And according to the residents of the Japanese village with the world’s longest-living people, finding it is the key to a happier and longer life.
Having a strong sense of ikigai—where
- what you love,
- what you’re good at,
- what you can get paid for, and
- what the world needs
It’s the reason we get up in the morning.
It’s also the reason many Japanese never really retire (in fact there’s no word in Japanese that means retire in the sense it does in English): They remain active and work at what they enjoy, because they’ve found a real purpose in life—the happiness of always being busy.The term compounds two Japanese words: iki (生き, meaning 'life; alive') and kai (甲斐, meaning '(an) effect; (a) result; (a) fruit; (a) worth; (a) use; (a) benefit; (no, little) avail') (sequentially voiced as gai), to arrive at 'a reason for living [being alive]; a meaning for [to] life; what [something that] makes life worth living; a 'raison d'être'.
