Ikigai Frustrated Me. That Was the Point.
I found Ikigai at Half Price Books on a trip I wasn't planning to make anything of.
I was deep in a Japanese literature phase, so it fit. I bought it, brought it home, and fully expected to read it in a few weeks.
It took me six months.
Not because it's long. It's 179 pages. Because every time I sat with it I felt the same thing: frustration. How am I supposed to find my reason for being when I genuinely love too many things? I love the corporate career I've spent 13+ years building. I left everything to study art in Rome. I invested real money and time into a 500-hour yoga certification and still teach every week. I love martial arts, writing, reading, podcasting.
The book kept asking me to find the one thing at the center of it all. And I kept coming up empty.
What I didn't understand yet was that I was reading a Japanese philosophy book with a western brain. Follow steps one, two, three, get a result. That's not what Ikigai is. That's not what Ikigai has ever been.
Ikigai is not a destination. It is a lifelong practice. And your Ikigai is allowed to evolve. It is supposed to.
That realization took six months to land. And honestly it still lands differently depending on the day.
I go back to this book now the way some people go back to journals. Opening it to a random page when I'm feeling stuck or overwhelmed, two feelings that for me almost always arrive together. How can you feel frozen in a perpetual pause and simultaneously buried under everything happening at once? I used to think those feelings canceled each other out. They don't. They coexist. And Ikigai was the first framework that didn't try to fix that contradiction but simply sat with it.
I want to be honest about something. Living practices like this one is hard work. It is not a book you read and apply. It is a daily decision to stay in the question even when the answer isn't coming. Even when you're not sure it ever will.
This project, The Simmer Project, is partly my attempt to see if all my Ikigais can live in one place. I genuinely don't know if that's possible. But I'm deciding to find out.