Table of Contents
This book is about Ikigai – a Japanese philosophy for how to live a long life and enjoy it. The authors make references to well-known psychological ideas such as Flow and Logotherapy, but also criticizes Western psychoanalysis for placing too much emphasis on control, direction, and intellectualizing – this is the opposite of Morita Therapy, where the individual is encouraged to find their own answers, avoid intellectualizing, and accept their feelings.
What is Ikigai?
Ikigai, in Japanese, is the combination of the symbols that represent “life” and “to be worthwhile.” What makes life worthwhile is different for each person, but we all strive for meaning, no matter who we are.
Our Ikigai is not always easy to identify, it requires the individual to discover it himself. Once you find out what drives you, when you find the reason you want to wake up in the morning, you will have less existential crises in your life.
In Japan, people are very active, even after they retire. Some never retire, they keep working for as long as they can. The word “retire” does not translate into the same meaning in Japanese. The idea of forever leaving the workforce does not exist.
The Nature of Work
The way you think of work affects how well you work. Take the idea of trust, there is clearly a mismatch between your self-interest and other people’s self-interest. It is hard to expect people to do what you expect of them through trust. But that doesn’t mean you don’t work with people, it means you should create operating agreements and contracts. In the west, the idea of pleasure is primary. Many people don’t like work because they don’t feel the effects of “happy” chemicals in their brain, but unhappiness is the key to improvement. If all you felt was pleasure all the time, you would never get anything done – you would have no reason to.
The Pursuit of Wealth and Power
Some people think inequality is bad, and the pursuit of wealth and power is evil. But inequality is fair. Four out of five people don’t care about self-improvement or the betterment of society. Wealth and power are in infinite supply, and the more of it you can get, the better you make life, for yourself, and for others around you.
To pursue wealth, you need to be very patient and rational. It is not about how intelligent you are, because you can be these things yet get yourself into too many unnecessary battles that will act as tailwinds.
Intelligent people often care more about being clever than being effective, becoming experts in many things that don’t matter.
What you want to focus on is restraint and self-control. Most people live in a way where they take their emotions, too seriously, they feel compelled to act when, in fact, the best thing to do is nothing.
If you are going to do something, make sure that you have good reasons for doing it. Have a clear objective, don’t just do things because you’re used to doing them.
Stress
Because of stress, many people seem older than their age. Most health problems are caused by stress. And an existential crisis is what happens when people do what they are told, or what others do, rather than what they want to do. The gap between what they want and what others expect of them is then filled with money, pleasure, or drugs. If you give up what you love, then no amount of success will be worth it.
When you are in a high stress situation, your antibodies react in the same way as they would to pathogens, activating proteins that trigger an immune response. This response, however, does not only neutralize harmful agents, but also damages healthy cells, causing premature ageing.
In our modern world, many people live in a constant state of emergency. If they didn’t have enough to worry about when it comes to managing their own lives, they have the media constantly barraging them with reasons to stress out. Over time, this mental state will inhibit the release of good hormones, that help you avoid depression. Your body doesn’t care if the threats you perceive are real or fake, stress is highly psychosomatic, and when out of control, will wreak havoc on your digestive system, and your skin.
To better deal with stress, learn how to meditate. This will help you better control the information you receive from the outside world. Mindfulness can eventually help your mind focus completely, and this will eliminate a lot of stress that you habitually feel. Mindfulness is a powerful ally to have – perhaps an indispensable one.
Another way to reduce stress is to move around. A sedentary lifestyle is bad for your health, and so is a lack of sleep.
Longevity
The more in a hurry you are, the worse the quality of your life, and the more stressed you will feel, and the faster you will age. If you want to go far, walk slowly. Pursue your Igikai, but don’t rush it. Instead of Fast Food, the centenarians in Ogimi relished slow food with local, organic vegetables.
The authors (non-Japanese) conducted hundreds of interviews with people in Ogimi, Okinawa to understand why people there live so long. What they found was that time seemed to stop there, everyone in the town was in an endless state of the here and now. And they are great at combining nature with technology, instead of taking one side in a never-ending battle between the two. They saw everyone as a friend, even strangers, and they highly valued celebrations.
Other advice they received was: to not worry, cultivate good habits, build friendships, live slowly, be optimistic, eat well: eat a variety of vegetables, eat grains and fish, eat fewer calories (80 percent rule: eat until nearly full), drink green or white tea, get enough sleep. Be a stoic in the face of adversity. Having the right attitude when life is difficult slows down ageing.
Logotherapy
Viktor Frankl is the founder of logotherapy. Frank was a survivor of the holocaust. He asked his patients to identify reasons to live to avoid committing suicide, and it is by doing this that they overcome the chains of their past and their neurosis.
Frankl lived and died for his principles, and as a prisoner in Auschwitz, he understood that everything can be stripped away from a human being, except for how he chooses to see things. Without a purpose, we become frustrated, but this frustration need not be a symptom of neurosis, but a prelude for improvement.
Morita Therapy
Most Western therapy is about controlling your emotions. The belief is that beliefs influence actions. But Morita therapy does the opposite, it is about relinquishing control by allowing your feelings to take their course, and by accepting them. Your feelings will change once your actions change.
Morita therapy and Logotherapy is about finding your Ikigai, or your purpose. Once you have found it, your task will be to have the courage to never give up.
Many people have obsessive thoughts, and what they tend to do is to try to get rid of them, but when you try to do this, they become even more intense. Instead, you must welcome them without reacting. Like the weather, we cannot predict or control our thoughts, we can only observe them.
Focus on the present moment and don’t intellectualize the situation. The Western mind is accustomed to explanations, that often lead the patient down never-ending paths, that in the end, only confuse and derail him. Morita therapy offers no explanations but allows them to learn from their own actions. You don’t learn to meditate or keep a journal, you only do so when you are compelled to, out of your own experience.
While your emotions are out of your control, your actions aren’t. You can choose to live according to your purpose, your Ikigai, or not.
Morita was a great Zen master of the Naikan introspective meditation. This therapy draws on three questions the individual must ask himself. What have I received this person? What have I given to them? What problems have I caused them? Thinking about these questions helps you take more responsibility and avoid playing the victim.
Flow
We tend to think about happiness in terms of financial success. But the richest people aren’t the happiest people. The people who are the happiest are those who spend more of their time in a state of flow. To achieve this state, don’t do things because they are pleasurable, do things that put you in a state of flow. To do this, you must concentrate at one thing at a time.
Even the most basic tasks should be done with intensity and focus. When you can turn routine tasks into moments of microflow, then you will always be happy. This is an idea that Alan Watts often spoke about. When you are doing the dishes, or taking out the garbage, you can do it in one of two ways.
The first way, practiced by many, is to do it with a sense of impatience and frustration “I can’t wait to finish doing this boring thing.” The second way is to trick your mind into enjoying it. “This is fun! This is like a game that I have to complete.”
Just like logotherapy and morita therapy, the idea of flow is about changing your perspective rather than changing reality. Think of mindfulness. The Western mind wants to change his own emotions, so he tries to control the “reality of his emotions”, but logotherapy, morita therapy, and flow is not about getting you to change your feelings of existential angst, fear, or boredom, but to change the way you experience them. To accept rather than reject them. To observe rather than control them.
The artist often seems like he is reclusive and cynical about the world, since he spends so much time alone, but he is not that at all. He is simply putting himself in an environment that can induce a state of flow. The author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi, tells us that two precursors to flow: 1) a distraction free environment 2) having control over what we are doing.