Three things I found while looking into what the word actually means, each of which changed how I think about the project. One of them says this project is using the word wrong.
The ikigai diagram is not Japanese
You have seen it. Four overlapping circles — what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for — with ikigai in the middle where all four meet. It is on office walls and in slide decks and at the top of several thousand LinkedIn posts.
It is not a Japanese concept, and the diagram has a traceable paternity.
The four-circle image comes from the Spanish astrologer and writer Andrés Zuzunaga, who published it in 2011 with the word propósito — purpose — in the centre. In 2014 a British blogger called Marc Winn reproduced it, swapped the Spanish word for the Japanese one, and put it online. It went everywhere.
Actual ikigai, as used in Japan and as written about by the psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya in her 1966 book on the subject, is mostly small and daily. A reason to get up. A person, a routine, a thing you are looking forward to. It has no necessary connection to being paid, to being skilled, or to what the world needs. The anthropologist Gordon Mathews, comparing matched pairs of Japanese and American interviewees in the 1990s, found ikigai realised largely through commitment to a group, where his American subjects reached for self-realisation.
So the most widely shared icon of purpose on earth is a mistranslation of a Spanish diagram — and the thing it accidentally encodes, that your purpose must simultaneously be your passion, your talent, your service and your income, is exactly the impossible demand this project is about.
Work-life balance is younger and stranger than it looks
The phrase feels ancient and it is not. The earliest citation that actually stands up is American, from Industry Week, 10 November 1986, quoting a Minneapolis consultant on managers seeking “a proportioning of their lives.” You will read in a hundred places that it began in Britain in the late 1970s. I could not trace that to anything primary — every path led back to secondary business writing — so I am not going to repeat it as fact.
What does have a scholarly origin is the idea underneath, and it arrived framed completely differently. Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Work and Family in the United States (1977) treated the collision between work and life as an institutional and gendered problem — something structures do to people, requiring policy. It became a personal virtue later, and quietly.
The same is true further back. Robert Owen’s slogan from 1817 — eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest — was not a theory of human flourishing. It was a ceiling on extraction, aimed at fourteen-hour mill days. Balance entered our vocabulary as a defence against being worked to death, and was subsequently repurposed as advice for people choosing how hard to work.
And the honest counterweight, which I want to keep in view: the historical record of great creators working monstrous hours is a survivorship sample with no denominator. We have the rituals of the people whose biographies got written. We have nothing from the equally obsessive who produced nothing. And a great many of the canonical monomaniacs had wives, servants or private incomes — they did not balance the domestic half of life, they outsourced it to someone whose hours nobody recorded.
The definition that cuts against this project
This is the one that gave me trouble, and I would rather state it than work around it.
In the psychological literature, purpose is a measured construct with a settled definition, and it comes from William Damon, Jenni Menon and Kendall Cotton Bronk in 2003: purpose is a stable and generalised intention to accomplish something that is at once personally meaningful and contributes to the world beyond the self. Bronk calls that beyond-the-self component the construct’s most distinguishing feature. It is not decoration. It is what separates purpose from every neighbouring idea.
On that definition, most of what this project is looking at is not purpose. A drummer who wants to be one of the greats, a player who wants to be acknowledged as the best alive, a producer proving something to everyone who wrote him off — those are enormously motivating goals that are personally meaningful and almost entirely self-referential. The measurement literature would call that meaning, or ambition, and reserve purpose for something else.
I think there is an answer, and it is not a dodge. Serious creative work does have an object beyond the self — it is just not a person. It is the work, the form, the field, the thing that outlasts you. Andrew Neiman is not trying to improve anyone’s life, but he is trying to add something to jazz drumming, and jazz drumming is not him. That is a beyond-the-self commitment of a different kind: impersonal rather than interpersonal.
Whether that is enough to count is a real question and I do not think it is settled. But it is the distinction the whole project turns on, and I would rather name it early than have a careful reader find it and assume I did not know.
Where this comes from
- Ikigai misunderstood — Ikigai Tribe — the Zuzunaga to Winn provenance, laid out in detail
- Mieko Kamiya, Ikigai ni tsuite (1966) — the founding Japanese text
- Gordon Mathews, What Makes Life Worth Living? How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996)
- Michiko Kumano on ikigai as eudaimonic wellbeing, Applied Research in Quality of Life (2018)
- Work-life balance, earliest citation — Word Spy
- Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Work and Family in the United States (1977)
- E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present (1967) — how clock-time made “balance” thinkable at all
- Damon, Menon & Bronk, “The Development of Purpose During Adolescence” (2003) — the definition
- Kendall Cotton Bronk, Purpose in Life (2014)
- Bertrand Russell, “In Praise of Idleness,” Harper’s, October 1932 — the best-written case against everything this project admires