Ikigai: A Closer Look

We’ve mentioned ikigai from time to time, usually when discussing the characteristics associated with Blue Zone centenarians, for example as number 5 of…

The Five Pillars Of Longevity

It’s about finding one’s “purpose”. Not merely a function, but what actually drives you in life. And, if Japanese studies can be extrapolated to the rest of the world, it has a significant and large impact on mortality (other factors being controlled for); not having a sense of ikigai is associated with an approximately 47%* increase in 7-year mortality risk in the categories of cardiovascular disease and external cause mortality:

Sense of life worth living (ikigai) and mortality in Japan: Ohsaki Study

*we did a lot of averaging and fuzzy math to get this figure; the link will show you the full stats though!

In case that huge (n=43,391) study didn’t convince you, here’s another comparably-sized (n=43,117) one that found similarly, albeit framing the numbers the other way around, i.e. a comparable decrease in mortality risk for having a sense of ikigai:

Associations of ikigai as a positive psychological factor with all-cause mortality and cause-specific mortality among middle-aged and elderly Japanese people

This study was even longer (12 years rather than 7), so the fact that it found pretty much the same results the 7-year study we cited just before is quite compelling evidence. Again, multivariate hazard ratios were adjusted for age, BMI, drinking and smoking status, physical activity, sleep duration, education, occupation, marital status, perceived mental stress, and medical history—so all these things were effectively controlled for statistically.

Three kinds of ikigai

There are three principal kinds of ikigai:

• Social ikigai: for example, a caring role in the family or community, volunteer work, teaching
• Asocial ikigai: for example, a solitary practice of self-discipline, spirituality, or study without any particular intent to teach others
• Antisocial ikigai: for example, a strong desire to outlive an enemy, or to harm a person or group that one hates

You may be thinking: wait, aren’t those last things bad?

And… Maybe! But ikigai is not a matter of morality or even about “warm fuzzy feelings”. The fact is, having a sense of purpose increases longevity regardless of moral implications or niceness.

Nevertheless, for obvious reasons there is a lot more focus on the first two categories (social and asocial), and of those, especially the first category (social), because on a social level, “we all do well when we all do well”.

We exemplified them above, but they can be defined:

• Social: working for the betterment of society
• Asocial: working for the betterment of oneself

Of course, for many people, the same ikigai may cover both of those—often somebody who excels at something for its own sake and/but shares it with others to enrich their lives also, for example a teacher, an artist, a scientist, etc.

For it to cover both, however, requires that both parts of it are genuinely part of their feeling of ikigai, and not merely unintended consequences.

For example, a piano teacher who loves music in general and the piano in particular, and would gladly spend every waking moment studying/practising/performing, but hates having to teach it, but needs to pay the bills so teaches it anyway, cannot be said to be living any kind of social ikigai there, just asocial. And in fact, if teaching the piano is causing them to not have the time or energy to pursue it for its own sake, they might not even be living any ikigai at all.

One other thing to watch out for

There is one last stumbling block, which is that while we can find ikigai, we can also lose it! Examples of this may include:

• A professional whose job is their ikigai, until they face mandatory retirement or are otherwise unable to continue their work (perhaps due to disability, for example)
• A parent whose full-time-parent role is their ikigai, until their children leave for school, university, life in general
• A married person whose “devoted spouse” role is their ikigai, until their partner dies

For this reason, people of any age can have a “crisis of identity” that’s actually more of a “crisis of purpose”.

There are two ways of handling this:

1. Have a back-up ikigai ready! For example, if your profession is your ikigai, maybe you have a hobby waiting in the wings, that you can smoothly jump ship to upon retirement.
2. Embrace the fluidity of life! Sometimes, things don’t happen the way we expect. Sometimes life’s surprises can trip us up; sometimes they can leave us a sobbing wreck. But so long as life continues, there is an opportunity to pick ourselves up and decide where to go from that point. Note that this is not fatalism, by the way, it doesn’t have to be “this bad thing happened so that we could find this good thing, so really it was a good thing all along”. Rather, it can equally readily be “well, we absolutely did not want that bad thing to happen, but since it did, now we shall take it this way from here”.

For more on developing/maintaining psychological resilience in the face of life’s less welcome adversities, see:

Psychological Resilience Training

…and:

Putting The Abs Into Absurdity ← do not underestimate the power of this one

Take care!