I don’t remember exactly when I first came across the word Ikigai. Maybe it was in a book I didn’t finish, or on a Pinterest board with pastel quotes and ocean-blue fonts. But the word lingered. Like a scent I couldn’t name but somehow recognized.
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that roughly translates to “a reason for being.” But calling it just that feels insufficient. It’s not about purpose in the loud, TED Talk, “change the world” kind of way. It’s quieter. Softer. Something that sits next to your morning cup of tea and whispers, “This is why you’re still here.”
For the longest time, I believed purpose had to be monumental — something that made headlines, earned applause, or at least proved I wasn’t wasting my potential. But Ikigai asks something else. Something simpler:
- What do you love?
- What are you good at?
- What does the world need?
- What can you be paid for?
Where these four answers overlap lies your Ikigai. But let me be honest — it doesn’t always appear as a perfect Venn diagram. Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes you only find two circles, or three. And sometimes, just sometimes, you have no idea what you’re doing, but something in you says, “Keep going.” Maybe that’s Ikigai, too.
We live in a world that glorifies productivity and burnout like trophies. But Ikigai doesn’t scream from a podium. It exists in everyday life — in the things we do without realizing time is passing, the stories we tell, the meals we cook, the people we love. The dreams we don’t abandon, even when they don’t make sense.
For me, Ikigai is writing. Even when it doesn’t pay. Even when no one reads. Even when I rewrite the same sentence seven times because it still doesn’t feel right. It’s in crafting characters who might never leave the pages but somehow still teach me how to live. It’s in the way I talk to Shikhar in my head. Fiction, but also maybe not.
I think we all have an Ikigai, even if we haven’t named it yet. Maybe yours is raising plants or designing buildings or making people laugh when they didn’t know they needed to. Maybe it’s a skill you haven’t learned yet, a place you haven’t been, or a person you haven’t become.
And maybe — just maybe — the point isn’t to find your Ikigai like it’s a buried treasure, but to create it, moment by moment, choice by choice.
Some mornings, you won’t wake up glowing with purpose. You’ll hit snooze. You’ll wonder what the point of any of it is. And on those mornings, I hope you remember that Ikigai can be as small as making your bed. Drinking water. Being kind when you could be cold. Living when you could disappear.
Not every day needs to be remarkable. It just needs to be yours.
So if today, all you did was breathe, try again, and choose softness — that’s enough.
That counts.
That, too, is Ikigai.
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