with my list: the teaching, the business, the books, the Substack. Because I had internalized the idea that my value was my output.
But the truth is, my ikigai most mornings is not any of those things.
My ikigai is coffee by the window while the city wakes up. It is the sound of my daughter laughing in the next room. It is the walk to the subway when the air is cold and sharp and I am fully aware that I am alive in a place I chose to be.
Those are not accomplishments. They are not products. They are not scalable or monetizable. They are the actual reason I get out of bed. Everything else, the books, the teaching, the writing, grows from that soil. But the soil itself is quiet. It is just a woman drinking coffee and being glad to be here.
Your reason for being does not need to be impressive. It needs to be true.
If you are over 50 and feeling the pressure to find your “purpose,” I want to offer you a different starting point.
Do not ask: “What is my grand calling?” That question paralyzes most people. It is too big, too abstract, too weighted with expectation.
Ask instead: “What made me willing to start today?”
Maybe it was the cat who needed feeding. Maybe it was curiosity about what would happen next in the novel you are reading. Maybe it was the smell of rain or the promise of lunch with a friend or the stubborn refusal to let a hard season have the last word.
Whatever it was, that is your ikigai. Today. Right now.
Tomorrow it might be different. That is allowed. Ikigai is not a life sentence. It is a daily practice. A small, honest answer to the smallest, most important question: why bother?
Because the coffee is good. Because the daughter laughed. Because the city is waking up and you are part of it.
That is enough. It has always been enough.
Ikigai is one of thirty concepts explored in Where the Lotus Grows. If the Western productivity framework has left you feeling behind, the Japanese alternative might feel like coming home.
Grappling with this right now a I return from a great bi-coastal trip to the US and how ikigai shows up differently depending on which side of the equator I seem to be on....