Ikigai — The Japanese Word I Wish I’d Known Before I Retired

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There is a Japanese word that keeps coming back to me — and if you’re navigating retirement and searching for your reason to get up in the morning, it might be the most useful concept you haven’t heard yet. Finding purpose in retirement is something nobody really prepares us for, and *ikigai* (生き甲斐) is the closest thing I’ve found to a map.

It doesn’t translate neatly into English — and I think that’s part of why it stopped me. We don’t really have a word for it. The closest we get is “reason for being,” but even that feels a little grand, a little formal, for what ikigai actually describes. It’s subtler than that. More personal. It’s less about a grand mission and more about that particular feeling when you’re doing something and time disappears — when you forget to check your phone and suddenly it’s two hours later and you feel, somehow, more yourself than you did before.

That feeling. That’s the one.

What ikigai actually means — and why retirees need it most

The way it’s usually explained, ikigai lives at the centre of four questions:

What do I love? What am I good at? What does the world need? What can I be paid for?

Draw four overlapping circles and the sweet spot in the middle — where all four meet — is supposed to be your ikigai. Your purpose. Your joy.

I’ve seen the diagram a hundred times. And for a long time I looked at it and felt vaguely inadequate, like I was supposed to have this all figured out, neatly labelled and filed away. Like everyone else had received some private instruction that I’d missed.

I didn’t have it figured out. And I suspect most of us don’t.

What I’ve come to think is that ikigai isn’t something you *find*, like a set of keys you’ve misplaced. It’s something you stumble toward, often sideways, often only recognising it after the fact. The map comes with you — but it only becomes readable once you’ve already walked a stretch of the path.

That realisation, strangely, was more of a relief than the diagram ever was.

The years I didn’t see it

I spent a good many years running a manufacturing concern. I was competent at it. I showed up, I solved problems, I kept things moving. There’s a particular satisfaction in operational work — the feedback loop is relatively clear, the metrics are tangible, and the days have structure. I don’t dismiss those years. They gave me things I still carry: discipline, a tolerance for complexity, an ability to hold a long view.

But if you’d asked me then what my purpose was, I probably would have said something about responsibility. About the people who depended on the operation. About keeping commitments.

All true. But not quite *it*.

What I didn’t yet know — what I couldn’t have told you then — was that I was a writer. That sounds strange, I know. Writers are supposed to know early. They’re supposed to have filled notebooks since childhood, to have felt the compulsion clearly and urgently from a young age.

Mine came later. And it came without announcement.

I started noticing that I was composing sentences in my head as I moved through the day. That I reached for words the way other people reach for tools. That when I sat down to share something I’d read, or felt, or wondered about, something in me settled in a way that the operational work never quite managed.

That was the signal. I just wasn’t listening for it yet — or perhaps I was too busy to hear it. Retirement, oddly enough, is what made me go quiet enough to finally notice.

The caterpillar that didn’t know what was coming

I think a lot about the caterpillar.

Not as a metaphor I chose — it’s one that chose me. Because the caterpillar doesn’t plan its transformation. It doesn’t know, in any meaningful sense, that it will become a butterfly. What it knows is only this: *do what you have to do*. Move. Feed. Grow. And then, when the time comes, go still.

That stillness before the transformation — the chrysalis — looks like nothing from the outside. It looks like stopping. Like giving up, even. But inside, everything is reorganising. The caterpillar essentially dissolves. Becomes formless. Before it becomes the butterfly.

I had my own version of that.

Retirement was my chrysalis. The diary emptied. The daily urgencies fell away. The world outside went still, and something inside started shifting — slowly, quietly, without my permission or my plan. I didn’t rush it. I’m still not rushing it. But I notice, more and more, that I am becoming something I didn’t expect to become.

I think many of us in this season are in that same slow dissolving. And I want to say, to anyone who needs to hear it: that’s not failure. That’s not stagnation. That’s exactly what this looks like from the inside.

The trouble is that Western culture has very little patience for the chrysalis stage. We celebrate the butterfly. We celebrate the launch, the achievement, the arrival. We have almost nothing to say about the quiet middle — the formless stage where you’re neither what you were nor yet what you’re becoming.

But that stage is real. And it is necessary. And if you’re in it right now, I think you might be exactly where you need to be.

Picasso’s comfort

There’s something I find oddly reassuring about Picasso.

Not because he was famous — he was, enormously so — but because he is a reminder that what we love and what we’re good at and what the world rewards don’t always arrive in the same moment. Picasso painted nearly 20,000 works across his life. He worked with the urgency of someone who had no choice in the matter. And the market — the paying-for part of the ikigai diagram — lagged behind him for much of his life.

But he never stopped. Not because of certainty about legacy. Not because of applause. Because he couldn’t not paint.

That’s the part I find most useful. Not the fame. Not the millions his works sell for now. But the *couldn’t not*. That compulsion toward the thing that is most yours — that pull you feel toward something even when no one is watching and nothing is rewarded and the outcome is genuinely uncertain.

I’m slowly finding that in writing. The pull toward it in the morning. The way a day feels slightly off when I haven’t written anything — not because I failed some target, but because something that needed to move didn’t get to move. That’s the signal. That’s the compass.

I don’t fully understand it yet. But I’ve stopped needing to. I just follow it.

What Frankl understood

Viktor Frankl — psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, one of the most clear-eyed writers on human meaning I’ve ever read — said something that I return to often:

*”Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life… everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment.”*

And in another place, he wrote about the space between what happens to us and how we choose to respond. In that space, he said, lies our growth. Our freedom.

I’ve been thinking about that space a lot lately.

Because retirement — this season — hands us something we rarely had in the years before: *time*. Time that is genuinely ours. Time that isn’t allocated in advance, isn’t spoken for by the organisation or the schedule or the role. Time that sits open in front of us and asks, quietly but persistently: *what now?*

What we do with that space, how we inhabit it, what we move toward inside it — that’s not a small question.

It might be the only one worth sitting with.

I spent the first months of retirement mildly terrified of that question. I filled the space with activity before it could ask anything of me. Gradually — slowly — I’ve been learning to let it ask. To sit with the asking without rushing to answer it. And what I’m finding, in that space, is not a crisis. It’s a beginning.

[INTERNAL LINK: /free-guide] — *If you’re still searching for what your ikigai might be, I put together a short guide on this. It’s free and it won’t take long.*

So what is yours?

I’m not going to tell you what your ikigai looks like. It wouldn’t help if I tried, and it would be beside the point entirely. Ikigai, by its nature, is not transferable. It’s the thing that is specifically and stubbornly yours.

What I will say is this: it’s probably already present. Already stirring. In the thing you keep returning to without quite being able to explain why. In the conversation that makes an hour feel like ten minutes. In the moment when you lose yourself and just *do*, without performance or audience.

I’m still finding mine. Writing is part of it — perhaps the largest part right now. Sharing what I’ve read and thought and wondered about, and hoping that it lands somewhere useful in someone else’s morning. That it might reach the person who woke up at three in the morning with the vague feeling that something important is missing.

That wish — that it might be useful to someone, that it might make one person feel a little less alone in the asking — that’s what sits at the centre of my four circles.

What’s sitting in yours?

I’d genuinely like to know. Not the polished, edited answer — the honest one, the unfinished one, the one you’re still working out. Share it in the comments. Or just sit with the question quietly today, and let it ask you what it needs to ask.

Either one is a good start.

*If this resonated — if the chrysalis metaphor landed somewhere real for you — I write shorter reflections in between posts over on Substack. Come find me there. The conversation continues.*