If you’ve come across ikigai before, you are probably familiar with the Venn diagram of overlapping tiers: “what you love,” “what the world needs,” “what you can be paid for,” and “what you are good at.” The intersection of all four is your Ikigai: a Japanese term for what gives life value, meaning, and reason to live on your own terms.
But what if you don’t have it yet? It doesn’t mean your life is tragic. Or in crisis. Maybe you don’t have a purpose, a “reason for being.” You can still get good at something that buys you freedom. Freedom funds curiosity. Curiosity discovers something closer to ikigai. Now that’s leverage. I respect that.
Existentialist Sartre said, “existence precedes essence.”
You exist first. The rest is yours to experiment. You don’t have to have one reason for being to make the most of life. You can be multi-ikigai or no-ikigai and still win. You can be a parent, writer, an artist or none of those. There’s no one true purpose.
Your ikigai can evolve. What made you come alive at 20 might bore you at 40. A fixed “reason to live” doesn’t exist. You can be a “swiss-army-person.” And still win. Some people find their ikigai, eternal purpose, and still feel miserable.
I have ikigains.
Small daily wins aligned with my values, multiplied over time. I make everything that makes me come alive repeatable. That’s how I find flow. I do that because sometimes you love something and suck at it. My life is an ongoing experiment. Try new stuff. Quit what sucks. I took a coding program once. Hated it. I spend too long debugging lines of code. I learned I love problem-solving in other ways. Each step in life clarifies what you want. You don’t need a single purpose to move forward.
Just curiosity and grit.
Sometimes you’re great at something you hate. And sometimes the world doesn’t care what you’re good at, and nobody’s paying for any of it. And then what? Are you not allowed to enjoy your life, even if you don’t have a sweet spot? You’re not failing if you don’t have a perfect blend of passion, skill, and profit. You’re just human. Flawed, and figuring it out. Like everyone else.
I don’t have a perfect ikigai.
Most people I know don’t either. We’re figuring it out. We’re trying not to lose our minds daily. But it doesn’t mean we’re floating purposeless. Purpose can be many things. Sometimes it’s survival. You show up for your kids. You write a paragraph that actually says something true. You make dinner and find a quiet place in your house to decompress. That must count for something, too.
Build a life that feels tolerable, sometimes beautiful, mostly real.
Not one that only fits into a circle.
Meaning accumulates. When you are busy living, you’re not worried about whether it’s your purpose. You’re just doing it. You’re living. And making memories. You build your life experience by experience. Small joys. Hard-earned habits. A little risk. A lot of imperfections. You make peace with half-finished things.
You stop demanding every experience to be your ticket to transcendence. You just be. Sometimes you’ll be fired up. Other days you’ll be fried. That’s okay, too. Do your best anyway. Do hard things. Read a page of your favourite book. Have conversations. Take up space even if you don’t have a five-year purpose in your soul.
Purpose is also a thing you practice.
It can be small, daily reasons to lean in to flow. Did you finish a task you’d been avoiding? Good. Did you stumble on wisdom for tomorrow? Excellent. That’s a win too.
These small experiences create a life of substance. As Camus wrote, “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” That summer isn’t one big thing. It’s a collection of small actions that make you come alive. Stop looking for the one thing that will make your life make sense.
Build a life that feels interesting right now.
The pressure is off. Your purpose is to do what you must in real-time. Do it well. And be done with it. And then do the next one. One experience at a time. Do what feels like meaning today. Maybe today, meaning is in getting eight hours of sleep.
Or having that difficult conversation. It could be writing how you feel in a journal. Whatever makes you feel okay. You get to point at something, anything , and tell yourself, “This has meaning because I say it does.” You don’t need a reason for being to say yes to life.
You just need to be awake to your own life. Not every experience of your life will be thrilling. Some will be awkward.
Some will make no sense.
Some will feel like a rerun of a rerun.
But they still matter. You don’t find your ikigai. You live it and just be. You’re doing fine. Keep going in your own way. In the words of philosopher Alan Watts, “The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”