Is it possible that some people don’t yet know what happiness is because they’ve been mistaking it with pleasure their whole lives? There’s a distinct difference between pleasure and happiness. Happiness is a state of mind – a long term way of living life. To be happy IS a choice – it’s a feeling that is manifested internally. Pleasure is a temporary feeling which we pursue through external sources. Our generation grew up fuelled by a culture of instant gratification. Whatever we wanted, we could get almost immediately – convenience has been bred into us. Everything from coffee shops at every corner to Amazon Prime to Uber and Google; we have to wait for almost nothing. Since becoming so accustomed to instantaneity, almost anything requiring incremental and consistent effort has become obsolete, uncommon and seemingly unachievable.
It’s very easy to fall into this pleasure-addiction-lifestyle where we don’t even notice that the choices we make revolve around externally-fuelled dopamine releases which send us into a state of temporary joy disguised as authentic happiness. The issue is this: once the feeling of elation dissipates, it creates a void – because instantaneous pleasure is just that: instantaneous. It is nearly impossible to have something so convenient and external create a sense of long-term fulfillment. Instead, all this pleasure does is provide an immediate “high” which then leaves a gaping hole waiting to be filled again by something convenient, instantaneous and temporary. This external pleasure factor can be anything; online shopping, indulging in unhealthy food, procrastinating on the internet, pressing snooze on our alarms, etc. This addictive process pushes us into a vicious cycle of continuous pleasure-seeking instead of pursuing things which will create a greater sense of fulfillment in the long-term.
Okay, so we clearly have a problem. We’re addicted to convenience and external sources of pleasure, but how can we create a greater sense of long-term happiness? How can we find out what truly fills up our cup? While many have tried to tackle this question before, there simply isn’t one clear black and white answer. The closest I have come to a sufficient answer revolves around a concept I stumbled upon which has entirely shifted my perspective on how we fill our days:
IKIGAI- the secret to a long life of daily, sustainable fulfillment.
what’s an ikigai?
Ikigai means “reason for being” in Japanese – essentially why you wake up in the morning. There is a little island just South of Japan called Okinawa, where the average life expectancy is nearly 10 years higher than the rest of the world. Why are they living so long? Aside from eating a mainly plant-based diet, stopping to eat at 80% full and spending the majority of their days mobile instead of sedentary, every person in Okinawa has an ikigai – a unique purpose within the community; their specific reason for being there. In Okinawa, individuals wake up with their ikigai in mind, deriving a sense of drive and fulfillment from their work. For example, a florist in Okinawa would be entirely invested in his role of providing flowers to the community, ensuring he is proud of his product and treats the role with care and dedication.
For the people in Okinawa, their ikigai is not work – it’s their way of contributing and making an impact. The concept of ikigai is so powerful that they do not even have a word for retirement in the Okinawan language. Diving into work that is so valuable and fulfilling such that retirement does not make logical sense to them is the reason that the people of Okinawa live considerably happier, healthier and longer lives than the rest of the world. Of course, it’s not easy to just wake up one day and know what your life purpose is, nor should we expect to. However, it is important to question how we think about work and the purpose it serves in our lives. Do we really want to spend a third of our life doing something we don’t really like just to get us to retirement? Retirement is intensely glorified in North American society. Why waste the best years of our lives just “getting through each day”, to achieve an early retirement? Wouldn’t we rather enjoy what we’re doing so that we’re not spending our entire lives dreaming about when we can one day be happy? I hope you read that in Morgan Freeman’s voice in your head. A little known fact about retirement is that it takes away much more than just a job – it removes the daily structure and social community embedded in our lives — dissolving two fundamental human needs which constitute a fulfilled life. In fact, it has been proven that the two most dangerous years of our lives are the year after we are born and the year after we retire. Studies illustrating the dangers of retirement are becoming increasingly alarming and forcing us to take a step back and reevaluate this social construct which has governed the mindset of our entire workforce for the last century and a half. Perhaps we should look around at those who have a better handle on how to lead a happy, fruitful life, and explore what they’re doing right!
finding an ikigai might lead to a more fulfilled life, but it takes some searching.
Finding your ikigai certainly won’t be simple or immediately obvious – but the search will be worth it. Choosing to pursue work you align with and are driven by will ultimately carve out a path of long-term, continuous happiness instead of a disjointed path made up of discrete pleasure-checkpoints. Discovering what drives us starts with tuning in to the things which invoke excitement, curiosity and a renewed sense of motivation. While pursuing pleasure is often tempting and relatively frictionless, it’s also highly unpredictable, externally-dependent and unsustainable in the long-term. It’s impossible to know just how far we might need to travel before we stumble into another opportunity for pleasure, while finding ways to make ourselves happy – independently of external circumstances – is a skill which will prove to be valuable at every stage of life. It’s inevitable that there will be times where things are simply not going our way and it will be easy to blame our circumstances for why we’re unhappy. Unfortunately, nothing fruitful comes from feeling sorry for ourselves. Of course, negative emotions like guilt, pain and regret often exist for a reason and it is important to explore what those reasons may be, but succumbing to self-pity when things are merely becoming more challenging will make it far more difficult to progress and create a life we are happy with.
Ultimately, finding something that drives us and keeps us entertained and persistent even when things get difficult will make it much easier to push through the challenging times and find fulfillment in our work.
Maybe the Okinawans cracked the code on happiness.
Now, you may start noticing ikigai in other people; it’s easy to see when someone has a “reason for being”. Whether it be the local coffee-shop-owner who takes care of her business like it’s her child and knows more about coffee than anyone you’ve ever met or a math professor more excited about linear algebra than most 3 year olds are about opening their birthday presents – ikigai is obvious. People with ikigai have a certain zest for life that is hard to find in those simply waiting for their careers to end. To me, living each day excited about what you are doing, who you are helping and how it’s making a difference sounds a whole lot more rewarding than counting down the days till you can “start your life of happiness” in 45 years when you have accumulated enough money to do so. I know it may not be possible for everyone in the world to live a life where they’re doing exactly what they want to do, but odds are if you’re reading this you’re probably one of the lucky ones who might actually have a shot – so why waste it?
how to start finding your ikigai
- Choose roles where the experience is more valuable than the monetary reward.
- Experiment in fields you are fascinated by and learn voraciously about what intrigues you.
- Talk to people about topics you’re interested in and ask questions to whoever you can – you never know who you might meet and what they might know.
- Be willing to spend time alone to just be – it’s easy to lose sight of what we genuinely love when we’re constantly surrounded by noise.
- Do everything you can to find your niche and run with it.
Living should be continuously invigorating – whatever we want to do, we should do it now, because as much as we can plan, think about and prepare for the future – there is absolutely nothing certain other than the present moment we’re in. The best thing we can do is embrace our current situation and fill our time with that which brings us happiness and moves us closer to where we want to be, rather than spending our time looking for the next dose of pleasure – which will dissipate just as quickly as it was obtained.
Fostering happiness is a marathon, not a sprint – and it takes practice. Taking things one day at a time and making mental notes of the people, activities and work which bring us the greatest sense of fulfillment will propel us down the most optimal path for us. Everyone’s path is going to be different, and it is important to get comfortable pursuing your own. Otherwise, you might spend awhile on someone else’s before you realize you have to do a U-Turn and find your way back to the road which will bring you the greatest sense of happiness. U-Turns are 100% okay, but minimizing the time we spend knowingly pursuing something that does not fill up our cup simply creates more opportunity for us to do that which is right for us – and bring us closer to our ikigai.
Ultimately, making choices to carve out happiness in the long-term will almost always be more challenging than succumbing to the temptations of short-term pleasure, but our future selves will thank us. Through these consistent efforts to think long-term, we will grow more resilient to the draw of those immediate pleasure-checkpoints we’re so used to stopping at, and ultimately establish a foundation for a much more rewarding and vivacious life. It’s never too early to start thinking about what excites us and quenches our thirst for fulfillment. I can’t say it much better than the Dalai Lama himself, so I’ll leave you with this:
“The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered “Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”