Ikigai - Load full of sh#t

Okay, so this Spanish bugger, Francesc Miralles, son of a dressmaker and an office clerk, with bad
high-school records who worked as a waiter found his Ikigai of selling self-help crap to the gullible. The first line of the book says it all - “The book came into being on a rainy night in Tokyo, when its authors sat down together for the first time in one of the city’s tiny bars’. So basically Miralles and Hector Garcia, a Japanese software engineer were sloshed when they came up with this ‘brilliant’ idea of telling a story to the world about how this handful of people on the island of Okinawa live longer than the rest of the world. And boy, how the world has lapped up the utter nonsense by buying millions of copies of, yet another scam called ‘Ikigai’.

In a nutshell, Ikigai is the intersection of:

1.       1. What you love

2.       2. What the world needs

3.       3. What you are good at

4.       4. What you can be paid for

Obviously, the long-lost humans who continue to get screwed day in and day out in their mundane lives, scampering to make their ends meet from pay-check to pay-check and hitting the pillows each night dejected and unhappy wondering what the f$%k are they doing, made up the market place for Ikigai. Needless to say, it is Miralles and Garcia who are laughing all the way to the bank.

It is mentioned that ‘the purpose of the book is to help you find your Ikigai’, broadly speaking, your ‘purpose’ of life, your raison d'être. Stand aside all ye imbeciles, here comes this 100 page book that is going to decipher the mystery of life, the millions of years of existence.

If you believe the world was created by God then either (a) God has already written everything down for you and all you do it follow the instructions or (b) What you do is the result of your past deeds, in this life or past. In either case, you can’t do sh#t about what you end up doing. It is God who decides where you are born, who are your parents and what you will go through in life. If you and your friend both buy a lottery ticket each then how the f$%k did he win a million dollars while you got zilch?

Oh, I think you are a man of Science. You say the ‘probability’ of both you and your friend winning the lottery was same. Hmmm. Aren’t you saying that it is ‘probability’ which decides what your Ikigai would be? So how the hell do you find it if it is decided by ‘chance’? Now that we are on probabilities, pray tell me what exactly was the probability of you being born? It is one divided by infinity. Yes, that’s almost ZERO. Forget the six million years since humans have been in existence, even if we consider the 200,000 years since the modern human has evolved, for you to be born, your 8000 previous generations had to get conceived at exactly the same time, each time, by the same set of Parents. If just one of your great, great, grandmother feigned headache at the time when one of your great, great, grandfather was supposed to be conceived then you had it. Neither you would have been born, nor you would have been worried sick of looking for your f$%king Ikigai.

What a load of bull sh#t it is? The trigger for me to write this vitriolic piece against Ikigai was the Pixar animation film I watched last night, titled ‘Soul’. It touches upon the same topic of ‘life’s purpose’. SPOILER ALERT! Life has no f$%king purpose. It is to be ‘lived’. Miralles and Garcia precisely target most people on the planet earth who are in continuous lookout of ‘why they were born’ instead of living the life which they got just by pure chance. The only reason you were born is because your parents decided to f$%k without protection on that particular night at that precise moment and out of the billion sperms that got ejaculated, the one that would become you found the egg. And you are looking for Ikigai? WTF!!!

Let’s take some real-life examples.

1.       You are born in Dharavi in Mumbai to parents who work in a leather factory. Following are the answers to the Ikigai Venn diagram:

a.       What you love - Films

b.       What the world needs - Entertainment

c.       What you are good at - Dancing

d.       What you can be paid for - To dance

So… you are now the background dancer in Bollywood. I am sure you found your Ikigai. Right?

 

2.       You are born in a middle-class family in Delhi. You marry a banker and relocate to Mumbai. Following are the answers to the Ikigai Venn diagram:

a.       What you love - Jewellery

b.       What the world needs - Who cares till the time you are getting what YOU want.

c.       What you are good at - Watching TV

d.       What you can be paid for - Who the hell wants to work?

So… you seem to have found your Ikigai. Correct? Sorry to say but not as per the centenarian residents of Okinawa or the authors.

How we all wish it were so simple and straight forward? Living longer than someone else, being happier than someone else or living for a purpose or a goal are all independent things. You can try to correlate them and might succeed in proving it with a select sample, like Ikigai, but we all know enough people around us who live like a rock but are happy to the core or those who slog day and night in pursuit of their life’s purpose but die young and unhappy.

Life is just a random set of cards dealt to you. What you do with them is on you. Life is a bizarre set of improbable events and any desire to look for the result would be met with more frustration and unhappiness. I wonder how many of you found or lost your Ikigais due to Covid.

Think about it…