> 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.
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.