Ikigai Summary & key ideas explained

Ask a ninety-year-old in the north of Okinawa when she plans to retire, and she may look at you as if you'd asked when she plans to stop breathing. She still tends her vegetables. She still meets her friends. She still has somewhere to be tomorrow.

Japanese has a word for that somewhere to be: ikigai. Roughly, it means the reason your life feels worth living. Héctor García, a Spaniard who has lived in Japan for many years, and Francesc Miralles, a writer from Barcelona, set out to find how this idea shapes some of the longest and happiest lives on Earth.

Their search led them to Ogimi, a small rural village on Okinawa's northern coast, famous for its very old and very lively residents. There they interviewed around a hundred of the village's elders. They wanted to know what these people ate, how they moved, who they spent time with and, above all, what kept them going.

What they found isn't a miracle pill. It's a handful of simple habits, a few old Japanese ideas, and some surprising lessons from Western psychology, all pointing in the same direction.

In this read, you'll discover:

• why having a reason to get up may matter as much as what you eat;
• what a village of centenarians does differently every day;
• how to slip into the state where hours vanish and work feels like play.

But first, what exactly is this reason for living, and how do you know if you have one?