💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~maria › log › 2022-02-08_re_ikigai.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 05:10:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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it's been a long time since i last posted anything in geminispace. there's reasons. and this is not the place to go into them. however i keep following antenna and this time ew0k managed to make me write a response
when you search the clearweb for terms like how to find your calling in life, or more fundamentally how to find a reason to continue existing, there's a flood of clickbait, blog posts, ideas, discussions and videos on this. a huge chunk is from selfproclaimed gurus or coaches that claim to have found enlightenment of sorts. and to reference jordan peterson (even that person says something smart once in a while) this may be because the western world lacks leadership. it has no common enemy anymore, the governments deal with the small-small of everyday life, more than putting out visions to follow for a brighter future. peterson claims the leaders of the world don't have an idea where they want to go. and that statement may be right.
what would a void in direction have to with ikigai. well, the answer is simple. if leadership pulls into a certain direction towards a greater vision, naturally there's a following (because in a democracy that following voted for the leaders, duh), and the economy gets dragged along. when companies share the vision of the leaders they follow or rather the vision a large portion of the social and cultural circle a company exists in, this drag gives meaning. leaders give meaning to the ones following them, companies give meaning to the people working there. everyone feels part of something greater, it can inspire, it can cause unhappyness, but at the very least there is no void.
the greater void we have surrounding us doesn't provide the simple answer anymore. contributions to a greater something become hard. and i am not talking about the few artists here, i am talking about a significant portion of the population that doesn't constantly head out into different countries to soulsearch.
returning to ikigai, finding your passion. i believe that passion either gives or requires meaning. without it to be meaningful to yourself, you cannot develop a passion. when nothing else in the world (and i agree with peterson's assessment here) offers you meaning like it did, say, 50 years ago, then you struggle to generate this. in general the creative ones that have inner balance seem to have it a lot easier to generate this meaning for themselves. depression (whatever the cause of that condition may be) definitely doesn't make it easier either. arguably one needs to rid themselves of it first, to a degree at least so control returns.
some time ago i also found myself drifting through that void and the trigger to realize the depression was a depression came by drastically changing life. the old ways to soothe the depression didn't work anymore. and when i treated it with profession help, the void, the lack of meaning and passion surfaced. i had drowned it for decades in the illusion that work, careers, self-improvement and consumerism would fix it. well, it didn't get fixed at all. and finding something i liked was not that hard. i looked back at my childhood to find indication what i liked before everything went downhill. and then i started doing that. like clockwork. every single day i forced myself to sit down and do it. eventually i had to adjust a little because i didn't quite hit the nail with the choices that i made, but the direction was sound. it made me a happier person. it's nearly impossible to transfer this into a dayjob, but the knowledge i found in finding a meaning and passion (that didn't come overnight and took a year of determination) could be partially layered on dayjobs.
today my life looks radically different to how it looked 5 years ago. i have very little time for myself and my passion in comparison, but there is something calming in knowing what makes you happy and that you don't need to give it away. as a sideeffect i stopped being interested in the meddlings of the government (unless they fuck with my life, thank you covid) or with the capitalistic notions of my dayjob. i honestly stopped caring, because growth is not a vision, and no one has offered me a vision in all my corporate and cultural lifetime. please don't suggest religion, because they don't offer a vision, they offer a promise. and the promise is rarely something global that a group of people should strive for, but something personal. and i have something personal already. it's awesome. more awesome than things religion can offer.