Big Purpose and Little Pleasures

Yujiro Seki, director of Carving the Divine

Source: Used with permission/Yujiro Seki

I watched Carving the Divine at midnight—laptop slipping off my knees, tea gone cold, snack crumbs forming a halo around me. It’s a documentary by Yujiro Seki, who spent seven years following a group of Japanese Buddhist sculptors called Busshi.

The Busshi are master carvers in a 1,400-year-old lineage. They make wooden statues of the Buddha using traditional tools, silence, and an amount of patience that made me feel like I’d lived my whole life as a jittery raccoon.

So naturally, I wanted to talk to the guy who captured all this. I invited Yujiro onto my podcast Fifty Words for Snow, which I cohost with Emily John Garcés. Every week we hunt for words from around the world that don’t exist in English—words that name a feeling, or a way of life, or a quiet truth we don’t know how to say.

This episode was called “Japanese Jewels.” And I had a jewel of a word in mind: ikigai.

The Answer I Didn’t Expect

You’ve seen ikigai floating around. It’s that four-circle diagram—what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Where they all overlap? That’s your ikigai. Your raison d’être. Your one true path. Cue the sunrise.

So I asked Yujiro if making this documentary was his ikigai. His big purpose. His reason for being.

And he said—very gently—that actually, that’s not really how we use the word.

Sake, Not Self-Actualization

He said, sure, you could describe making the film as a kind of calling. But in Japan, ikigai is usually something much lighter. It’s not this solemn, life-defining mission. It’s more like: What gets you through the day? What do you look forward to after a long one?

Then he said, “For many people it’s having a little sake at the end of the day.”

Huh.

The Big One and the Little One

There are, I realized, two kinds of ikigai.

There’s the big, flaming, capital-I Ikigai—the purpose-driven life, the legacy project, the stuff of memoirs and documentaries and daring leaps.

But there’s also the small ikigai. The lowercase version. The one that’s a cup of tea after a walk. A cold beer at sunset. A glass of sake when the day is done.

It’s not about being productive or admirable. It’s just… something you love. Something that helps you make it through.

Sometimes I think "purpose" gets better press than it deserves. I wrote about this in my book Easy Street: A Story of Redemption From Myself—how, in not having children, I felt a creeping pressure to make my life mean something. That existential pressure eventually led me to become the legal representative of a neurodiverse woman a decade older than me who happens to be in love with my husband.

In the book, I write: "When people ask what I do or what I’m working on, I hear: What have you done to justify your choice not to have children? What have you done lately?"

Sometimes, I worry I’ve been a little too eager to find purpose—like it’s a job I applied for and can’t stop checking my email about.

Maybe we’ve misunderstood ikigai over here. Maybe we’ve latched onto the “higher purpose” version because it fits our cultural obsession with productivity, ambition, and legacy. But maybe the truer, older meaning is this: your ikigai is what gives today a little shimmer.

Not your 10-year plan. Not your resume. Not even your dream.

Just the thing that makes being alive feel, for one small second, like enough.