A world like now never existed before: Millions of people living in cities were they are not able at all to live in nature or can't afford to move away or into the cities.
A world with high speed communication.
A world with unlimited possibilities.
A world were you grew up without ever having to learn were your water comes from and how your food is made.
The world doesn't need most of us, this was never the case in the past. I'm a smart person, i'm not needed because there are still enough even smarter people.
And regarding your quote of the Christians: They don't live it either or never lived. The dark ages produced a lot of christian focused 'art' full of gold.
And in the past, if you had any mental illness, you just might have been killed or put in shackles.
> And regarding your quote of the Christians: They don't live it either or never lived.
Lots of people have. Not everyone was perfect, but it was an aspiration, and there are whole traditions of monasticism and other service based on it. It is no accident that the word organisations that help others is derived from a Christian theological term, charity.
> The dark ages produced a lot of christian focused 'art' full of gold.
The dark ages were not dark.
Art is one of the things that contribute to the community, and its creation leads the artist to fulfilment. Public art (which is what religious art usually is) is the opposite of hoarding private art.
> A world with unlimited possibilities.
Very few people have access "unlimited possibilities". Financial constraints, legal constraints, personal constraints..
"Man is born free and everywhere is in chains" - as Rousseau said 300 years ago.
Nonetheless, ikigai is more than just what christians wanted. Ikigai means different things for different people and the zeitgeist and your cirumstances are having a big part in it.
Dark ages were dark in sense of we have not that many records of it, there were little change.
'Art' was stuck and pressured from church and others. Art became art after all the revolutionary ideas and probably achieved the proper unlimitness of art today.
Although I think the issues are complex, I disagree that the complexity of the modern world itself leads to this.
One of the core features of modernization has to do with the substitution of local communities with regional and global institutions. That alone changed many things.
It also does not help that our civilization keeps making this mistake: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-call... ... that is, the effort by modern institutions to make sense of the world in a legible way leads to imposing simplification on the world. The world was already complex, even in pre-modern times.
> The world doesn't need most of us, this was never the case in the past. I'm a smart person, i'm not needed because there are still enough even smarter people.
If we take a person's worth as a _quantity_, sure. We can reduce every person into a set of stats, similar to D&D character sheets, and every person fits into roles based upon those stats. Those stats make things more legible.
Each person, however, has a _quality_, and it is here one's unique purpose and contribution can be discovered. I didn't learn this from ikigai specifically; as one of the comments talked about, some form of this was widely known in pre-modernized cultures. Carol Sanford has been writing, talking, and practicing this as applied to the modern world for decades.
There's also the work of Christopher Alexander. His writings and work convinced me that modernity did not have to be designed this way.
The unique contribution someone can make isn't necessarily about the survival of the community. When I say unique, it means once that person has passed, there will never be again that particular contribution -- at the very minimum, the environment, relationship, and moment is unique, as is the person. As such, the community also grows and changes over time, a living system as much as the individual people within the community are themselves living systems.
The existence in itself needs a reason.
Nonetheless its hard to follow your thought, perhaps you could elabore it more?
There have always been Christians who at least tried to live it. They're in the minority and they weren't and aren't the ones you hear much about (or from) but that's kind of the point.
Perfect. It isn't even a matter of being replaceable: it's just that so many people might die, anywhere in the world, and you don't even notice it.
As the Enlightenment already absorbed eastern concepts into the western plane to some degree already (see the roots in Hume for instance), the relationship of westerners with eastern concepts as like hiring a consultant to tell you all the things that your employees were already saying, but which were ignored since they were merely grunts.
Clearly Hume uses eastern concepts ("I" am just a bundle of thoughts; causality is just a projection; etc). And the anti-Aristotelianism of the Enlightenment (hostility to concepts such as substantial form) could be seen as eastern too. I'm not sure if this history has ever been documented though.
The Enlightenment is seen as paradigmatically western, and in a way it is, and yet it tried to reject pretty much the entirety of western philosophy that came before it -- perhaps even under eastern influence.
Stuff is never simple, is it?
I've never read about the eastern connection to the Enlightenment in any place, but lots of references pop up. A translation of the play Shakuntala by Kalidasa seems to have created a bit of stir for instance, even inspiring some of the structure in Faust by Goethe.
This (like so many other things) is a very ontologically tricky proposition due to the deceptive distinction between abstract and concrete "is-ness". It is true that at least one Human in each country possesses at least some knowledge of such things, but how well distributed is the knowledge? The so casually deployed symbol "is" makes no distinction, and Humans generally do not have the ability to consider such things.
Even weirder: Hard Whorfism "is" "false".
> It strikes me that westerners have lost the roots of their culture and are having to relearn it from elsewhere.
Absolutely agree....perhaps this is (at least in part) because we never learned in the first place (other than abstractly, and even there only for a small percentage of the population) the difference between abstract and concrete "reality", because such things are not taught in standard curriculum in school (see also: financial planning, how to be nice, categorization in general (ontology/taxonomy), etc).
I often wonder if all of the sub-optimalities in our "advanced, 'scientific' culture" are purely coincidences / oversights. That people seem to so reliably (in frequency, and form) have an innate and very strong aversion (a lot like how religious or anti-religious people get nervous/agitated if one is to call into question the truth of scripture) to discussing such matters in the context of concrete reality makes me more than a little suspicious.
You're recognizing the same bias. It's not that there are oversights so much as there are widespread ideas believed to be definitive. Rather than teaching people the "right ideas," at this point I feel it's critical that people learn how cognitive biases work, namely, authority bias. On the matter of beliefs, Crony Beliefs is a gem https://meltingasphalt.com/crony-beliefs/
A lot of people will not even make the effort. The motivation comes from existing values and beliefs, which will have been subject to biases themselves!
As for the reason it would help the issue, if the person is not susceptible to these, they will not be susceptible to the industries, governments, teachers that exploit these. They’ll recognize it before falling for it.
As for the difficulty level, it could be made simple. They aren’t complex, they are just unknown
I think you are right, but I am not sure what the underlying problem is. I wonder whether there is a bit of cowardice there and a fear of where the line of thought will lead - not wanting to turn the stone over for fear of what you will find. Our scientific culture is afraid of facing facts.
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> Our scientific culture is afraid of facing facts.
You are getting very warm! ;)
With all of these examples. The trick seems to be in 'how'. Everyone can read this article, or a Buddhist text, or some Stoic essays, and agree and think it would be a good idea.
The 'how' to get there, seems to be the gap.
Everyone agrees having 'purpose' is great. The 'how to find a purpose' is the problem. Not just intellectually 'decide on a purpose', but 'believe in a purpose'.
You have to take the time to allow yourself to be aware of what's going on within yourself, and what's going on in the community around you. This "awareness" isn't the same as collecting data, or constructing thoughts that interpret things. It's not an easy thing to convey, since many people will take what I'm saying here and turn it into yet another recipe. And if I then say, it's more like mindfulness meditation, then all sorts of ideas and interpretation gets added to that, making it far away from I'm saying here.
I'm not very articulate about this. But maybe Carol Sanford's _Regenerative Life_ would better able to convey just how to find your unique contribution to that which is greater than yourself.
zen would say the harder you try the further away you'll be. You do have a purpose only as much as you don't. ..."sense" isn't the right word but it makes sense to me, it's more like just something you realize.
For me something like looking at life from a constant meditation on your future self [Alex Harmozi] or Gurdjieff's Self-Remembering or Vigyan Bhairav Tantra: Meditation Technique No. 33 allows this kind of consistent clarity.
I read a bit again recently because someone quoted part of what I quoted with regard to work and education, and it really does feel contemporary. That said, it is not that uncommon for ancient texts to feel relevant. I do not read a lot of ancient texts but one I did recently, pseudo-Xenophon's Constitution of the Athenians had several things, including a great passage about the rich and democracy.
There is a lovely reading of it by David Suchet that is on Youtube.
If it were possible to compare every model for happiness ever conceived, they'll likely have a few things in common. Mostly, they will propose factors that are familiar within a group's common frame of reference, those factors will address that group's common experiences and habits, and the formula will project a roadmap for making changes in those habits to realign the experiences with "happiness."
In other words, "we all tend to do one thing, but doing another is probably better, and it's easy to forget, so here's way to remember." If it's useful to anyone at all, it's of value. If it's useful to larger group, then a utilitarian might say it has greater value. But even the assessment of value is culturally-dependent, so it's kind of pointless to argue about the virtues of different models on the basis of their cultures of origin.
So of course different cultures present things differently. It doesn't have to mean anyone is losing the roots of their own culture. Foucault would argue that being anything other than a part of your own culture is impossible. Even if you reject your own culture, you're rejecting the culture you're a part of, and that becomes a part of that culture. You just can't _not_ be who you are, where you are, and a product of your experiences.
If the differences in habits among various cultures become more apparent in a direct comparison, that's mostly down to the different frames of reference that determine the signs and signifiers used to express and internalize the models. But within each culture, the mechanisms themselves are often fundamentally the same. We manage resources as a group, we figure out who's us and who's them, we defend the group against threats, and we generally aim to reproduce. Whatever else goes on, our culture is how we communicate among ourselves what to expect from each other as we all go about those activities. It gives us the language we use, which Pinkerton et al might go so far as to say shapes the very ideas we have about ourselves and each other, including our "secrets to happiness."
The point is, there are many models for understanding happiness. Some we know more about because they've established a large socio-economic footprint, like the major religions, and some are more academic thought experiments, like what the ancient greeks tended to get up to. Others are more directly products of and by their host culture. Ikigai is this. If people find it accessible and useful, that's nothing but great. Is it a very Japanese way of looking at it? Sure. Is it some innate universal truth and wisdom? I dunno, but I bet someone pushing that narrative has a book or a seminar to sell.
In any case, for most purposes, the meme is probably enough. Do what you can to do what you love, that you're good at, that helps you survive, that helps your group survive.
In "westerner" kindergarten, they simplify it even further: do only what is necessary, helpful, and/or kind. Don't even need a graduate philosophy degree for that.
Rome defeating Carthage was legitimately one of the worst things that ever happened in history.
It strikes me that westerners have lost the roots of their culture and are having to relearn it from elsewhere.
"ikigai doesn’t limit someone’s value in life to career and financial status"
Ancient Greek philosophers and their successors frequently discussed happiness and how to live life.
Assuming it is being explained correctly here, that is less anti-wealth than Christianity ("it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle" etc) but similar in rejecting financial status.
Buddhism regards wealth as an attachment so I would have expected a slightly different attitude.
From middle eastern (possibly Hellenised) culture before Christianity read the book of Ecclesiastes.
"What does a man acquire from all his labor and from the anxiety that accompanies his toil on earth? For all day long his work produces pain and frustration,) and even at night his mind cannot relax! This also is futile! There is nothing better for people than to eat and drink, and to find enjoyment in their work."