I’ve long carried a nagging feeling my screen time is probably higher than ideal… but having faaaar too many other things to worry about, I rarely check the stats *grin*.

This week I looked while researching and writing this essay. It says four hours and thirty seven minutes a day. Down from last week, with Facebook at the top of the list on seven hours and thirty eight minutes so far this week, then LinkedIn, then YouTube.

I felt a flush of shame.

Then realistion dawned I hadn’t considered how many of those hours made me happier, closer to people I love or better informed about stuff. I went straight to guilt.

I do find that a bit weird considering my geeky heart gets SO much from being online. I created and grew one of the Island’s very first internet communities. I found friendships in chat rooms and online games long before most people had an email address. I learn SO much every day from the people I follow and I write to you from here every week. So where does that nagging feeling come from? Why do I think my number is too high?

If you’ve been reading awhile, you’ll know that underneath all the essays about purpose and AI and bullet journals runs my concern for humanity. I care whether our days hold enough joy, connection and meaning to be worth getting up for, and I care whether the tools we build make that easier or harder. So I was happy to see that Gallup’s annual report on the state of the world’s emotional health has a new section on social media!

I suspect that the clock is the least interesting thing about our time online. Better questions sit underneath the metric. What was it for? Did we choose it? What did it crowd out? … and shame is very good at stopping us asking them. AI is already becoming the next big place our hours go, so I’d like us to get these questions right now... and I’d love for you to try them with me.

The state of the world’s emotional health

This year Gallup’s State of the World’s Emotional Health report asked two new questions. Did you use any kind of social media in the past seven days? And if so, roughly how long do you spend on it each day? They then lined the answers up against questions about how people feel day to day, enjoyment and worry, laughter and sadness, being treated with respect and how they rate their lives on a scale from zero to ten. It’s a rich report that builds on twenty years of emotion data and I’d encourage you to read the whole thing.

Once Gallup accounted for age, health, income and the rest, social media users were slightly more likely than non users to say they’d learned something interesting the day before, enjoyed themselves, laughed and been treated with respect. My geeky heart felt a little vindicated.

Time tells a more tangled story. The people who fared best overall sat in the middle, on social media for half an hour to two hours a day. Heavier users, on two hours or more, reported a little more anger, loneliness, sadness, stress and worry. Lighter users, a group that includes people who don’t use it at all, reported a little less enjoyment and laughter and rated their lives a touch lower.

That phrase “a little” is doing a lot of work. The adjusted differences come to a couple of percentage points. In the UK, heavy use showed no statistically significant association with emotional wellbeing once those other factors were in the picture.

Gallup is admirably candid about its own limits. This was an observational study, it can’t tell us whether social media changes how people feel, whether their feelings shape their use, or both. They measured whether people use social media and for how long… not which platforms people used, what they did there, what they came across or whether the habit felt compulsive. Their report points to a WHO review that found the effects depend on who is using it and what they come across, as well as when, why and how much they use it. The WHY is clearly super important.

In my defence

I wanted to know how other people feel about their stats, so I went where people confess things to strangers... Reddit posts asking people to share their screen time with replies ranging from minutes to very many hours.

What struck me most was how many people reported a number with a defence. YouTube playing while I cook. Music at work. Podcasts to fall asleep to. Feeding a baby at three in the morning. Recovering from surgery. Illness. The clock counts all of it the same, and people rush to explain.

The vocabulary was moral too... embarrassing, ashamed, horrified, addicted, please don’t judge me. One person said their number was strictly between them, Apple and God. Another said they still hadn’t developed the square eyes their mother always warned them about, and I suspect plenty of Gen X readers heard that warning growing up. One poster converted four hours a day into years of life, the kind of maths that makes your stomach drop… though some of that overlaps with other stuff, say time on the toilet *grin*.

I wonder how much of my own nagging feeling comes from exactly there. Decades of square eyes warnings, headlines about brain rot, apps promising to rescue us from our screen time… and very little of it from looking at what I actually do.

The wisest voices in those threads kept moving towards the same place. It depends what you use it for. Split the hours you chose from the hours you drifted into. Ask where relaxing ends and reaching for the easiest thing begins. They looked past the number and that’s where the three better questions live.

1. What was it for?

For me, Facebook does three jobs. It’s how I check in on friends and family, how I communicate with many people and how I keep up with local news and events. On a small Island it does a lot of the work the parish noticeboard used to do. Some of those seven hours and thirty eight minutes were connection, some were communication, some were information and some, if I’m being honest, *were* me drifting and I should possibly have stopped the scroll earlier.

If you’re new here, this is where ikigai comes in (a Japanese word often translated as a reason for being). The version I’ve come to love is having LOTS of reasons to get up in the morning... a call with someone you love, a job well done, a good book, a bit of local news about a new café that’s opening. Any of those can arrive through a screen. Hours on a phone can feed that sense of a life worth living or starve it, and a clock counts both the same.

In The Lighthouse Keeper’s Dashboard I wrote about the four columns every dashboard hides, activity, output, outcome and impact. Screen time is the purest first column number there is.

I want to be careful here, because “what for” can easily turn into yet another productivity test, one more way to grade ourselves. In Humans Do Not Recharge I argued that we all deserve time that is for nothing at all. So “for nothing” counts as an answer. A few rounds of the morning puzzles, a video you’ll forget by lunchtime, ten minutes of staring at beautiful art... if you chose it and it felt like rest, happy days.

2. Did I choose it?

This is the question I think matters most. There’s a world of difference between picking up my phone to message a friend and picking it up because of habit. A conscious choice turns an hour into something I spent. Drift can turn it into time I hadn’t meant to give.

The places where social media reaches the most people include Lebanon, Ukraine and the West Bank and East Jerusalem, alongside Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Estonia and Northern Cyprus... places living with war, conflict, division or a nervous border. Denmark, Singapore and Bahrain are on that list too, so it’s no neat rule, and Gallup draws no such link itself. Those figures count whether people used social media in the past week, with nothing about how long. Still, it got me thinking. Where the news can be a matter of life and death, checking in frequently makes sense. It might be how you know your family is safe.

Here on the Isle of Man I care a great deal about what’s happening, from the election to what’s on in the coming weeks, yet very little of it changes from one hour to the next. I think perhaps my ‘facebook news check’ vigilance is set for a storm we’re not having. Gallup’s heavier users were a little more likely to report stress, worry and anger, which is a fair description of how I feel after a long scroll through local news and comments threads... a bit het up. So I’d like to turn my sensitivity dial down a notch. Caring about politics and societal change matters, checking on it so frequently is a choice I can make differently.

3. What did it crowd out?

The third question is the one a stopwatch can never answer, and it’s a kind of gap analysis. What, if anything, is my screen time stopping me from doing in real life? And what is it stopping me from doing properly, because the phone is in my hand while real humans are right there in front of me?

One story from those threads has stayed with me. A mum who had forgotten her phone, sat by a theme park ride exit with her baby while the rest of her family went on and watched the people coming off for ages. She found herself wanting to chat to the woman beside her about the soaked and delighted riders, and she realised she hadn’t felt that urge to talk to a stranger in a long time. The urge comes back if the phone is out of reach.

Sometimes the answer to this question is nothing at all. A queue, a waiting room, a bus stop... the phone fills a gap that was empty anyway, and that’s fine (though I’d argue so called boredom can be a gorgeous way for your imagination to flourish). Other times the answer stings a little. The conversation you half heard. The walk where you saw more of the screen than the sea. The bedtime story read with one eye on a notification. Gallup’s survey can’t see any of that, and neither can the stats… only we can, if we’re willing to look without flinching.

The questions coming for AI

I think we’re about to make the same mistake again, on a bigger scale. AI is becoming the next place our hours go, and the questions are already lining up. How many hours a day do you use it? How many chat threads do you start a day? How much time did it save you? Employers are counting logins. Vendors are counting tokens. Imagine if, in a few years, Gallup adds AI questions to its survey... I’d love it to be a better one than how long.

So in the spirit of giving rather than grumbling, here are the questions I’d hand them, built on the same three.

What for... yesterday, what did you ask AI to help you with, and did you come away feeling more capable, more like yourself or neither?

Whose choice... who decided you would use it, you or someone else?

What’s missing... did you let it do anything you’d have liked to do yourself, and did it bring you closer to anyone or leave you more on your own?

None of those can be answered with a stopwatch. All of them get closer to understanding the ikigai risk of AI, the chance that our tools make our days more efficient while wearing away the reasons we have for living them.

Have a look at your own screen time this week and if you also want to explore this with more nuance, choose the question/s that speak most to you and share in the comments;

• What’s your daily average?

• Which app sits at the top of your list, and what do you mostly go there for?

• What was your very first feeling when you saw the number?

• How much of it did you choose, and how much did you drift into?

• Is there anything your phone gets in the way of?

• If you sit with it a moment longer, does that time leave you happier, closer to your people or better informed... or none of those?

I’ll gather what turns up and share patterns, I’m curious what we’re all actually doing in there.

I’m keeping my own log this week too, Facebook first, and I’ll put my findings alongside yours. I’m also going to try a small experiment. For the next few weeks I’ll aim to spend less of my Facebook time on local news, keep the parts that connect me to people and see whether I feel a little less het up. I’d like it to be a choice I make from curiosity, with the shame left at the door.

Those twenty seven hours and forty two minutes were a slice of my week. Only I can say what they were for, whether I chose them and who I was with while I spent them.

So what would change if your phone gave you a different report card on a Sunday... one that captured what your weekly screen time was actually for?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS For the bullet journallers, a What For log. Create a double page spread with three columns. Each time you put down your phone for a week try to remember to jot down what you went on it for, whether you chose it or drifted into it and what (if anything) it pulled you away from. Timings aren’t important… at the end, sort your notes (rainbow pastel highlighters perhaps hehe) into connection, communication, information, rest and drift, and see if the balance of the categories surprises you.

PPS An AI prompt to try “Here are notes on why I picked up my phone this week, whether I chose it and what it pulled me away from. Help me notice which uses might help me feel more like myself and where my phone might be getting in the way of thriving or connection. Then give me some creative ideas to help me be more intentional with my phone use that suit what you know about what matters most to me.”

PPPS This week’s soundtrack is Time by Pink Floyd… a song about years slipping by… it makes me want to really notice what my hours are spent on more often.

There are two notebooks on my desk this morning.

My lilac bullet journal of course, ever present and opened every day for lots of my thinking. The other my Leuchtturm1917 Thesis Journal with a step by step methodology for turning a question into something you can defend. I open it rarely, and when I do it’s with an intake of breath.

In March I wrote that I’d started it tentatively, like stepping into cold sea water one toe at a time. I’d love to tell you I’ve since waded in up to my shoulders. The tide has been in and out many hundreds of times since then yet I’m still stood at the water’s edge with my jeans rolled up.

I want to work through why I keep picking the thing up and putting it down again, and whether a woman with a busy life, a wandering brain and little formal academic exposure should be putting herself through this at all.

The dictionary says a thesis is the main idea, opinion, or theory of a person, group, piece of writing or speech.

If you’ve ever wondered what I mean when I say I’m in search of a thesis, here’s the shortest answer I’ve found. I want my hunches to be checkable and to feel confident the methods I use to help people are doing more good than harm.

What I thought in March

In Essayer, What Do I Know? I said “an essay explores, a thesis defends”. I wrote about the tenderness of rigour, the idea that the most caring thing I can offer you is something sturdier than my own enthusiasm… and I came up with an image I still adore. White light, that raw urge to make meaning, hits a prism and splits into colours. An essay. A talk. A course. A workbook. A poem. A thesis. The same light, each colour reaching eyes the others can’t.

Rereading it this week, I noticed two things.

The first is how many new colours have appeared since March. Workshops. Bite size lessons. Talks and panels. Frameworks tested in rooms full of real people. An AI charter I’m building with my own team at work.

The second is where I’d gone wrong with thesis thinking… why turn it into the colour that has to be mastered before any of the others matter. The prism says something kinder, that thesis is only one band of light. Its the broader prismatic thinking that shows what the light is made of and ultimately whether we can trust the rainbow as a whole.

A thing I know for sure

Last week I read about AI being used to decode Second World War Enigma messages that had defeated researchers for years. The playbook was simple, give the AI a goal, let it research and build its own tools, feed it one thing you’re sure of as a clue, then check the answer against known facts.

So I tried it on my own archive. I wanted to map how my thinking about the ikigai risk of AI had grown across more than 150 essays and what thesis ideas are becoming clearer. For my one sure thing, I gave it this;

People around me are already struggling, and I believe a lack of purpose literacy is part of why. AI is arriving so fast and so chaotically that I fear it could harm human flourishing, or concentrate it in ways that make inequality worse.

It built me a timeline and a conceptual map.

Reading my sure thing back, I noticed that the sentence is three things. Something I’ve seen, people around me struggling. Something I believe, that missing purpose literacy is part of the reason. And something I fear, that AI could make it worse and unevenly so. The first I can stand behind but the other two are hunches, built from years of watching and listening. Rigour is the work of telling them apart.

That’s what makes it a thesis in waiting I guess, a feeling, broken into claims I could be wrong about.

The map showed me something else too, that I’ve described the ikigai risk of AI in many slightly different ways. It began, in January 2025, as a worry about work worth doing. By this spring it had grown into a worry about ikigai itself, the felt sense of a life worth living. My wandering had a spine but I hadn’t been drawing it out as my thinking evolves.

So here today’s draft definition stitched together from my own words;

The ikigai risk of AI is the possibility that, in making our lives easier and more productive, we unintentionally erode some of the agency, growth, contribution and meaning that make those lives feel worth living.

But the more I turn it over, the more I see different faces of the same question. There’s the paradox of progress, where making life easier might not make it better. There’s human agency, and what we surrender when we hand over our thinking, creating and choosing. There’s equity, and the possibility that AI expands freedom for some while narrowing it for others… and underneath it all is the philosophical question of what makes us human, and whether choosing, trying, learning and contributing matter as much as the things we produce.

Different ways of looking at one worry, and a growing collection of questions I don’t yet know the answers to… but here’s how I think we might respond, Purpose Proofing as a deliberate practice of protecting what matters, with Purpose Prompting as a daily habit... prompt yourself first, prompt the AI with intention, then return to your own judgement.

A girl on the beach at Lyme

Mary Anning was born in Lyme Regis in 1799, into a poor family. She had almost no schooling, teaching herself from the beach, borrowed papers and patient hours studying the creatures she found. She was about twelve when she and her brother Joseph uncovered an ichthyosaur skeleton. Later came the first complete plesiosaur. She hunted after winter storms, when the cliffs slumped and gave up what they’d been hiding.

Gentlemen geologists bought her finds, wrote them up in learned papers and often left her name out. She couldn’t go to university or join the Geological Society of London, which didn’t admit women. Yet the experts kept coming to her little shop, seeking the knowledge of a woman who had taught herself by doing. In 2022 Lyme Regis gave her a statue, after a campaign started by a schoolgirl.

The word amateur comes, through French, from the Latin for lover. We’ve let it slide into meaning not quite good enough but Mary was an amateur in the oldest sense, a devotee, someone whose love for a subject became close to obsession. Is that what makes a good researcher? If so I feel like I qualify and am thinking about her this week for two more reasons.

The first is that practitioners have always fed science. The people on the beach find things the people in the lab would never stumble across. A practitioner’s ideas, workshops and hunches only survive if they’re written down clearly enough for someone else to pick up.

The second is that my brain works far more like her beach than a laboratory. I wander. I pick things up, noticing what the last storm has turned over. For a long time I’ve worried that this is the wrong kind of brain for a thesis.

Now I’m seeing that research needs both and that there may be more accessible pathways for me to either become one or add to the body of knowledge in this sphere.

Tankyū, the searching that goes all the way down

The Japanese word I’ve fallen for this week when researching this essay is Tankyū (探究) which means inquiry, the patient search for understanding. The first character carries the sense of searching or feeling your way, the second of investigating something right to its end. Add the character for heart and mind and you get tankyūshin (探究心), an inquiring spirit... a curious heart.

I named my publication after a verb, seeking. I’ve written before that the seeking itself became a reason for being. Tankyū adds seeking with direction and keeps going until it reaches the bottom of the question.

A beachcomber with a question walks a shore noticing everything, she also knows what she’s looking for.

That, I think, is what a thesis is for, giving my wandering a focus.

Pasteur’s corner, and a small Island

In 1997 the political scientist Donald Stokes drew a grid of the different kinds of research. In one corner he put Niels Bohr, who wanted to understand the atom for its own sake. In another he put Thomas Edison, who wanted things that worked and wasn’t fussed about why. In the corner where both wishes meet he put Louis Pasteur, who wanted to understand microbes because wine was spoiling and people were dying.

I live in Pasteur’s corner, minus a lab coat. I want to understand what AI is doing to our sense of purpose and I want that understanding to help someone practically speaking.

I doubt I’ve stumbled on something nobody else has noticed. Researchers already study autonomy, cognitive offloading, deskilling and meaningful work. What I might offer is the weaving... gathering threads into something an ordinary person can pick up and use and asking one plain question of it. When does AI help us flourish, when might it chip away at that and how can we tell the difference?

There’s a long tradition for people like me. In the 1940s the psychologist Kurt Lewin championed action research, the idea you can learn about a system by changing it and studying what happens. Teachers, nurses and community workers have been doing it ever since… and I currently work in Government, on an Island small enough that the distance between an idea and the people it touches is short. I’ve written before about small islands as living laboratories. You can’t hide from the people your decisions affect here, and you can see quickly whether something helps. Practising change alongside the people who need it most. Feeding evidence into policy. Gathering people to think differently about systems that should serve both people and planet, economically and environmentally and above all in ways that leave us healthy and thriving. Those feel like more colours of the same light, and maybe the brightest ones.

So, can a practitioner feed the research ecosystem? I think she can, if she leaves a trail clear enough to follow. Writing claims down before testing, in words I could be wrong about. Borrowing measures researchers already trust, like the nine question ikigai scale developed and tested at Mejiro University in Japan, used before and after interventions. Keeping a method log of what I tried, with whom, what I expected and what happened, flops included. Sharing it all openly, ideally alongside an academic friend who’d love a practitioner’s beach to walk on.

Every one of those habits fits in a notebook *grin*

If someone new asks what I am passionate about around here, I’ve found a description I quite like. An independent practitioner researcher, exploring AI, human agency and flourishing. It names a direction more than a title, which feels about right for now.

Sentences in pencil

Underneath everything sits one question.

As AI becomes more capable of doing things for us, how do we stay capable of choosing and living the lives that matter to us?

And beneath that are the questions I’m starting to scribble in pencil. Questions I want to be able to investigate, and perhaps one day answer with something sturdier than my own enthusiasm.

• Does knowing what gives our lives meaning help us navigate change, including the changes AI brings?

• When AI makes us more productive, what happens to our sense of agency, contribution and purpose? Does it matter whether we chose to hand something over, or had the choice made for us?

• Could Purpose Proofing help us keep hold of what matters and might we actually measure the difference?

• Who gets to flourish? If AI expands freedom and opportunity for some, whose choices might become narrower? I’m particularly interested in what this means for women, and for people who already have less control over their working lives.

That last question probably deserves a page of its own, Mary Anning would understand why.

There are different lenses through which I might look for answers. Agency... who decides? Meaning... what matters here? Capability... what do we keep? Flourishing... what makes a life good? And always, the question of whose lives we are talking about.

I’m going looking for evidence that I’m wrong, too. AI can widen lives. It can open doors for someone with a disability, someone short on time or confidence, someone who never had the chance to make things before. Perhaps what matters most is how, why, when and by whom it’s used. Whatever I build needs room for the gains, the losses and the reality of our muddled lives. I want to find out how well my ideas explain real life, including the places where they don’t.

These questions will change, that’s the point of pencil.

Is it worth the stress?

I have a rule for handing things to AI, before I let go of a task, I ask what I would miss if I stopped doing it myself. So I thought through this when refining my thesis, Claude could draft me a thesis statement in seconds but I’d miss part of what I love which is the thinking and refining.

So yeah I’ve been thinking it through with two AI helpers, like two mirrors held at different angles. Claude helped map my archive, while ChatGPT helped me imagine what a research practice might look like for me without a PHD, can I build something here in researching the ikigai risk of AI that also helps me live my own ikigai? Both helped and as ever the next steps are mine to make.

Back in April I also wrote about needing an enough line, so that purpose doesn’t slide into endless productivity. A thesis could easily become one more way to never feel enough. So my enough line for now is one page of the thesis journal each Sunday and a short log after every workshop or talk.

The prism takes care of the rest. The thesis becomes another way of honouring the same impulse to make meaning, and one more small reason to get up in the morning.

As for whether my brain suits it... I’m starting to think a thesis can be shaped to fit a brain like mine walking the shore after every storm. And AI acceleration is one almighty storm. The cliffs are slipping all over the place right now. Things are being uncovered every week that nobody has had time to understand.

Somebody needs to be down on the beach, writing down what they find.

So I’m going to open the thesis journal this afternoon… dip a toe in first probably, but definitely in.

What about you? Is there something you feel sure of, but haven’t yet tried to prove? What might happen if you wrote it down in pencil and started looking for the evidence?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Bullet journal spread to try. The Tide Line. Draw a wavy line across the middle of a double page spread, like the mark the sea leaves on the sand. Above it, write your hunches... the things you believe about your life or work but can’t yet show anyone. Below it, write your finds... the conversations, notes, feedback and moments that back them up. Along the line itself, write what would change your mind. Then pick the hunch with the most finds beneath it and write it as one sentence, in pencil, at the bottom of the page.

PPS AI prompt to try, with extended thinking on;

“Here is something I feel sure of about my life, my work or the world. [Describe it.] First, help me separate it into what I have seen, what I believe and what I fear. Ask me one question at a time about each part. Then help me turn the strongest part into a working thesis, one sentence I could be wrong about. Tell me what evidence would support it, what evidence would change my mind and one small experiment I could run in the next month to start finding out. Finish by telling me how I could check the result against something I already know is true.”

Then take whatever it gives you back to your notebook, and decide for yourself what you feel about the exchange..

PPPS This week’s soundtrack is I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For by U2, a song by someone certain of what they believe and still out searching... which is how this thesis sensing can feel to me at times,

I always cheated at Choose Your Own Adventure books.

If you’re Gen X you’ll know exactly what I mean. You’d reach the bottom of a page and be offered a fork in the road... if you decide to enter the cave, turn to page 34, if you decide to follow the river, turn to page 52. And instead of choosing like a brave adventurer, I’d wedge a finger in the current page, sneak a peek at page 34 and, if there was a dragon waiting, scuttle back and follow the river instead.

Some days I had three fingers wedged in at once. A whole hand of hedged bets.

Did you do that too? I think lots of us did after the first heady read through and reaching an untimely end. I think I’m still doing it... only these days the finger in the page is a little circular arrow under every AI answer. Claude calls it retry, ChatGPT calls it try again and I call it the reroll, because that’s what it feels like... rolling the dice again until you get the number you wanted.

Turn to page one

The first book in Bantam’s Choose Your Own Adventure series, Edward Packard’s The Cave of Time, came out in 1979. The magic of those books was that your choices mattered. Some endings were glorious. Some were properly grim, and you’d be eaten, or lost in time forever, or stuck in a cave with no way home. Which is why the finger in the page was such a cheat. It let me feel the thrill of choosing without paying the cost of choosing… and if I’m truthful, it spoiled the books a little.

AI gives us a finger in every page. Draft the email five ways. Generate twelve versions of your LinkedIn headline. Ask for another option, and another, and another... Nothing ever has to be final, because there’s always one more version a click away. It’s wonderful. I use it every day. Sometimes another version helps me see what I mean. Sometimes it saves me from having to decide whether I mean it enough to do anything about it. I wonder what it does to us when nothing ever has to be the one. This essay is a case in point. I could ask AI to generate ideas for a more scroll stop worthy title, a tighter wordcount, a different thesis... and spend all my writing time choosing between versions. Eventually I have to pick a direction and write the words I can stand behind and hit publish. Preferably before I lose my weekly publishing streak *grin*

Twenty four jams

You may know the jam study. In the mid nineties, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a tasting stall in an upmarket supermarket in California. Every hour the display switched between 24 jams and just 6. The big display drew more people in... but only around 3% of them bought a jar. At the small display, around 30% did.

That study became the founding story of the paradox of choice, Barry Schwartz’s name for the way more options can leave us more anxious, less decisive and less satisfied with whatever we eventually pick. Later researchers have complicated the picture. One large review found that across lots of studies the effect averages out to roughly nothing, but that choice overload bites hardest when the options are complex, when we’re unsure what we want and when the decision feels like it really matters.

Which sounds familiar when the thing we’re choosing is who to become.

When I was growing up there were only four TV channels. The careers adviser had a slim menu of possible selves. I’ve written before about how I ended up with an accidental career, shaped by narrow GCSE choices and very little guidance. That narrowness has real costs and oh how I wish we helped people see more possibilities earlier.

Now the menu feels endless. You can be anything, live anywhere, work any way you like and reinvent yourself on a wet Wednesday... at least on paper, even when our actual circumstances are anything but… that freedom is a gift that people before us fought hard for.

Expanding the menu is only part of the work. We also need to learn how to choose from it. In Escape from Freedom, published in 1941, Erich Fromm explored how the weight of freedom can make us seek relief by surrendering it. He argued that people go looking for ways to put it down, handing their choices to an authority, a crowd or a system that will decide for them.

Imagine the appeal of something clever, friendly, endlessly patient and available at 2am. Recommendation engines already choose much of what we watch, read and buy. In The NeverEnding Becoming, I wrote about AI moving from capturing our attention to shaping our desires. Now I’m wondering about the everyday temptation to let it decide what we want.

Faced with endless options, I can keep asking for more. Or I can ask the machine to pick.

I recognise both temptations. Neither gets me much closer to making a choice I can call my own.

Regret is the receipt

In 1843 Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “Marry, and you will regret it; do not marry, you will also regret it.” I think he wrote it with a twinkle in his eye, but there’s something true tucked inside the joke. Every real choice closes a door. Something is always lost.

Regret is an inescapable part of being human. It’s the receipt we’re handed for having chosen at all. The research backs this up in an interesting way. Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec found that we tend to regret actions more in the short term... but over the long run, it’s the things we didn’t do that haunt us. The roads we never took. The finger we never quite pulled out of the page.

Daniel Pink’s World Regret Survey gathered regrets from thousands of people in many countries, and found they cluster into four kinds of regret. Foundation (if only I’d done the work). Boldness (if only I’d taken the chance). Moral (if only I’d done the right thing). And connection (if only I’d reached out). Pink’s lovely insight is that each regret is a photographic negative of something we value. Hold it up to the light and you can see the shape of what matters to you.

Which makes “no regrets” a strange thing to aspire to, doesn’t it? A life with no regrets would be a life where nothing mattered enough to lose. Perhaps ‘no regrets’ asks the wrong thing of us. I’d rather learn from mine than pretend there was nothing worth regretting.

I’ve just turned fifty one. I have a decent collection of them by now. Some I’ve made peace with, some I’m still sitting with and a few I’d rather not write down just yet… but every one of them points at something I love even if you have to squint to see that.

The ikigai risk of the endless draft

Some of our ikigai grows in the choices that cost us something. We become who we are through commitment... to a person, a place, a craft, a cause, a way of spending our ordinary days. Every yes is built from a hundred small noes. It can grow through the things I keep choosing, even when choosing them means letting something else go.

When AI offers us infinite drafts, every choice can stay provisional. We don’t have to commit to the sentence, the plan, the direction. We can keep it all in beta, and a self kept permanently in beta never quite gets to become anyone. The finger in the page saves us from the dragons, and it also stops us ever reaching an ending we can call our own. The day still passes while we compare possibilities. I can reroll the plan but I can’t reroll the afternoon I spent asking for another one. At some point, keeping every path open starts to cost me the chance to walk any of them.

This is part of what I mean by purpose proofing AI in reaction to my concerns about the ikigai risk of AI. The risk lives less in the dramatic headlines and more in the habit of never having to choose. I’m not about to throw away the reroll button. AI can be a brilliant scout, running ahead to peer down paths we’d never have imagined, which is a big part of what Purpose Prompting is for. But the scout can’t walk the path for us. The choosing, the closing of doors and the living with the loss... that bit stays ours and I think it’s where meaning can get made.

The map nobody can draw

In 2018 the finger in the page moved to the telly. Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror Bandersnatch landed on Netflix, a film you steered with your remote, set in 1984 and all about a young programmer turning a Choose Your Own Adventure style book into a video game.

My first playthrough was exciting, I made my choices, reached an ending that I remember enjoying. But the geek in me couldn’t leave it there. What was behind the other doors? Should I draw flowcharts of every branch and share them across the interwebs? That would have worked in 2018, because Bandersnatch was finite. Someone had written every path, so someone could find every path.

Now imagine the next version. A story generated by AI as you watch, tailored to you, your choices and your mood, never quite the same twice. There’d be no flowchart to draw. You could never see every ending, because most of them wouldn’t exist until somebody chose them.

And oh gosh... that’s real life, isn’t it?

There has never been a map of every path. Not for your career, your relationships, the town you didn’t move to or the person you might have become. We just used to be able to pretend there might be one, somewhere, if only we looked hard enough.

So maybe the practice is learning to finish a first playthrough and feel ok about choosing a path where we don’t know the ending. To let the unwatched branches stay unwatched, without carrying regret for paths we were never going to see anyway or treating them as evidence that we choose badly.

Akirameru, or seeing clearly

There’s a Japanese word I discovered this week. Akirameru (諦める) usually translated as to give up, which sounds like failure but its roots run back to an older word meaning to make clear… and the character 諦 is the one used in Japanese Buddhism for truth, as in the Four Noble Truths.

So akirameru is, at heart, to see a situation clearly enough to let it go. That changes how closing a door feels to me. When I let go of the life where I did the other thing, I’m seeing my actual life a little more clearly. The cave I didn’t enter becomes part of the map of who I chose to be.

I suspect a life you feel content living is built from exactly this. Doors closed on purpose, and made peace with.

I don’t remember a huge amount about the books I cheated at with fingers in lots of pages. The ones I remember better are when I committed. Where I chose the cave, got eaten by something dreadful on page 87, laughed and flipped straight back to the beginning to start a brand new adventure, a little wiser.

So I’m wondering this week... which pages do you have fingers wedged in? What might happen if you pulled one out and let the story carry on? Which branches are you still trying to map? And is there a door, closed long ago, that you might finally akirameru... see clearly and let go?

Turn the page. I’ll see you on the other side.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Bullet journal spread to try. Turn to Page... Draw your own Choose Your Own Adventure flowchart across a double page spread. In the top left corner, draw a box labelled “Page 1, you are here” with today’s date, and write this question inside it... When I replay the past, which “if only...” am I hearing most loudly?

If only I’d done the work... turn to Foundation.
If only I’d taken the chance... turn to Boldness.
If only I’d done the right thing... turn to Moral.
If only I’d reached out... turn to Connection.

From that box, draw four branching paths to boxes, one for each of Pink’s regrets, and give each a colour if you like.

Follow whichever branches answer your question; there may be more than one. In each box you land in, write the regret as if it were an ending from the old books, finishing with THE END. You never sent the letter. THE END. Then write a new beginning idea underneath... A year from now, I’d love to look back and see that I... Pick the branch that tugs at you most, ink it in bold and write one small step you’ll take this week.

If you’d rather just journal and reflect;

• Which “if only...” still follows me around?

• What do I wish I could turn back the page on?

PPS Choose Your Own AI Prompt Adventure. Two prompts this week, and you get to pick. If you’re in the mood for some fun, turn to Prompt A. If you’d rather sit with something a little deeper, turn to Prompt B. Fingers out of the page, please.

Prompt A, for fun. Paste this into your favourite assistant and bring a dilemma, big or small.

Write me a Choose Your Own Adventure page in the style of an 80s gamebook, starring me, about this real dilemma: [describe it in a sentence]. Make it gloriously over the top... caves, dragons, suspicious wizards, the lot. End the page with two choices and page numbers, then wait for me to pick. Keep going until I reach an ending, glorious or grim, and finish with THE END.

No rerolls allowed. Afterwards, notice which choice you made without thinking. That might be the one you already knew.

Prompt B, for reflection. Pick one of the regrets from your spread and paste this into your favourite assistant.

I’d like to reflect gently on a regret. Here it is: [describe it]. Daniel Pink says every regret is a photographic negative of something we value. Ask me one question at a time, no more than five, to help me see what this regret shows about what matters to me. Please don’t reassure me or try to fix it. When we’re done, tell me in two or three sentences what value you heard, and ask me what one choice this week would honour it.

Then close the chat and reflect on the value.

PPPS This week’s soundtrack is Regret by New Order. It’s 1993 full of promise and Bernard Sumner sings it like a man shrugging at the very idea of looking back.

Have you ever been so tired and emotionally drained that you don’t quite trust what you’ll say next?

I’ve been running on fumes this week.

A bit under the weather, tired and missing Anna SO much it knocks the wind out of me at the strangest of moments... and feeling a little lost and scared too, the fear has no obvious shape just foreboding about who I might become when this worn out. My reactions can let me down with stuff feeling too loud and too close. Is this thing in front of me really such a big deal? A brief word or phrase reads like a telling off and I can feel retorts forming before I’ve decided whether they are a good idea or not.

That’s the part that scares me. When you feel lost, it’s very easy to grab at anything that gives you a sense of control... and being cross seems to be an easier thing to hang on to than other emotions. Plenty of people around me seem to be in the same boat. Worn thin, tired and carrying things others don’t necessarily see. So I’ve been wondering what would actually help us in those moments and I realised that I’ve written more careful instructions for AI than I have ever written for myself. Use British English. Be honest. Challenge my assumptions. Please stop saying delve or crucial. I can be wonderfully specific about how I want a chatbot to behave, yet apparently I expect myself to navigate grief, tiredness and everyday stuff and nonsense with no instructions beyond “try not to be a knob”.

There may be room for improvement here.

The difficult thing is that knowing what really matters doesn’t automatically make you serene about everything else. You can understand, with horrific clarity, how short and precious life is and still get ridiculously het up… then feel cross with yourself for wasting energy being cross, the joys of being a human in this messed up timeline.

So what would actually help? “Life is short” is true, but it doesn’t tell me what to do with the terse reply I’m about to give which will probably make things ten times worse. “Be calmer” is an admirable ambition and a deeply irritating instruction when I’m already wound up.

I think we need a reminder to reach for when we don’t have the energy to talk ourselves all the way back to perspective. Something that helps us decide what to do next. Which is what drew me to philosophical razors this morning.

A rummage in the razor drawer

Philosophical razors are short rules of thumb for cutting through tangled thinking. I wondered whether I could borrow a few of these ideas and make some of my own, for the everyday business of being a human when life feels a little pooey. For example, “try muddle before malice” gives me a useful place to start with an abrupt email. Before deciding someone is being mean, I can check what they meant. The email hasn’t changed but I’ve given myself another possible explanation, and a choice about how to respond.

That’s how a little rule becomes useful as a map. I know the direction I want to go in... towards kindness, towards those I love, towards spending my time on things that matter to me. But when I’m tired or upset, I can lose sight of the next turn. A few words, chosen while I’m thinking clearly, might help me find it again. I could still be sad. The day could still be difficult. But perhaps I could get through that moment without adding a row, a regret or hours of stewing to everything else I’m already carrying. That feels like a useful, achievable kind of hope.

Before making my own, I went looking at a few of the originals. These are starting points for thinking, and each has its limits. You still have to pay attention to what’s actually happening.

The famous one is Occam’s razor, named after the medieval friar and philosopher William of Ockham. The principle recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements, paraphrased as ‘the simplest explanation is the most likely’ has roots even older than Ockham, a rule about simplicity has a complicated history. For everyday purposes, I like this version; “before constructing an elaborate theory about why everything feels awful, check whether you’re tired or hungry” *grin*.

Then there’s Hickam’s dictum, a medical counterweight commonly attributed to the physician John Hickam. “Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please.” One neat explanation doesn’t necessarily account for everything. I’m borrowing that idea very loosely for feelings. You can be grieving AND tired AND annoyed about something that really is annoying. You can also laugh, look forward to something and have a lovely afternoon. You can have as many feelings as you damn well please.

Hanlon’s razor appeared under that name in Murphy’s Law Book Two in 1980. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” I’d prefer “muddle” to “stupidity”, especially this week. People forget. Instructions confuse. Someone thinks someone else has done the thing, I have absolutely been someone.

And two more that feel very relevant against a backdrop of noisy AI news Hitchens’s razor says that what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. The Sagan standard says extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Useful when a headline announces that AI will either save civilisation or finish it off. Useful, too, when my own brain presents “everyone is cross at you” as a researched finding. Whatever my tired brain asserts my rested brain is allowed to question. I can take a concern seriously while asking what actually supports it.

The appeal of these little rules is that they give a question to ask before committing to the story in our heads.

Custom instructions for this human

Asimov set out his Three Laws of Robotics in Runaround in 1942, then spent years exploring how apparently clear rules could get complicated in practice. That feels relevant to anyone who has ever resolved to “be more patient” and subsequently encountered other people.

I’m borrowing the idea of custom instructions from robots and AI. A few reminders and rules about how I want to respond when things get messy. Mine need to be short enough to remember when I’m tired, and forgiving enough to be useful after I’ve already got something wrong.

If the machines get guardrails, so can we and ours should be gentler.

There’s a song running through all this for me too. Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs, one of my favourite songs of all time, tangled up with fab nights out with Anna and our other friends... it feels like the right soundtrack for trying to find my bearings this week.

So here’s my map. A reminder for when I’m judging someone else, one for when I’m judging myself, one for when I’m about to react and one for deciding what I want to keep doing myself. Four compass points and someone very important in the middle. Sarah’s Razors if you will;

North... try muddle before malice

Before deciding someone is being deliberately difficult, leave room for a less dramatic explanation. Perhaps they misunderstood. Perhaps they’re overwhelmed. Perhaps the email I’ve mentally added a sarcastic voice to was written by someone in a rush to get out of the door and home to their family I can ask what they meant. I can also notice patterns and set boundaries when behaviour keeps causing harm. Starting generously leaves room to change my mind when I know more.

I’d quite like to extend some of that generosity to myself. Being below my best doesn’t mean I’ve become a dreadful person. It just might mean I’m below my best.

East... let more than one thing be true

Thank you, Dr Hickam. This is the one I need when I catch myself thinking I should be handling everything better because I know what really matters. I can love my life and find today difficult. I can miss Anna and enjoy a ridiculous joke. I can be hopeful about AI and worried about what we lose when we hand too much over.

None of those feelings requires me to cancel another. There’s room for all of them, even when I’d prefer a simpler arrangement.

South... if it can wait, let kindness catch up

The important bit is “if it can wait”. Some things need addressing now. Plenty of things can survive a cup of coffee, or a day or two to reflect before I address them. That reply I’m composing with my shoulders up around my ears? It can probably wait. I might still need to say something afterwards. I might say exactly the same thing, with fewer sharp edges and a much better chance of being heard.

And if I’ve already snapped, kindness can catch up through an apology. “Sorry, that came out badly” is a perfectly good way back.

West... keep a hand in what makes you feel alive

This is my AI razor, and a small piece of what I’ve been calling Purpose Proofing. Before handing something over, I ask myself what I would miss if I stopped doing it myself. Sometimes the answer is absolutely nothing. Wonderful, off it goes. Other times, the effort contains something I treasure. Finding my words, learning a skill, making a wobbly drawing, choosing what I really think. AI can help with those things too. The question is which parts I want help with and which parts I want to experience. Getting a finished thing and having the experience of making it can matter in different ways.

That’s part of the ikigai risk of AI for me. I could get so efficient at producing things that I gradually remove the bits that make doing them worthwhile. This little rule asks me to notice while I still have a choice.

At the centre... what would Anna say?

This one makes me smile and ache at the exact same time.

I can ask myself that question and remember the person I knew. I can think about what her friendship taught me, the good times we had and how I want to carry that love into the way I treat people now. She was curious about AI too, we spoke about it in relation to creativity and what might it make possible. I’d have loved to be talking to her over a carrot cake about razors, I’m also thinking that often she’d tell me to stop worrying so much and that sometimes it IS the other person acting like a knob.

Perhaps my next useful move is a coffee, an awesome tune, a hug or a conversation. Every map has a legend, the key that helps you understand what you’re looking at. Anna, a legend in both senses of the word, belongs at the centre of mine. Some people keep helping us find our way long after we wish, desperately, that we could ask their advice in person.

Finding my way back

I don’t want to give grief a job. It doesn’t have to become positive fuel or teach me something every week. Missing someone is enough to be carrying. But when I have a little energy, I can choose where some of it goes. Towards a friend. Towards making something. Towards a kinder reply. Towards putting on a bloody brilliant song and letting myself enjoy it, even if I cry as well.

There’s ikigai in those ordinary choices. The things that make a day feel worth being here for, including the days when we don’t achieve very much of anything at all.

I’m sure I’ll forget every one of these rules at some point. That’s why I want them in my journal, where I can find them again. A map is most useful after you’ve taken a wrong turn. Perhaps making the most of today can be as manageable as giving a little more attention to something I love. A message to someone I’ve been meaning to catch up with. A bit of patience for the tired woman writing this.

Beautiful souls, what’s a little rule that helps you find your way back on a difficult day? It can come from a philosopher, a fictional character, someone you love or your own hard won experience… I’d love us to build up a library we can all borrow from when needed.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS ✍️ Draw your own map and compass

Open your journal and draw out a lovely fantasy land map and next to it a compass. Give each point a reminder you’d find useful on a rubbish day. In the centre, put a person, question or value that helps you centre and find your bearings.

Each time you reach for a reminder, draw a little star beside it. At the end of your journal period, notice which ones helped the most, you’re allowed to redraw your map in your new journal with refined reminders.

PPS 🤖 A little help finding your bearings

Try this with your favourite AI tool:

“Here’s something that’s been getting me het up: [share one example].

Help me turn this into a personal ‘razor’: a short, memorable rule of thumb to guide me when something similar happens again.

Start by asking me questions, one at a time. Explore what bothered me, what I might be assuming, what matters to me and what’s within my control. Follow my answers rather than a fixed checklist. Don’t rush to offer advice or automatically agree with my interpretation.

Once you understand enough, suggest one razor in words that sound like me. Make it specific enough to help me choose my next action, and check whether it feels right.

Then help me test it: what would following it look like in my example, and when might it be unhelpful? Refine it with me until it earns a place on my little map back to what matters.”

You get the final edit, especially if it starts sounding too much like a motivational poster *grin*

PPPS 🎧 This week’s soundtrack, Maps by Yeah Yeah Yeahs

One of my favourite songs of all time, takes me back to fab nights out with Anna and our crowd. That mixture of love and longing means something else now of course, but I love that it contains the repeating refrain about maps and love, for sure how to find your way forward on difficult days… turn it up and sing along with me.

On Tuesday night I sat on an uncomfortable bar stool in Noa Market Hall with a microphone in one hand and my lilac bullet journal open on my lap. CREATIVITY was exuberantly sprawled at the top of page 96 in rainbow pastel lettering above lots of questions, tick boxes, a cloud for what scared me and another for what excited me. AGENCY had earned orange capitals, an exclamation mark and an arrow.

There were cameras on tripods, a room full of faces and a giant screen behind us reading RELENTLESS: The Rise of the AI Tide. Underneath my preparation, a voice in my head was constantly needling that I was there to be the sacrificial lamb.

I use AI every day and very much love it (most of the time). I was about to say so in a room full of creative people, with what I suspected to be, very different feelings about it, on film. My handwritten notes and doodles were going to have to do quite a lot of emotional support work *grin*

Loving AI out loud

The evening was a live debate about AI and the future of creativity, filmed by Dave Armstrong of DAM Productions for his documentary about our Island and AI. I’d already had the pleasure of being interviewed for it (check out the teaser trailer link for dramatic drone shot of me striding along one of our harbours hehe). This time I was sharing a panel with Dave Artus, Mike Wilson, Cliff Chapman and Quinn Shipton, with Chris Kissack moderating.

Being introduced as an optimist felt a little like having a sign pinned to my dress saying “tomatoes this way, please”. Some of the people around me had very good reasons to be angry or frightened about what AI could mean for their work.

What happened was respectful and fascinating. Chris guided the conversation beautifully, and there was room for disagreement without the evening becoming a contest over who could sound most certain. Dave’s post the next morning opened with “No physical blows exchanged!” I was mostly relieved that I’d been able to bring my complicated feelings into the room and be heard.

I came away so proud of our tiny Island for making safe space for this. People whose livelihoods, creativity and hopes give them different reasons to care, sitting together in a café and sharing openly. I hope the documentary carries some of that feeling to people who weren’t there.

The warmth didn’t settle the difficult questions, but I hope it inspires others to want to keep exploring them together so that we collectively shape our future, including the question underneath so many promises about AI… if it saves us time, who gets to decide what happens to that time?

The geeky girly in the cloud

Near the top of my journal page, inside a yellow cloud, I’d written “me”. Underneath… geeky girly, reading, writing, drawing, computer games and programming, Asimov’s robots… super sensitive and emotional, with a little smiley face to soften my own critique.

That’s the person who gets super excited about AI helping someone bring an idea to life. It’s also the person who worries about consent, livelihoods, bias, environmental costs and who holds the power. My enthusiasm and my fear come from caring about what happens to people.

When I first wrote about the ikigai risk of AI, I reflected on helping build one of the Island’s earliest online communities. I remembered the excitement of connecting people, and wondered, with hindsight, whether I could have done more to anticipate harm. That question still follows me. I know how easy it is to fall in love with what a technology makes possible before properly considering what it might change.

Outside several lovely communities I’ve found, the loudest AI conversations can feel like a choice between passionate rejection and tech bro certainty, with productivity promises and predictions of doom sometimes arriving from the same direction. It can be hard to hear your own questions in all that noise.

I don’t want my enjoyment mistaken for indifference to harm. Equally, I don’t want my concerns dismissed as a failure to understand the opportunity. And I need to offer other people that same generosity. Someone can understand AI and decide they don’t want to use it. Someone can be angry for very good reasons. They still belong in the conversation.

Who gets to decide which is the boring bit?

One of the questions Chris sent us beforehand is a theme I’ve explored many times before. We are told that AI will take away the boring work and leave people free to be creative. Lovely, but who gets to decide which bit is boring?

Nobody needed me to hand-letter CREATIVITY in pastel colours. AI could have organised the panel questions into an impressive set of notes for me...but mind mapping my thoughts gave me time to notice where my feelings and arguments didn’t quite line up. I was doing some of the thinking as I wrote, and also enjoying a small way of expressing myself in words and colours, making the notes feel really mine.

There’s a bigger version of this in becoming the person someone asks for help. That lovely moment when a colleague says, “Could you show me how?” or a friend trusts you with an unfinished idea because they value what you might notice. You’ve learned something, and now you get to help.

Getting there involves being a beginner at some point, there’s no shortcut to gaining that trusted taste. Trying, asking, making mistakes and gradually developing judgement. Some of those earlier stage tasks may look like obvious things to automate. They may also be where someone gets the practice that helps them become confident and capable. If we remove those opportunities, how will we help the next person learn?

This is an aspect of what I mean by the ikigai risk of AI. The possibility that, while making things faster and easier, we weaken some of the experiences through which people find meaning. Learning, expressing ourselves, contributing, being recognised and feeling connected can matter enormously, even when they don’t appear in the calculation of time saved.

I’m frightened of a future in which we become even better at producing things people don’t really need while giving too little thought to how people find their place and sustainably thrive. And I’m hopeful because AI could help someone find theirs… understand an idea, express something they’ve struggled to say, begin a project or discover an ability they didn’t know they had.

I don’t want to romanticise difficulty or suggest that needing assistance makes an achievement less yours. I want to know whether the help gives you more room to learn, choose and enjoy what you’re doing. Nor should being useful become another condition we place on belonging. We deserve care and pleasure when we have nothing left to give.

Caution has something to teach us

Who gets to feel hopeful about AI also depends on who gets to shape what happens next. If you’ve had to work especially hard to be heard, paid fairly or taken seriously, yet another promise of progress deserves careful examination. I don’t want people to confuse that experience with a lack of imagination. It’s really hard to feel hopeful when you’ve repeatedly experienced the sharp end of inequity.

Research reviewed by Harvard Business School’s AI Institute describes women’s concerns that using AI will be seen as cheating or a sign of lower ability. It also reports research in which identical AI-assisted work received lower competence ratings when attributed to a female engineer. Confidence is hardly the thing that needs fixing there.

Mara Bolis, writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, uses the phrase fierce ambivalence which I adore… welcoming what AI can make possible while demanding fairness, transparency and safety. That feels close to the combination I’m trying to live with, enthusiasm with expectations attached.

The conversations I value in She Writes AI, the Isle of Man AI Community of Practice, the AI Lyceum, The AI Social and Women of AI give those mixed feelings room. I can be excited about a technology or tool AND worried about its consequences. Tuesday’s panel brought that possibility into a wider public space, including people whose experience of AI differs from mine.

I’d love us to make that a habit. Before changing someone’s working day, ask what they value about it. Before removing a junior task, ask how the learning will happen. Before describing someone as resistant, ask what they’re worried about losing. Then give their answers enough weight to influence the decision.

The time has to help us thrive surely?

There’s another question in my notes “time saved, given back?”

If every hour saved fills immediately with more work, the person doing it may never get the calmer day they were promised. The benefit will show up somewhere else, while they finish the week just as tired. That needs decisions from employers and the people building and selling these systems as well as communities and Governments, it cannot be solved by individuals learning to prompt more cleverly.

What would I like the time for? Enough patience left for a proper conversation. The energy to write something I care about. Learning something because it interests me. Helping someone without feeling I’m stealing time from something else. An evening that doesn’t need to justify itself by becoming an achievement. Time to exercise, enjoy nature and eat healthier food.

Saving time becomes progress when people have more room to live meaningfully, and a real say in what changes. That is the direction I want to keep exploring here. Alongside the risks, I want to look for the uses that make a life feel fuller… a little more confidence, a creative door opening, a task becoming manageable, enough energy left for something lovely.

That also means paying attention when the answer is to do something ourselves, ask another human or leave the tool alone. The point of seeking ikigai is to notice what makes life worth living. I want my experiments with AI to help answer that.

More rooms like this

A conversation in a café doesn’t resolve questions of consent, employment or accountability… but it gives us a chance to understand what matters to the people affected, and to ask better questions of those making decisions.

I’m grateful to Dave for making the documentary and creating space for this evening, to Chris for guiding it, and to my fellow panellists and everyone who came along. I hadn’t needed everyone to agree with me. I’d needed enough room to say what I thought, listen properly and keep thinking… for us all to respect each other and connect in real life a little more.

Among all the doodles in my journal, I wrote “Will it help more people thrive?” Looking back, that question belongs to the whole evening. I want more people to get a say in the answer, including the people who are frightened or angry, the people who are curious and the people who haven’t been asked yet.

I’m the geeky girly with the coloured pens, still excited AND worried. But sitting on that stool gave me something hopeful, the experience of a difficult conversation that I wanted to continue. I’m proud of our Island for helping make it happen. For all my talk about saving time, that evening felt like a very good way to spend some of it.

What would you like AI to make more room for in your life, and what would you want it to leave in your hands?

A declaration of process… this essay began with a hand-drawn spread in my journal through to real life conversations and interviews, human braindumping of thoughts and fears which grew through conversations with Claude and ChatGPT and then were taken into Google docs for lots of rewriting and editing before publishing in Substack. All of the experiences and values are mine, as are most of the words… and I’m definitely responsible for what I publish.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS ✍️ for the bullet journallers

Choose a task you might use AI to help with. Write it at the centre of a mind map spread, then around the outside consider what you and your team learns or enjoys in the doing. Underneath you could draw out the steps and highlight which could or couldn’t be done by AI. Estimate how much time might be saved and write about what you would like the saved time or energy for.

At the very bottom, add Who else does this affect, and have they had a say? If it’s a team decision, take the page into a conversation and let the answers change the plan.

PPS 🤖 an AI prompt to try

“I’m considering using AI to help with [task]. Ask me one question at a time about what I find draining, what I enjoy or learn through doing it, who else is affected, and what I would like any saved time or energy for. Don’t assume using AI is the best outcome or that my caution needs fixing. Base your reflection on what I tell you, and flag anything uncertain. Then help me choose one small, reversible experiment, which could include doing it without AI. Suggest how I could notice whether it leaves me with more understanding, confidence, connection or enjoyment, as well as saving time. Help me identify whose input I need before changing anything that affects other people.”

PPPS 🎶 Today’s soundtrack

Two Tribes by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. A suitably dramatic soundtrack for the loudest corners of the AI debate, and a little Gen X energy for your weekend. The title fits the pressure to pick a side that you often feel on this topic, or any other topic for that matter due to shouty social media. The evening reminded me how much more interesting people become when we give them room to be complicated and find ways to move forward together.

Joe Cocker’s With a Little Help from My Friends feels like the right soundtrack for recovering from this weekend. Although, looking at what my colleagues and so many other people have put into it, a little help is nowhere near the truth.

I’ve spent the whole weekend working at The Big Manx Feast here on the Isle of Man. My contribution was very, very small though my tiredness is so very huge *grin*

As a consequence this is perhaps my shortest essay yet… with the weekend almost over and my desire to not break my weekly publishing streak just slightly stronger than my need to crash on my sofa… oh and a massive urge to express that most people are just brilliant aren’t they?!

Behind the Feast

The Feast has been a fabulous celebration of food, drink, culture, art, producers and so much more. The programme brought together Manx dancing, live music, cookery demonstrations and even butter churning. So many ways to discover what people here grow, make, create and care about… and behind all of that are the people who make it possible.

My colleagues have put an enormous amount of work into this, alongside so very many others. There’s a whole world of organising, thinking ahead and sorting things out behind an event that somebody else gets to turn up to and enjoy.

I’ve been thinking about how gorgeous a thing that is… Taking all that care and effort and turning it into a good day out for other people in our community.

The things we do together

We talk a lot about finding our purpose. Our calling, a particular thing. I certainly spend enough time thinking and writing about my journey.

But this weekend reminds me how much meaning lives in the things we do together and especially for others. There’s room to bring a little of yourself to something that other people have poured themselves into. To lend a hand, appreciate the work and be glad you could play a small part.

Perhaps that’s one of the gentler ways into ikigai. You don’t have to solve the enormous question of what your whole life is for before you can help with what’s happening in front of you.

Sometimes, being close to other people’s enthusiasm and care reminds you how much there is to love about the place you live.

Honourably tired

Japanese has a phrase I want to say to each and every one of them. Otsukaresama deshita お疲れ様でした. Colleagues say it to each other at the end of the day as they reach for their coats, and it usually gets translated as “thank you for your hard work”. Take it apart though, and it’s even lovelier. Tsukare means tiredness. The o at the front and the sama at the end are both marks of respect. Nobody in Tokyo is thinking about it this literally, in the same way we’ve forgotten that goodbye began as “God be with you”... but piece by piece it comes out as something like “you are honourably tired”.

I love that. We usually treat tiredness as a problem, this concept though allows it to be noticed and met with respect.

The good ache of long days spent making something happen alongside other people.

So, to my colleagues and everyone who helped make the event happen, thank you. Otsukaresama deshita. I hope you get a moment to take in what you’ve created, as well as a very well earned sit down.

I came to this google doc just now stressing about how little time I had left, and worrying that I hadn’t had time to think about ikigai much this weekend.

Though now I think about it I realise that in getting a little help from my friends, we were all getting to experience a small helping of ikigai.

Who makes lovely things happen in your corner of the world?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - A bullet journal spread idea. Two lists on facing pages. On the left, “A little help I received”... every person whose effort made your week better, however small, from the colleague who sorted the thing to the stranger who held the door. On the right, “A little help I gave”... the small parts you played in somebody else’s good day. Small things count, especially the ones you almost forgot to notice. When you’ve finished, pick one name from the left hand page and thank them.

PPS - An AI prompt to try with thinking mode engaged

“I recently enjoyed [an event, a meal, a day out, a project that went well]. Take your time and think carefully. List the behind the scenes jobs that probably made it possible, including the ones I would never have noticed as a guest. Finish with the three jobs most likely to go unthanked.”

Then close the laptop and go and thank one of them. I tried it in my head on the Feast and it would surface things like licensing, waste collection, signage and whoever stood in a car park all day.

PPPS - This week’s soundtrack is With a Little Help from My Friends by Joe Cocker. A big hearted song for a weekend made possible by lots of people bringing something of themselves.

I went to our pre election meeting with seven boxes drawn on a page. One for each candidate. Every time somebody said something fundamentally opposed to what I value, or something I understood the evidence to suggest would cause more harm than good, I put a cross in their box.

My democratic anxiety requires a bullet journal spread.

I was trying to be methodical. I was also, as the crosses accumulated, becoming angry and worried and sad. Hearing people describe a position and I’m thinking about the next generations having to live with those choices. How is it that what had seemed to be getting better, seems to be stalling or going backwards in terms of public agreement on what it means for people and planet to thrive?

By the end of the session there were far too many people I felt I simply couldn’t vote for, and I’d wanted more hope and positive choice than that. I’m so conscious that aside from scientific rigour, I want to see candidates with ethics who are skilled in consensus building, collaboration, critical thinking and innovative ideas to keep what makes our Island special while testing new stuff that makes it an even more awesome place to live and work.

I do hugely respect anyone with the guts to stand, but some of what I heard disappointed me and I have been trying to process my feelings since.

Subjects that keep me up at night

I have many times written about them in my 12 favourite problems spread… but perhaps one of my biggest worries wasn’t listed because I thought it was finally being treated appropriately, the climate emergency. Apparently not though with the mentions of opening new gas fields that would put more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. The same money could go into wind, tide, solar and storage instead, giving us energy that never runs out, innovation we can export and jobs with a future attached. Don’t get me wrong I’d respect someone saying they aren’t prioritising investment in renewables right now, as long as they aren’t making the problem worse, we could buy more green electricity from the UK (but that doesn’t solve energy security or ability to influence pricing).

Then there’s the different facets of inequality, and the way certain words were spoken on that stage sounding like the loudest and meanest corners of social media, words that tend to make people angrier at each other and less tolerant or curious… made me feel so very sad.

I think what upset me the most though was the certainty, perhaps a lack of humility from some quarters. Subjects where consequences could still be landing long after this election is forgotten, dismissed in a handful of confident sentences by people who aren’t experts on all topics and who may soon have considerable influence over the place I love.

I grew up expecting knowledge to keep pulling us all steadily forward. Learn more, understand more, do better. It hurts to see knowing itself go a little out of fashion.

Disagreement I can do, it is part of democracy and it’s so interesting to me to analyse source evidence and science and try to make better decisions accordingly. What troubles me is how easily a polished answer can pass for a sound one, particularly when a speaker seems unruffled by its consequences. I am not naturally a cool cucumber. I care about many issues deeply, and I’ve wondered whether becoming wiser means becoming less bothered?

There is a question underneath that one. Could I stand? Could I be on that stage and listen to an answer I found alarming and still take time to understand the driver for it? Would people understand me arguing against it, or decide I was being too emotional before I had finished trying to lay out my rationale?

The thing I worry might count against me is something I want from the people I vote for. I want them to be bothered by the prospect of avoidable harm. I also want them to think carefully about what to do next.

The soft stuff becomes the hard stuff

Finding things that matter can hurt. If I care about fairness, unfairness will upset me. If I care about people whose lives are different from mine, policies affecting them stop being abstract exercises. Meaning makes us vulnerable but I don’t think the answer is to care less.

Sometimes I am emotional because I have thought deeply, following the consequences all the way down to somebody’s future. I’m painfully aware though that that doesn’t automatically make me right. People believe incorrect things with extraordinary sincerity, and I am people.

So I have started a practice where I imagine four people meeting with me when I want to work through a position on a topic;

• Caring Cassie says, listen carefully to understand why this really matters.

• Evidence Edna asks, what is actually true about available options?

• Curious Caleb asks, what might we be missing?

• Humble Herbie reminds us that we could still be wrong and be open to learning more.

Care without evidence is a feeling, evidence without care is a spreadsheet. Both without curiosity is a fight, which may produce a winner rather than a better outcome.

There was a question about the need for an equality champion, and some of the answers landed somewhere I didn’t expect. I don’t think any of them intended to hurt anyone, but a few answers made it plain that the person giving them could not see the harm their position might cause, maybe they had never been in those shoes or properly listened to others who had. Call it the lived experience gap. When you have never been the person turned away, talked over, priced out or treated as a problem to be managed, it is easy to file fairness under the soft stuff. Something for after the serious business of the economy.

I’ve seen the soft stuff become the hard stuff, how hard life can become when people feel unseen or struggle to get support. That is why I want fairness considered while decisions are being made, with the people affected in the room. What gets dismissed as the soft stuff can become painfully practical in someone’s daily life.

I wonder how an evening like that lands with someone who already feels politics has little to offer them? Why would you engage with a process where nobody sounds like they care about what you know are serious issues. Nobody saying your life could be kinder and here is how, nobody seems to have noticed you at all? Switching off looks like apathy but is often self preservation.

So the voice I found myself searching for that night was a particular blend. Kind and confident. Strategic and sensible. Someone who knows in their body how difficult life can be for some people here, and who has credible ideas for making it less so.

People are equal, ideas are not

Respecting someone’s humanity doesn’t oblige me to treat their every claim as credible. Some claims are supported by huge bodies of evidence, some are plausible and uncertain, some have been tested and found wanting. Being open minded also means understanding the source and quality of data you use to form an opinion.

When I catch myself thinking why can’t people see what would be better for all of us, I need to pause. A proposal I find exciting may look different to someone worried about getting to work or paying another bill. Their objection might reveal a problem the proposal needs to solve. Science can show us likely consequences, but deciding what is fair and who carries the burden needs the people who will carry it.

Conviction without contempt for those who think differently, takes a lot of practice and discipline!

Part of my future vision is one where people come together more often in real life… where there are healthier and vibrant walkable cities, towns and villages with lots of entrepreneurs, shops and experiences, gorgeous greenery, orchards and flowers (with solutions for those who can’t walk of course), places where people feel safe to linger and places for them to sit in beautiful surroundings and have community conversations… solar panels and windmills where they make sense, and especially to heat and power hubs for free where people can help each other… communities where having children or getting older doesn’t mean disappearing from public life.

My search for ikigai includes wanting other people to have the time, safety and belonging to discover theirs too.

Whoever is elected will be one of twenty four voices in the House of Keys. I found that reassuring when worried about certain policy positions, then felt its other edge, because a wonderful candidate cannot enact everything I hope for either. Shared power is a safeguard. It also means persuasion and patience, which feel agonising when problems are urgent.

Before polling day

Care fiercely, think carefully. Perhaps that is the sentence I needed after the debate. Care enough to be disturbed, and think carefully enough to check what the disturbance is telling me.

I cannot make permanent despair my contribution to democracy.

So this weekend I am going back to my page of seven boxes and running the four voices practice against every cross I made. For each policy position that upset me; What am I trying to protect? What evidence needs checking? Whose experience am I missing? What would make me revise my view? Some crosses will no doubt survive... but maybe one or two will turn into questions, and a question is something I can take to a candidate to carry on the conversation and hopefully learn and grow together.

Also an invitation, offered with warmth to the seven people whose names are on my page (or any candidates right across the Island)... there is still time before polling day for all of us to revisit a topic. What did we miss? Who should we hear from? What would change our minds? I would find it reassuring to hear a candidate say “I have listened, looked again and changed my view”.

We tend to treat that as weakness in a candidate. I think it is the most reassuring thing one could possibly do. It tells me that when new evidence arrives after the election, and it will, you will look at that too. A willingness to minimise harm in every decision you make is the quality I am voting for above any single policy.

And to everyone else reading, try the four voices on the thing you are most certain about, that is where they are needed.

I want to keep looking for evidence even when it might prove me wrong, and I love finding people willing to do some of the work beside me.

Just under a fortnight left. Enough time to change a mind, including mine.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on all this… what’s something you care about so much that staying calm becomes difficult? What’s something you’ve changed your mind about and what helped you see it differently?

Much love

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS ✍️ For your bullet journal

Journal spread idea; Draw a meeting table with four friends sat round it, create a centrepiece with a topic written on the title card, then in each of the quadrants brainstorm the words that relate for you.

Journal prompt idea; Pick a thing I am certain about or a topic I’d like to explore again. What am I trying to protect? What evidence needs checking? Whose experience am I missing? What would make me revise my view?

PPS 🌟 An AI reflection prompt

“Think carefully and take your time before you answer. I want to care deeply about an issue without sliding into contempt for the people who disagree with me. Here is the issue, and the position I find hardest to hear... [describe them]. Help me build a strong, fair version of that position without inventing motives for anyone or excusing harm. Then help me separate out factual claims, the values and the practical worries on both sides. Ask me what evidence supports my own view and what might change my mind. Be warm, be honest and be willing to challenge me.”

PPPS 🎶 This week’s soundtrack

“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears.

I spent my Bank Holiday Monday mooching and journalling.

Daydreaming, listening to podcasts, making notes about what I was learning and thinking, doodling and flicking back to other spreads I was still working through.

Elizabeth Day’s fabulous How to Fail interview with Andy Burnham hugely resonated, I got emotional several times and was left feeling SUCH a sense of hope I haven’t had from a politician talking in ages! Hearing him reflect on Hillsborough and the choice he faced of toeing the party line or standing with the people he grew up with, made me jump straight back to my values spread and I sat for a while trying to pin down exactly why I admired it so much. Thinking about specific words to describe what I was seeing, was it courage? vulnerability?

Then a word arrived for me that I didn’t already have written on my values page, INTEGRITY.

Which set me off with several research strands to assess its fit for my thinking.

Down the dictionary rabbit hole

Integrity comes from the Latin integritas, derived from integer, meaning whole, intact, untouched. The same word many of us learned in maths, a whole number, one that isn’t split into fractions. So integrity doesn’t really mean honesty, but moreso WHOLENESS, of being undivided (something I also wrote about when defining coherence). Honesty comes downstream of that, you tell the truth because lying would split you into two versions of you and that just isn’t something you can cope with.

So yeah, armed with shiny etymology, I did what I always do with words that matter to me, I wrote it in fineliner on a Leuchtturm1917 page.

If you’ve been here a while you’ll know this isn’t my first values rodeo. I wrote a practical guide to finding your values in the early days, then went deeper with the Schwartz Values Wheel when I decoded my talent DNA. This is at least my fourth values spread across as many journals, and I really need you to hear that the repetition is not boring… the repetition IS the exercise and where you get the benefits over time. The first time, you mostly write down words you aspire to be, even if you struggle to embody all of them all of the time. The second time, you notice which words survived the year, and which new ones emerged and which you perhaps no longer care so much about… by the third and fourth, patterns emerge but also sometimes something floats up that feels like a really important lesson.

This time, sparkly highlights and all (spread below), it was integrity… but when I tried to plot it on the wheel, I realised that it didn’t neatly map to just one place which I hadn’t noticed happening before.

Quick refresher for newer readers… the ten labels on Schwartz’s wheel are for FAMILIES of values, ten broad motivations arranged in a circle where neighbours are natural allies and opposites pull against each other. Each segment can align to everyday value words; honesty and loyalty live in benevolence, creativity and freedom live in self direction, politeness and self discipline live in conformity. The exercise I do in my journal spread is to brainstorm the words that matter first, then working out which family each one belongs to.

I struggled with integrity. Depending on what you mean by it, it could land in self direction (being true to yourself, acting on your own principles) or in benevolence (being someone others can rely on, keeping your word), with perhaps even a little nudge into the conservation side too when you are thinking about remaining whole. I realised that I was definitely being BOTH/AND coded with my thinking, my most important value word refusing to pick a side.

Of course it won’t sit in one segment. A word that means WHOLENESS cannot live in just a slice of you. So if it isn’t any one place, perhaps I’ve stumbled on something more like a rim... a thing that holds all the pieces together in one circle.

Your values are not always friends

The wheel is a map of tensions. The families are arranged so that pursuing something on one side can make its opposite harder to honour in the same decision. Openness to change pulls against conservation. Looking after yourself pulls against looking after everyone. Your values are not a cosy team all rowing in the same direction. Sometimes they fight.

I love AI, I work with it, I write about it, I believe in what it can do for people... AND I worry about the ethics of it, deeply.

I care about our planet with my whole heart... AND I live day to day inside a world where almost nobody in charge seems to be treating our changing climate as an emergency.

I want inequality halted and reversed... AND I operate inside systems that habitually, structurally perpetuate it.

I genuinely believe rest is productive and that wellbeing is the foundation everything else stands on... AND I still catch myself measuring a day by how much I produced.

None of those tensions make me a hypocrite. They make me a person holding more than one value at once. The wheel’s gift is showing you that the pull you feel is the geometry of caring about more than one thing, rather than a character flaw.

You don’t find out what you most value by listing lovely words in January and July. You find out in the moment two of them fight. The spread is a rehearsal, a low stakes way of asking yourself in advance, when it isn’t clear cut which way do I turn? That, I think, is what I was really admiring in that interview. Hillsborough put two different motivations of one values word in direct conflict.. loyalty to the government he served or loyalty to the people he came from.

Which opens a question I’ve circled in my journals for years, can values motivations even be classified as GOOD or bad?

My answer is mostly no when I’m being my best self. Judgement comes from your own frame, your own map of the world, not from some absolute scoreboard in the sky. One person’s healthy ambition is another’s greed, one person’s loyalty is another’s tribalism. The wheel itself is neutral about all this... every label on it is a legitimate human motivation, even the ones I personally find hardest to relate to.

If you add an assumption though the picture sharpens. If your north star is to minimise causing any harm in this world, then some hierarchies become obvious. Mine currently reads; responsibility over blame, honesty over image, resilience over comfort, curiosity over certainty, growth over pleasure. Not because blame, image, comfort, certainty and pleasure are villains, they’re all on the wheel for a reason, and comfort and pleasure will absolutely be seeing me later on this evening *grin*... but because when a pair is in conflict, I’ve already decided which way I will turn.

Then there are harder rankings, ones where good people part ways. There are those who would judge someone for standing firm against a local law, legal contract or a company edict in the name of human rights, or dignity, or wellness, or preserving our planet. Rules are rules, they’d say, and I do understand where they’re coming from... order and security sit on the wheel too, they keep a lot of our world turning… I just can’t be that person myself. Which is exactly why I so admire the people who stand against the norms when the norms are causing harm, and why that interview struck me the way it did.

Makoto, or staying whole

There’s a Japanese concept that captures where all this lands for me too, makoto 誠, usually translated as honesty or sincerity, one of the traditional bushido virtues. The character places the element for WORD beside the element for COMPLETION... Nitobe, in his classic Bushido The Soul of Japan, translated the pairing as Word and Perfect, using perfect in its old sense of completed, brought to wholeness. I think the traditional reading is beautiful and fitting; what you say, made complete in what you do. Your word, made whole. I love that it’s a doing word, a practice of closing the distance between thoughts and action, over and over, wholeness as a verb.

Which brings me to something I’ve believed for a long time… that bringing our whole selves to work is healthier for us and that we need to destigmatise it. I made the case in the language of wellbeing and creativity but now realise it was also an integrity argument in the oldest sense of the word. Every time we split ourselves into a work self and a real self, a public face and a private conviction, we disrupt our wholeness. Wholeness is not the same as total disclosure. Nobody owes a workplace access to every private, tender or potentially unsafe part of themselves. Sometimes integrity means setting a boundary. The question is whether adapting to the room protects your wholeness or separates you from it. Some small variance is just life, many of us flex and adapt and read the room, social skill rather than fraud. It only becomes corrosive when the gap grows so wide you can’t find your way back across it.

I believe that your values are the best way to become whole.

If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with AI, my other favourite subject... I asked recently in More Capable, Less Free? whether AI is increasing our agency or just our output, and what would still need to belong to me, even if I relied on AI every day, for that reliance to feel like an extension of my agency. I think this spread is a piece of my answer. AI can help me spot patterns and challenge the stories I tell myself. What it cannot do is want things on my behalf or carry the moral weight of the choice. The noticing can be collaborative, the authorship cannot be delegated. My values are what make me the author of my life rather than merely efficient at someone else’s defaults. Doing this work in this way is my agency maintenance.

Knowing your values is how you pick your battles. It is also how you forgive yourself for the ones you don’t fight.

Not every day is a battle though, most days are just living... school runs, spreadsheets, being patient with people who test you, doing your best inside imperfect systems while you work out how to nudge them (and ourselves) a little closer to better than not. Integrity doesn’t ask you to be infinite, it asks you to be whole, grace must live here too.

Seeing your values and daring to live them whole, is a way of aiming higher. More of us need to do that, when it is safe to do so… and more of us need to make it safer for each other too.

What’s your ___ over ___? I’d love to hear one value pairing where you’ve already decided which way you turn”... where do you hold two values that pull against each other, and have you forgiven yourself for it yet?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Bullet Journal Spread - Fancy running the spread yourself, even if (especially if) you’ve done it before? Here’s my process, fifteen minutes and two pages;

1. Brain dump, left page. Every word that feels like it matters, no editing, no filtering, repeats allowed.

2. Draw the wheel. Yes, by hand, wonky is fine. Something happens in the drawing that doesn’t happen in the reading.

3. Cluster. Four boxes: personal growth and openness to change, social growth and transcendence, personal protection and self enhancement, social protection and conservation. Sort your words in. Notice which boxes fill fastest.

4. Circle the wanderers. Any word that won’t sit in one segment gets a sparkly cloud. These are usually your most important ones, the values with more than one motivation underneath... your rim material.

5. Date it. Future you, doing this in a new journal, will thank present you for the comparison. The comparison is where the unlocks live.

PPS - AI prompt to try - photograph your finished spread, upload it, and try this;

“Here is my values brain dump and my attempt to map it onto the Schwartz Values Wheel categories. First, tell me which of my words map cleanly to one segment and which ones wander across several. Then, for the wanderer you suspect might matter most to me, ask me one question at a time to help me work out which motivations are underneath it FOR ME, naming a real tension in my life where my values pull in different directions, and rehearse with me which way I want to turn when it isn’t clear cut. Finally, help me write one sentence about how I want to show up when that value gets tested. Be warm but don’t flatter me, and don’t let me off with hypothetical answers.”

The wanderers are where the good conversations happen, with the AI and with yourself.

PPPS - Today’s soundtrack is The Whole of the Moon by The Waterboys, which has featured here before but it’s my second favourite song of all time… a song about someone who aimed that bit higher, who saw further and wider than everyone around them... It gives me the same big epic feeling every single time I hear it, that we can all choose to not settle for the slice, of the sky, of the wheel, of ourselves, when the whole is out there.

It was so very sad to hear of Dolly’s passing this week, what an extraordinary woman she was.

It’s a different shade of grief you feel for someone famous, and the fact that she had a somewhat reasonable innings as they say, makes it a little easier to bear. So my thoughts quickly turned to what it was that made her so loved and admired… it almost goes without saying that she was a huge talent, she also had a bloody shrewd head on her shoulders… but it was her kindness, her sense of humour and joy… and her strength of vision of herself and how she could effect change in this world via the sustained energy of her light, that made her such a hero to me.

My sadness didn’t need to be hurried away because beautiful rhinestone sparkly light arrived all by itself… in all the gorgeous posts and tributes with SO much evidence of Dolly’s goodness appearing everywhere. A song, a story of generosity, a flash of pink, a reminder of somebody who had felt braver or more themselves because she had been so gloriously herself first.

When a particularly sparkly person leaves our mortal plane, it makes me see with fresh eyes how widely they scattered that light, and consider how I can further their mission too.

I found the version of “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” that Dolly released in January for her eightieth birthday, with Lainey Wilson, Miley Cyrus, Queen Latifah and Reba McEntire, which I knew I had to feature as my soundtrack song today. It gathers voices and rises into a joyous celebration. It sounded to me like hope growing stronger because more people have joined the song.

And it arrived just as I was once again thinking about problems.

The problem with problems

As I have been working on my 12 Favourite Problems spread in my new bullet journal, it occurred to me that the word problem can sound so negative, and I’m someone who prides herself in trying to see positives!!… but these are not really supposed to be twelve reasons to lie awake at night over or to make your life more problematic. They are supposed to be a more conscious and controlled awareness of the enduring questions that catch our curiosity and concern… indicators of what matters to us that can therefore steer our sense of purpose.

What makes work worth doing? How can technology make us more human rather than less? How can I use my particular combination of experience, curiosity and voice to leave something better than I found it? Our favourite problems reveal something about our purpose because they show us where our attention keeps returning, and where what we love, what we know and what the world needs might meet.

Purpose can feel warm and glowing. It can also feel like a downer if we aren’t careful, drawing our eyes towards unfairness, confusion, suffering or wasted possibility and make us wonder whether we could ever really make a difference (always yes IMHO).

As I work through my evolving thoughts on these topics in my journal, and as I am learning to process the sadness I was already feeling, I realised I had created a thoughtful map of everything that needed attention, lots of negatives of our world, without really drawing any of the places I hoped those questions might lead, or indeed pointing out the many positives.

My problems can show me what I care about changing, but it’s so very important to build a picture of what we want to see instead too.

Bad is very good at getting our attention

A review of psychological research was given the wonderfully blunt title Bad Is Stronger Than Good. Its authors found that negative events, feedback and impressions often affect us more powerfully than positive equivalents.

This is not a personal failing. The strange noise in the car and the alarming headline seem more urgent than the many things continuing to function perfectly well. Noticing danger has its uses. But useful instincts can still give us an incomplete picture. If we only record what is broken or missing, purpose can begin to feel like permanent emergency work. We repair, resist and prevent, but rarely imagine, nurture or create.

Even hopeful projects can become organised around what we oppose. We know what we want less of, yet struggle to describe a future we would actually like to inhabit.

Fear may help us apply the brakes but it doesn’t help choose our destination.

Purpose needs a picture painting

This is the glorious counterpoint I now want beside my twelve favourite problems. A fresh spread titled 12 Favourite Possibilities.

Possibilities are glimmers of the goodness I want to move towards, protect or help grow. I’m consciously avoiding forced positive reframes, exhausting goals or pressure to manifest a flawless life through sufficiently sparkly thoughts.

What if technology increased people’s confidence without diminishing their agency? What if the Isle of Man could be ambitious about innovation while remaining unmistakably human and kind? Some possibilities belong to a future we have not made yet. Others are already here, waiting to be noticed.

They are present when a teacher watches understanding replace fear on somebody’s face. When a person with influence holds a door open for someone else. When friends can still find something to laugh about during an unbearable week. When I walk beside the sea with Henry and remember that being alive is SO not a productivity contest. They are present in gloriously sparkly people too. The ones whose kindness is not timid, whose joy is not trivial and whose success illuminates very different paths we could travel.

Perhaps purpose asks for two kinds of noticing… the place where we could fix something and the goodness we want to be near.

Joy is not a distraction from the work

In experiments by psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Christine Branigan, positive emotions such as amusement and contentment were associated with a broader scope of attention and a wider range of imagined actions. Joy did not make people less able to see reality, it helped them see more of it.

This is so so important because joy is sometimes treated as the reward we may enjoy once all the serious problems have been solved. Given the current state of the serious problems, this seems like an excellent way to postpone joy indefinitely. For work to be good and worth doing, it doesn’t also have to be serious and stuffy! Positive possibilities pull their weight, they remind us why we care enough to continue and help us imagine more than one route forwards.

The psychologist C. R. Snyder described hope as involving both pathways towards a desired future and a sense that we can act along them. Hope needs somewhere to go and some idea of how we might travel. Certainty that everything will be fine appears nowhere in the definition, which is rather a relief *grin*.

Hope is refusing to let everything that is wrong become the whole picture.

Twelve favourite possibilities

My new spread will not attempt to solve each favourite problem neatly on the opposite page. Life rarely offers such cooperative symmetry. Instead, I want to build twelve scenes that make an even better future state feel doable.

For each one, I will ask three questions.

What is the picture? What would this possibility look and feel like on an ordinary day?

Where is the spark? Who or what already shows me that some fragment of it is possible?

What is the movement? What small action would take me closer to it or help it become more common?

The ordinary day specificity is important, breaking it down into something manageable. “A kinder world” is difficult to picture. A meeting in which the least powerful person can ask the uncomfortable question without being punished is a scene. A beginner leaving an AI workshop feeling capable rather than left behind is a scene. Telling a sparkly person what their light has meant while they are still here to hear it is a scene.

This gives me a new question to consider beside every favourite problem.

What good thing is this problem preventing, and where can I already see a fragment of the better alternative?

The answer may reveal an organisation to support, a person to learn from or a small experiment worth trying. Purposeful pathways move us closer to what makes us feel most alive.

The light we pass along

Dolly wrote “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” in 1976, during a season when she was searching for hope, and called it her song of deliverance. Fifty years later she invited other women to add their voices, released it as an eightieth birthday gift to the rest of us and gave the proceeds to children’s cancer research. Hope can travel beyond its original moment, gathering new people and new meaning as it goes.

That may be what moved me most this week. Dolly’s light travelled… it helped other people sing, create, give, laugh, read, dream, dress magnificently and become less apologetic about taking up space. Anna’s did too, it’s the most common thing people have said to me over these last few weeks, that she just had the most fabulous energy about her that really shone and made you feel special and lit you up too. There is only one Dolly Parton and Anna Goldsmith, of course. The rest of us will have to find our own particular kind of sparkle.

My twelve favourite problems still matter. They tell me where my concern lives and where my experience might be useful. I will keep allowing them to shape the work I choose… but they are not the whole picture.

I also want to remember the people who shine, the places where something kinder is already being attempted and the small pieces of a better future growing between the cracks.

Perhaps purpose needs both pages. One for what we cannot ignore and one for what we refuse to stop believing is possible.

The world contains pain, injustice and problems worth giving ourselves to… but the world is also full of light.

We should look at it with new eyes, tell people when we see it shining through them… and whenever we can try to nudge more positive than negative.

Now over to you… who is a sparkly person in your life, living or loved and lost, and what song instantly brings their light to mind? Share it below (a link if you can find one, I’d love a playlist of pure sparkle by Sunday) … journalers, a photo of your possibilities spread would make my whole week too… *Kisses on your beautiful faces till you squeak*

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Bullet Journal prompt

Create a new spread for favourite possibilities. Turn to a fresh page and write 12 Favourite Possibilities at the top. Include possibilities you hope to create and goodness that already deserves more attention. Reflect on the positives that matter the most and feel free to use the suggested questions from this essay in your journals to expand out your purpose pathways.

PPS - An AI prompt to help you notice the light;

“I am going to share some problems, questions or concerns I care about. Help me explore the positive possibilities they could point towards. For each one, ask what I hope might exist instead, where I may already have seen a small example of it, and what gentle action could move me closer. Do not turn my answers into forced positivity, grand goals or a productivity plan. Help me notice what I value, what gives me grounded hope and what I may want to protect, join or help grow in a mission to make my corner of the world a slightly sparklier place. Ask me questions rather than inventing the answers for me.”

PPPS The soundtrack. “Light of a Clear Blue Morning” by Dolly Parton, featuring Lainey Wilson, Miley Cyrus, Queen Latifah and Reba McEntire. A gorgeous song that starts with one clear voice, and ends in glorious chorus.

Eleven years ago today, Andrew and I stood in a beautiful field on the Isle of Man and asked the people we love to witness our wedding.

We wrote our Humanist ceremony together, sprinkling in love, honesty, respect and joy. It asked whether we would commit to being best friends, to creating a loving and stable home for our children, whether we would be kind, considerate, tolerant and understanding… oh and whether we would keep working together when hard times came.

We answered, “We do.”

Our wedding rings described as circles looking inwards towards each other and outwards towards our wider community. That we were choosing each other’s children, families and people alongside each other. We placed our marriage inside something larger than the two of us.

It was Wedfest, handmade, heartfelt and perfectly imperfect.

This anniversary has arrived in the shadow of losing Anna. Grief has made me so very appreciative of the fragile privilege of continuing to share a life with someone at all. Loss removes the illusion that presence is ordinary. It also makes you notice what it means to have someone beside you who knows the backstory, remembers who you were before the latest thing happened and can recognise the difference between a bad mood and an old wound. Someone who has lived through the ups and downs of the process of becoming.

That word, witness, means something different to me now than it did in a field eleven years ago. A wedding asks other people to witness your promises. A marriage asks two people to continue witnessing one another. It means remaining interested in the person your partner is becoming, rather than expecting them to remain exactly as they were when you chose them. It means noticing the effort behind their changes and remembering earlier selves without using those memories to hold either of you in place.

I think this is another aspect of ikigai. We strive to unearth many things to live for, but as social creatures we yearn for a special someone to notice that we are living and growing.

The love I want

Long before Andrew, there was an Elton John song.

I remember passionately (often drunky *grin*) singing along to I Want Love many a time, I’d learnt that I didn’t want love at any cost, but that I did still kinda want it. The song is bruised and wary. It carries the longing of someone who wants something healthier and more realistic than whatever hurt before. The accompanying video makes loneliness visible. Robert Downey Jr walking through an enormous empty house, lip-synching the song in one uninterrupted take with pain and longing in those expressive eyes.

I’d learnt something about what I did not want. I knew that frequent tears were a warning. Chemistry could not compensate for incompatibility. Excitement could never build a shared life if somebody was never truly available. Love should never require us to become smaller or live indefinitely on future promises.

I already knew I was capable of being happy on my own, less willing to settle, I sang I Want Love as a refusal to accept the wrong kind of somebody.

Love, respect and fancy

When I went looking on purpose, I wrote an honest and lengthy dating profile. What I valued and how I wanted to live. I figured that anyone worth meeting would need to recognise me from my words. I was looking for a witness before I had the word for it.

A few months after meeting Andrew, I tried to explain what felt different. I wrote about the lessons I had learnt from earlier relationships and the ways each had helped me understand myself. Then I described what I believed was the perfect trilogy, someone you love, respect and fancy, who feels the same way about you.

I still love that formulation.

❤️ Love holds the emotional connection.

🤝 Respect keeps love from tipping into possession, condescension or carelessness.

✨ Fancy is my unpretentious word that keeps the whole thing embodied. It includes chemistry, attraction and the delight of looking across a room and still being pleased that this particular human chose you too.

With Andrew, there was always an intellectual attraction, an affinity in the way we thought and expressed ourselves and when we had our first date he passed the highly scientific hug and sniff test for the physical too hehe. There was also the experience of seeing what an extraordinary parent he is. Falling in love with him meant welcoming three wonderful young people into my life and Willow into theirs too. I had met someone kind and clever with whom I could imagine creating a real, joined-up life. Someone who had got me from my words alone and wanted to keep learning more.

In that early piece, I wrote that love itself was simple and kind and should not be an effort. I also wrote that when life became trickier, I would “study fecking hard” until it became easier again. Love at its best is simple and kind but people are complicated, and lives are rarely simple. There is a difference between working together on a relationship and constantly working to make cruelty, incompatibility, indifference or instability resemble love. A difference between the effort of understanding another person and the exhaustion of repeatedly persuading them to care. Showing up is meaningful only where there is kindness, safety, respect and reciprocity.

Even when those foundations are present, commitment still involves active choice. You choose each other, and you choose your own attitude. You choose whether to assume the worst or remain curious. You choose whether being right matters more than repairing connection, to keep learning the person in front of you rather than insisting that they remain the person you first met.

You choose to keep showing up. You choose to keep noticing.

Two songs together

This is where the second Elton John song enters.

I could present I Want Love and Your Song as two stages of a romantic journey. First, we long to be loved, then we find someone and want to offer to them what that means to us. Real love loops though, we move between need and offering, between asking to be known and trying to show another person that we know them.

I Want Love faces inwards, carrying a vulnerable desire to be received without abandoning the boundaries that protect. Your Song faces outwards, beginning with the problem of having no adequate gift to express what another person means, so the narrator offers something personal and imperfect instead. One song says, “I want a love that is worthy of me.” The other says, “This is the love I can make for you.”

A lasting relationship needs both, love travels in both directions. Wanting healthy love is an act of self-respect. Offering love is how care becomes visible. That is why Your Song reminds me of Wedfest. We made something from the words, values, people, music and random joy available to us. The ceremony itself was an offering. We chose every part of it together. We said that love in its many forms was the foundation of life. We promised respect, trust, kindness and understanding. We acknowledged that hard times might come and committed ourselves to working through them together.

We described how we felt and how we intended to behave, they were vows about attitude and action.

Being seen into becoming & purpose in the plural

Being witnessed is active. The ways we see the people we love can change what becomes possible for them. There is a relationship psychology concept called the Michelangelo phenomenon. It describes how close partners can help one another move towards their ideal selves through the ways they perceive, affirm and behave towards each other.

A loving partner recognises and encourages the person you are already trying to become. The chisel stays in your own hand. The research found that this kind of partner affirmation was associated with movement towards the ideal self and with personal and relationship wellbeing. Sometimes another person sees our becoming before we can. They remember an ambition we have started dismissing as silly. They reflect back a strength we thought was ordinary. They create enough safety for an unexplored part of us to emerge. They help us remain visible to ourselves.

What is ikigai if not, at least partly, movement towards a life that feels more authentically our own? However, much of the modern conversation about purpose happens in the first person singular. What do I love? What am I good at? What should I do with my life? Ikigai concerns our felt experience of life having value, and very little of life is created alone. Another person shouldn’t become our entire reason for living though, that places an impossible weight on any human relationship.

Some meaning is relational, it is made between us. There are also truths about ourselves that we struggle to see alone. I can talk myself into almost anything and out of most things. A loving witness cannot give me a perfectly objective account, but they can offer another honest vantage point. They can remind me what happened, what it cost and what I cannot always see from inside myself. Connection is not merely a pleasant extra, it is one of the places where our understanding of ourselves is formed, challenged and held.

A person can become part of your ikigai without becoming responsible for it. They can make the world feel more inhabitable and help you notice joy. They can remember your hopes when you have temporarily misplaced them, or stand beside you during experiences neither of you would have chosen and help you remain recognisable to yourself. Losing Anna has made me think about how much of us is held in the memories of other people. The people who know our backstory are living libraries of shared language, earlier selves, half-forgotten hopes and moments that mattered. Grief has made the continuing presence of those I love feel newly precious. Loss changes the focus. It makes ordinary presence extraordinary again, and it reminds you that your life has always been a shared document, written and checked by many hands. If you are reading this having lost the person who knew your backstory, I am SO sorry. I have no other words, only love and the hope that you are being witnessed by others and that you remember that what they saw in you is still true.

We still do

Our Humanist ceremony ended with a toast to “love and laughter, today and forever more”. Forever is far too big to experience all at once. It arrives in ordinary days, built up through small kindnesses, difficult conversations, shared responsibilities, ridiculousness, mutual respect and the decision to return to one another after life pulls attention elsewhere.

Eleven years of marriage is millions of small choices. The romance is that we have continued to meet one another’s changing selves and say, in all sorts of ordinary ways, “I am here for this version too.” When I met Andrew, I wrote that perhaps we had already had our last first kiss and fallen in love for the last time. I adore the joy of the woman who wrote that and I’ll keep practising choosing the same person through lives that keep changing.

I still want love. This love, grounded in kindness, respect, attraction, trust and the freedom to remain fully ourselves.

I still want to offer love. Something handmade, personal and made visible.

The ikigai of being witnessed is knowing that someone remembers who you were, recognises who you are and remains interested in who you are becoming.

A wedding asks the people you love to witness a promise, a marriage asks you to keep witnessing each other. Eleven years later, we still do.

“How wonderful life is while you’re in the world.”

Happy anniversary, Andrew.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS A love, respect and fancy review

This is an invitation to notice what is alive within a relationship, we don’t need scorecards!

Divide a journal page into three sections headed Love, Respect and Fancy.

Under Love, record the small actions that make care visible.

Under Respect, notice the ways you encourage one another’s autonomy, growth, opinions, responsibilities and boundaries.

Under Fancy, include attraction, chemistry, play, laughter and the pleasure you take in each other’s company.

Then on your next free page reflect on what Choosing in your relationship means, ask yourself what you are choosing together now, what attitude you want to bring to it and how you can show up without abandoning yourself. Then ask who else witnesses this relationship, and when you last let them.

The exercise can also be adapted for friendships and family relationships by replacing Fancy with Delight. Who makes you glad to see their name appear on your phone? Who makes life feel warmer, funnier or more possible?

PPS An AI prompt for a gift that shows you notice

I want help choosing an anniversary gift for my partner. Ask me one question at a time, five questions in total, covering how many years we are celebrating, what they have been into lately, something they have said they miss or want more of, a private joke or shared memory between us and roughly what I want to spend. Then suggest five gift ideas. At least one should nod to the traditional material for that anniversary year, at least one should cost nothing but time and at least one should be something handmade or personal. For each idea, tell me what you think it would show them I had noticed.

Eleven years is steel, apparently… though the best gifts have less to do with the material and everything to do with whether the other person felt cherished or seen.

PPPS The soundtrack

Begin with I Want Love and remember the part of you who wants love without having to settle for its poorer imitations.

Then play Your Song, thinking about the love you have received and the imperfect, handmade ways you continue to offer it.

I took a couple of days leave this week and said it was because I needed to recharge. As though I am a laptop that needs to be plugged in for a day or so, to be at full availability by Monday.

I borrow the word bandwidth too, and capacity, and running on empty… I’ve said all of them many times without stopping to wonder why I use machine language more than I use natural language for such an important, underrated and misrepresented thing.

The trouble with borrowing a machine’s word is what comes along with it, the assumptions and unhelpful norms we are perpetuating. Four things are true of a battery metaphor and not one of them is true of me.

Downtime unproductive for a machine. A phone on charge is doing nothing. When I stop, my day gets unpacked and sorted and put somewhere I can reach it later, and my mind goes wandering off and comes back with creative ideas I wouldn’t otherwise have had.

A battery holds a measurable amount. Its charge counts down, the same drain for the same use. Mine makes no such sense. I can be too tired to answer a question at four, then a friend rings at six and I find an hour or two to answer several. Nothing charged in between, whatever I am running on is not quantifiable in that way.

A battery can be returned to what it was. Full is full, and full is the same as yesterday’s full. Nothing alive gets put back to a former state. I come back a little different every time.

A battery has no say over what it powers. It cannot ask whether the work is worth doing, and it cannot decline.

None of that describes an animal, and an animal is what I actually am.

The words we borrow

We have often described ourselves in the language of whatever we had just invented. When clocks were the cleverest things, we talked about doing things like clockwork or being wound up too tightly. In the age of steam we ran on pressure, so we blew gaskets and let off steam and broke down like an engine seizing. When telephone exchanges arrived we talked about wires being crossed. Then came computers, and we began processing things and needing more headspace. Every one of those an interesting analogy but not precise, I also think this is part of what has shaped what people believe they are allowed to need.

Now we are batteries and digital devices. Recharge. Reset. Drained. Out of bandwidth. Running at reduced capacity. A battery has one purpose, storing charge in order to give it away. Charging is not for the battery’s benefit, but for whatever the battery is plugged into. So when I tell you I am recharging, I am telling you my rest is a service performed for something else. That lying on the sofa is an investment with an expected return, and if I do not come back sharper then the time off was somehow spent badly.

English has natural words for the state we are in or the need we have; hibernation, nest, fallow, dormant, moulting, bask, burrow, roost, go to seed, slack water… these assume a cycle. Something has been, something will be again and the bit in between is part of the thing itself. Katherine May described this beautifully in Wintering. Nobody has ever accused a tree in January of being in low power mode, we say dormant and we do not tell it to try harder.

We forget that we are animals attuned to feelings, cycles, seasons, the weather and our environment. Sleep moves in cycles through the night. Attention arrives in waves rather than a smooth line from nine until six. Grief ebbs and flows. Curiosity has a spring and an autumn.

A machine runs at its rated output until the charge is gone.

Who is machine mode modelled on?

Machine thinking assumes steady daily output. A dependable eight hours, roughly the same today as yesterday, topped up overnight. Consistency is the virtue and variation a fault to be managed.

That describes one kind of body, in one tiny slice of a whole life. Lots of bodies vary over different phases of the month or seasons in life. There are weeks where you are sharper than others and we need to stop acting like this is personal failing. Then of course for some there comes a time when the whole system reorganises itself, and the advice available is thin because the research is still worryingly thin for issues that predominantly impact women.

A vocabulary built around constant availability was never going to describe a cyclical animal kindly. Listen to how the worst of productivity culture talks. Crush it. Beast mode. Grind. Sprint. Always on. No days off. 10x. It is locker room language and it suits a certain kind of swagger that isn’t the best role model for our young people if they want to learn how to build healthier societal norms.

Now of course there is the perceived threat of an actual machine to do your work, never needing a weekend, doesn’t get bored, or grieve, or need talking into trying something. Once you work alongside something available at three in the morning it starts to look like the standard, and that standard travels downwards into how much recovery a working life is permitted to require.

That is part of the ikigai-risk (i-risk of AI) I keep contemplating. Purpose can leak out of life when work goes. It also leaks out when the loose hours go, because meaning gets made in the pottering and the reading and the conversations nobody planned.

Room in the sleeve

There is a Japanese word for the thing I really need. Yutori ゆとり. Room. Slack. Latitude. It gets used for the ease built into a garment, the extra fabric in a sleeve that lets your arm move freely and without the seam complaining. It is the give in a thing.

Japan once tried to build it into schools. Yutori kyōiku, education that gives children room to grow, arrived formally in 2002. The week dropped from six days to five and a third of the required curriculum went. Then test scores wobbled and by 2012 the hours were back, and the children who grew up inside the experiment got named the yutori sedai, an insult for anyone who seemed a bit soft. Slack was granted, then it was measured perhaps imperfectly through a certain lens, so that it was deemed to be a failure.

It is hard to install room to breathe inside a system still keeping a tight rein purely on scores as the worth, which is more or less what happens to your annual leave. The 2026 figures are heartbreaking. Twenty one per cent of UK workers do not take their full entitlement. More than a quarter finished the year with fifteen days or more still in the pot. Eighty nine per cent said their mental health was better after they took a break.

Some of that is workload and perhaps a sense of underlying fear in the job market. Most of it, I suspect, is much older. I can explain my thinking in this essay and still feel a sense of shame when somebody rings the doorbell and finds me on the sofa at two on a workday afternoon. Idle hands and the devil’s workshop. Sloth sitting in with the deadly sins. A work ethic that arrived with the Reformation and never quite left. Centuries of moral instruction lodged in us which is why stillness doesn’t feel neutral, it feels like getting away with something.

What rest turns out to be

So here is a welcome piece of research, because it makes the case for downtime without appealing to virtue at all. In 2012 a team led by Benjamin Baird gave people creativity problems and then a break. Some worked hard, some rested, some had no break at all and some did a simple task that let their minds wander. The wanderers came back substantially better at the problems they had already seen. Working hard didn’t cut it, mind you pure rest didn’t either, mild pottering did the trick, I always knew I loved a mooch *grin*.

Ask people what rest feels like and they don’t describe recharging either. In 2016 BBC Radio 4 ran the Rest Test with Hubbub, Durham University and Wellcome Collection. More than eighteen thousand people in a hundred and thirty four countries answered, and sixty eight per cent said they would like more rest. Asked what genuinely restored them, the top of the list went like this;

• Reading

• Sleeping or napping

• Nature

• Spending time alone

• Listening to music

• Doing nothing in particular

I love that solitude and nature scored so highly (though makes me wonder if they analysed the respondents would they find a lot of INFJs? *grin*) Doing nothing in particular made the top six and I couldn’t love that more.

Somebody has to go first

I think we need to get better at using the right language. I am fallow this week. I am wintering and doing nothing in particular. I’m trying this out loud and I hope it sounds like a person doing something on purpose, with dignity. It definitely doesn’t promise anyone a return. Every woman I know who rests without apologising has made it a little easier for whoever was watching.

Here is a small test I am keeping. If I cannot describe my rest without mentioning what it will make me better at, then it probably was not rest.

Which brings me back to today, Henry cat soundly asleep next to me with the confidence of someone who has never once justified his afternoon. I am not going to return from this rest improved. There is no charge level and nobody can translate the percentage level anyway. I am making some room, introducing a little yutori.

So the questions I am carrying, and passing to you;

What would my rest look like if it did not have to be useful?

What word am I going to use instead of recharging?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - A bullet journal spread for lying fallow

Give a double page the title Fallow, and if you fancy it draw a field with a gate in it, or a tree in four seasons.

• Borrowed words - Collect every machine word you catch yourself using about yourself this week. Recharge, bandwidth, capacity, drained, reset. Just gather them, no telling off allowed.

• My own weather - Sketch your last month or so as a season or a tide rather than a line and mindmap the words needed to paint that picture fully, again without judgement.

• The pottering list - Five things you would like to do that will not further any goals, jigsaws or photographing flowers or, or, or…

• One swap - Choose your replacement rest word and practice it out loud.

Then do one thing from the pottering list for no reason at all.

PPS - An AI prompt for telling rest from maintenance

Try this with your AI of choice, extended thinking on, speak for a few minutes about what you have been up to recently and how you have been feeling, especially in your own time, then use this prompt with your dump;

“Here is how I have spent my last week or two. Help me tell the difference between rest and maintenance. Look for the moments that existed for their own sake and the moments that existed to make me more useful afterwards, and show me the pattern. Point out any language I use about myself that actually belongs to a machine rather than an animal with cycles and seasons. Then suggest three small things I could do this week that will not improve me in any measurable way but might help me feel a sense of renewal and creativity in the way that pottering while resting often can. Ask me questions where you need more information rather than inventing or assuming anything in your answer for me.”

PPPS - The soundtrack

I’m Only Sleeping by The Beatles

In March 1966 Maureen Cleave wrote in the Evening Standard that John Lennon “can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England”. He answered with a song. That drowsy backwards guitar took George Harrison hours of exacting work, all of it to make something sound like falling asleep.

I didn’t know what to write today.

Usually, by the time Saturday morning arrives, something has been rattling around in my brain for long enough that writing is mostly an exercise in finding out what I think about it. A conversation. A book. Something about AI. Something about work. An irritation or observation about being human that lodged itself in my head.

Today, not so much.

I had coffee, a blank page and a frustration with myself that after thinking about purpose for this long, I really ought to have something profound to say.

Part of me wondered whether I should skip this one, while another started rummaging around in my notes and brainstorms for Something Important ™.

Then I wondered when I had decided that everything worth writing about had to be some big production. Perhaps there was something interesting in that. The longer I’ve spent seeking ikigai, the less convinced I am that purpose is some huge thing we discover, and the more I see it as something we tend, cultivated over time and returned to season after season.

Most of life happens between the big moments

We tend to put an awful lot of pressure on purpose.

Find your passion. Know your why. Discover your calling. Identify your mission. Seek out your ikigai.

It can sound like there is one shiny answer somewhere, and our job is to keep looking until we uncover it. But lots of life does not feel like a search for buried treasure.

Of course we remember the huge moments. The person we fell in love with. The thing we started. The thing we finally stopped. The day everything changed.

Most days are not like that. Most contain work and dirty clothes and messages and making dinner and walking the dog and moving something that has been sat in a pile on the stairs for considerably longer than it needed to.

Purpose has to be able to live there too.

Psychologists Laura King and Joshua Hicks describe meaning in life as having three broad components. We want our lives to make some kind of sense, we want direction or purpose and we want to feel that our existence has significance or matters. Perhaps most reassuringly, they also found that experiencing life as meaningful is remarkably commonplace. Meaning is available to most of us, most of the time.

A 2026 study followed 303 middle-aged adults for eight days, asking them what they had done and how purposeful their lives had felt that day.

Their sense of purpose moved.

People tended to feel more purposeful on days when they had socialised face to face, been physically active, worked on a hobby or project, cared for children or done things around the house. Days without social activity were associated with feeling less purposeful. Interestingly, having done paid work showed no link with greater daily purpose.

It is only one study, and correlation is not causation. Perhaps feeling purposeful encourages us to participate more in life just as much as participating helps us feel purposeful.

But I love the possibility hidden inside it.

Sometimes we participate our way into meaning much more than think our way there.

Meaning might emerge while we are busy doing the living.

One block at a time

I think this might be one of the reasons I find Minecraft so soothing.

I can spend an unreasonable amount of time terraforming a patch of virtual land. Moving a few blocks. Softening an ugly hillside. Adding a path that curves towards my house. Planting some trees. Making a little pond. Growing flowers around the edges until it starts to feel like somewhere I would really like to be.

None of it necessary to win the game, I am simply tending my tiny corner of the world… and the change happens gradually, almost invisibly.

One block. One tree. One path. One flower.

Perhaps we can shape our lives like that too. Less through demanding constant reinvention from ourselves, more through noticing what would make this patch feel like somewhere we are really happy to inhabit.

What we choose to cultivate

A garden is a helpful way of thinking about purpose because gardening requires attention without offering complete control. You can water something, feed it, move it into the sunlight and give it good soil. You cannot shout at it until it grows.

Some things flourish with surprisingly little intervention. Some need constant tending. Something you were convinced would thrive dies almost immediately. Something you had completely given up on suddenly pushes a green shoot through the soil months later.

Sometimes you need to plant.

Sometimes you need to prune.

Sometimes the kindest thing you can do is stop interfering and leave a patch wild.

This feels increasingly like the version of purpose I want. Something I create the conditions for, rather than another thing to control, achieve or complete.

It also makes me look again at Ken Mogi’s five pillars of ikigai, which I return to again and again.

• Starting small

• Releasing yourself

• Harmony and sustainability

• The joy of little things

• Being in the here and now

There is no pillar called develop an impressive five year personal purpose strategy by the end of Q4.

They are surprisingly ordinary practices. Ways of paying attention and participating. Ways of staying connected to the life that is happening while we are making plans for the life that we might like to happen next.

I wonder whether I have spent all this time reading them as five ways to find ikigai when perhaps they are also five ways to tend it.

That feels like an important distinction. Finding suggests an answer. Tending suggests a relationship.

Not everything needs optimising

I keep coming back to this as I think about our relationship with AI too. I love technology that removes friction from things where friction adds no value for me. I am perfectly happy for AI to help me organise information, summarise something enormous, suggest connections I have missed or help me get started when a blank page is being bothersome (though not until I’ve done a rambly human braindump mini essay about how being stuck actually feels for me today and some of the things that have been going on in my life *grin*).

I am also interested in the things I have no wish to make efficient. Grief probably doesn’t need accelerating. Curiosity is allowed to wander somewhere apparently useless. Learning something slowly over a long time period is a perfectly valid way to learn it. A walk does not have to count towards anything. Making something nobody asked for can still be time wonderfully spent. Becoming someone you like being might be one of the least measurable projects you ever undertake.

There are some things where the time spent doing them is part of their value. If my Minecraft garden appeared fully landscaped at the press of a button, I would have saved myself hours. I am not sure I would have gained anything.

Perhaps the antidote to optimisation is cultivation.

Choosing what deserves our finite attention and then returning to it often enough for something gorgeous to grow.

What are you tending?

Which brings me back to this morning.

I did not discover my purpose today, or uncover a previously unknown secret of ikigai. I didn’t have a revelation, or really even an essay idea.

I just sat in front of the blank page for a while and paid attention to my thoughts and feelings. Eventually I realised that writing here each week is itself something I have chosen to tend. I never know exactly what it will become. Not every essay will resonate with every reader. Some weeks the ideas grow easily and some weeks the soil seems rather unpromising.

But I keep returning, and something has taken hold here. Perhaps that is one of the ways we recognise things that matter. They rarely arrive carrying a large sign announcing THIS IS YOUR PURPOSE. We just keep choosing to come back.

So perhaps there is something in your life that does not need solving or perfection today.

An idea. A skill. Your confidence. A friendship. Your health. A creative practice. A garden. A tiny business. A community. A version of yourself you are still getting to know.

Maybe you don’t need to know where it will end up. Maybe the question does not need to be What is my purpose?

Perhaps, for today, it can simply be what am I tending? … and maybe, just as importantly, what else would I like to grow here?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - A little bullet journal gardening

Instead of making another list of goals this week, try giving a double page spread the title What am I tending?

Divide it loosely into four patches, perhaps draw a garden or some flowers;

• Water - What is already growing in my life that deserves more of my attention?

• Plant - What small thing would I like to begin without needing to know what it will become?

• Prune - What am I continuing to give energy to simply because I always have?

• Leave wild - What am I trying to fix, measure or improve that might actually be better left alone for a while?

Then resist the temptation to create a seventeen point action plan, pick one thing and give it a little water.

PPS - An AI prompt to help you notice what is growing

Try this with your AI of choice with extended thinking on;

Look at how I have spent my time, attention and energy recently. Do not try to identify my single life purpose or tell me what my ikigai is. Instead, help me notice what I appear to be tending. Look for the people, activities, ideas, responsibilities and curiosities I keep returning to. Help me distinguish between things that seem to give me meaning, things I am simply maintaining and things that may be taking more from me than they give. Then suggest three very small experiments for the next week that might increase connection, curiosity, contribution or joy without turning my life into another optimisation project. Ask me questions where you need more information rather than inventing an answer for me.

As ever, I would ask the machine to hold up the mirror rather than decide what matters. You decide what deserves watering.

PPPS - The soundtrack

The Garden by Rush

Neil Peart described the garden as a metaphor for the acts and attitudes of a life, influenced by the ending of Voltaire’s Candide and the idea that, after all our searching and theorising, eventually we have to get on with tending our garden. For Peart, the things being cultivated there were ultimately love and respect.

I think there is something beautiful about ending there too. We can spend an enormous amount of time trying to work out what life means… and then Saturday morning arrives. There is coffee to make, creatures to love, a blank page and something worth tending.

Two weeks ago, I slipped a song into my soundtrack PS, Horoscope, by my ridiculously talented friend Anna Goldsmith, my beautiful green bridesmaid fairy, and said nothing else. Last week I wrote an essay about waiting, about grief that begins before a loss does and I wrote a poem in it called Fermata.

I can now tell you what I could not tell you then. It was about her.

I am devastated to share that Anna passed away on the 25th of July. It was her birthday. It was also the day last week’s essay went out into the world with a poem for her at the heart of it. She held on, whoever holds the note decrees, long enough to be wrapped in birthday love from us who adore her, and then, on her own day and in her own time, she let the song move on.

Her family asked for quiet until they were ready, and the Isle of Man kept it, because that is what our Island does. But the news is out now, the tributes are pouring in, and I cannot write about purpose this week without telling you more about a huge sparkly facet of mine.

My Anna

I am not quite sure I know how to be me without her.

She was my friend, my gorgeous green bridesmaid fairy who sang at my wedding. She was magical music and I was waffly words, and between us there was friendship and counsel and campfires and kids playing in rivers and toasted marshmallows and coffee and carrot cake and mischief and belief and therapy and laughter and and and… some loves cannot fit into sentences. They only fit into and.

It was always her, and music and a campfire for me. Last week I wrote that the rarest pauses are a person, in a place the noise won’t follow. You can now tell you who taught me that. She was my pause in a chaotic world, always, always.

So this tribute is not going to try to convey everything, because everything does not convey. Instead I am going to do a thing she would want, which is to turn the tunes up loud. The rest of the world needs to know how talented she was. Here is Anna, in her own voice.

A tribute in tracks

Night Fever

Let’s start where she would so often, with fun. Her powerhouse reimagining of the Bee Gees, filmed by DAM Productions and this higher quality version of the vid just uploaded by Christy… and yes, that is me you can spot in the video, because being near Anna meant being pulled into the absolute joy of life, we laughed so much making this.

Older Than My Years

The opening track of her album Let It Rain, her gorgeous classically trained voice soaring over the words she wrote… and yeah love that she was singing about trying to use her head and not her heart even if we both struggled at times with that *grin* … she was wise and so very kind and caring.

Horoscope

My favourite of hers had to be shared again, my comment right there under the video, seventeen years old. It is the song I chose for my soundtrack two weeks ago when I could not say why. A favourite line about how hard it can be to say exactly what is on your mind… and on her last birthday, I spoke that line back to her, it had never ever been truer.

You Slayed All My Monsters

Her gorgeous version of a fellow Manx songwriter’s song, filmed at her album launch in Peel. I was in that crowd, absolutely transfixed by her as ever.

With Davy Knowles at the Garden Party

… and then there were the festival years. This is Davy in 2011, with Anna at the centre of a trio of gorgeous backing singers, and it captures something I struggle to explain to anyone who wasn’t there… what a time that was to be a music and camping fan on the Isle of Man. The Garden Party, Mannifest, the smaller, more personal gatherings like our Beltane weekends. Actual astronauts on our island and everywhere this shared love and pride and excitement… for the Island, for the music, for the magic and the safety of it all. I was in that crowd that night too, absolute perfection.

Be Here Tomorrow

Written for a short film, Love Like Hers by Danny Lacey, and I love everything about it heaps. Of course the words are poignant now in ways I never envisaged, but what a gift to hear her singing I Love You *Love and strength to all her family and friends*

Angel

Her cover, and oh my goodness, the voice. The range of her, the control, the ache she could put into a single held note. It was always poignant, now it is something so much bigger than that. If you only press play on one of these to understand what we have lost, maybe it should be this one.

A Revolution of Hope

The singing never stopped. In recent times Anna poured energy into the mighty Post War Stories, and their album A Revolution of Hope carries her incredible voice and it was fab to see them perform as a band at Noa including my other very talented and gorgeous friend Laura (the beautiful blue bridesmaid fairy). Anna’s song Stole The Show, has recently been reworked by the band, and I understand will feature in Christy’s Manx Radio tribute later on today between 5pm and 7pm. Her energy and passion, the band said this week, was unmatched. It really, really was.

Her own album Let It Rain is there to be discovered by so many more people, all eleven songs of amazing her… It has been pretty much on repeat for me over these last few weeks I’m not gonna lie. I love that her voice is out in the world being loved forever more, what a glorious legacy.

Name that tube

And then there was our game, Name That Tube… it went like this, tear up strips of paper and deal them out equally, everyone writes down a song, and the rest of the table has to guess who chose it… preferably with a designated DJ driving the YouTube playlist, so nobody has to disguise their handwriting. It was always played so seriously to start with. My elaborate opening strategy of thinking what would Critch or Laura or Anna themselves choose if they were trying to throw us off the scent, would as I got increasingly drunky, collapse into simply playing my own actual favourites, on the flawless logic that this would throw everyone off. It was exceedingly transparent grin. I do not remember winning very often at all.

Winning was never the point (much ahem hehe), more an excuse to sit around a table with your favourite people, chat shit and share choons… and it was the cause of much hilarity over the years, if I close my eyes I can still feel the absolute joy of that.

Please play it, gather your besties, tear up the paper and press play… loving therapy and homework from her.

The Island she loved and nurtured

Away from the stage, Anna spent more than twenty years as a public servant, and she did SO much with a huge amount of talent and love and care. Footpaths, she was the officer who looked after the island’s paths for ages. Benches placed under dark skies, so people could sit in the quiet and look up at the light. Warm spaces in cold months. A garden at St John’s, Garey Yn Ellan Ain. A Year of Our Island. A homelessness strategy delivered so nobody on the Isle of Man needs to sleep rough because of work she led.

Above all else though she was the best Mum to gorgeous Robbie who she could not be prouder of, and partner to James who made her so very happy… and I can’t imagine the pain of her lovely parents Angela and Brian, her sisters Natalie, Lisa and Hayley… or those of us in her huge long list of extended family and friends… she exuded love and joy, and was certainly loved in return, heaps and heaps.

Last week I wrote about ma, 間, the Japanese idea that the space between things is not empty but load-bearing, the pause that is structure, the light through the gap in a door. I did not know how to tell you then that my friend had spent her life creating places for an entire island to pause, to rest, to be warm, to look at the light.

She made ma for all of us.

Fermata, kept

I wrote her this poem exactly one week ago while she was still this side of the threshold, when I wasn’t able to really talk about that, and I thought that once I could write openly I would want to write something new. I was wrong because reading it back now, it feels more perfect to me that it was written in the flux, while the holding was still happening… a poem she was alive inside.

She held the note until she couldn’t any more,

We keep the beat

We had plans, Anna and I. Proper, brilliant, purposeful plans.

Anna had long since walked away from Facebook, she hated it, and hadn’t been much of a LinkedIn person either, which is exactly what makes her last post there, nine months ago, so precious to me now. It reads: “Talking creativity, AI and opportunity with 2 incredible women has completely lifted my mood today 🔥”. The two women she was talking about were me and an inspiring soul named Carol.

We had been plotting and she was working her way up to posting more I know it. Anna was an enthusiastic embracer of AI and I had been nudging her towards the 1000 true fans idea, the notion that an artist does not need the whole world, only a community of people who love the work and will support it… with an eye on turning her sheer brilliance into the proper income stream it always deserved to be… and from there the dream grew legs and walls, a real-life community space one day, coffee shop and workshop and bookshop and coaching, a supportive, creative, good for your head and heart kind of place. Her and music and campfire energy.

It was clearly not meant to be, but I’ll treasure her words about creativity, opportunity and a lifted mood, about the future we were building together and I will be giving serious thought to how best to honour it from my side.

My poem for her says that if the page stops counting,the ones who love you keep the beat… in her music shared, her paths walked, her benches sat upon under dark skies and in every good thing done in her name. That is the rest of the song, and it is ours now to sing.

Rest now, my beautiful friend. You are held and counted, for evermore.

We love you forever and ever.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS No bullet journal spread this week. Instead a table, strips of paper, a pen each, and your best people. Play Name That Tube and then tell me in the comments which song you would choose and why.

PPS No AI prompt this week either. Light a campfire, or simply a candle and put the kettle on and stay for one more cup with someone you love.

PPPS This week’s soundtrack is all of the above, please turn it up, she always always did xx

In Japanese there is a word for the space between things.

Ma, 間. The pause that is not empty. A gap between stepping stones. The beat in the lines of a poem. Silence between notes that makes music music. The same character sits inside the Japanese words for both time, jikan 時間, and space, kūkan 空間, because ma is the interval in each of them, the threshold between now and next… and the character itself 間 is derived from the character 門 for door or gate, and 日 for sun. Sunlight streaming through the gaps of a door. Not nothing in other words… structure.

I have been thinking about ma a lot this week, in between a lot of waiting around as I was away at an exhibition for work all week… and because modern life (or AI for that matter) seems to not be able to cope with a gap. It asks you to watch a reel or ten, or autocompletes, autosuggests, wanting to fill every still moment before we have worked out whether the pause was a good idea to just sit with. Three dots appear the moment I stop typing. The next word arrives before I have finished thinking it. Efficiency hates a pause, and our tools have learned the same allergy.

This will be a shorter essay than usual, which is for sure very much some of the point.

The waiting

I have championed the space between for years, my bullet journal a shrine to it, and yet I can tell you honestly that the space between is not always easy or peaceful.

Waiting is an incongruous thing. Sometimes it is a window opened, breathing room you did not know you were owed. Sometimes it is the heaviest thing in the world. Sometimes it is both at the exact same time leaving you adrift and unable to fully articulate that feeling.

Psychologists have a name for one particular kind of waiting. Anticipatory grief, the mourning that begins before a loss does. Grief with its tenses confused, missing something that is still here, feeling homesick for a place you have not yet left. It arrives in hospital corridors and redundancy consultations, in the last week of the summer holidays, in a parent watching a child learn to drive away.

I suspect more of us are carrying a version of it than ever say out loud. Some for people. Some for places… and some for lives we can feel changing faster than we can keep up with. When I write about the ikigai risk of AI, the erosion of purpose as machines absorb some of the work through which we find meaning, I am also describing anticipatory grief at scale, a workforce mourning something that has not finished happening yet.

Grief before loss is a very strange thing, but it tells the truth. We only pre-mourn what matters.

Enough reasons

So what do we do, in the waiting?

This is where the Japanese understanding of ikigai really resonates for me. Ikigai as the psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya described it in the 1960s, a felt sense, ikigai-kan, the lived experience that a life is worth living. And so very importantly, plural. Not one grand purpose but many smaller ones. The morning tea. The elderly cat commandeering the warmest chair. The Manx homework. The friend who stays for one more cup. A tapestry, not a thread.

Which gives me the most practical definition of resilience I have;

Resilience means having enough reasons to get up in the morning that losing one doesn’t keep you in bed.

A tapestry survives a pulled thread. This is not stoicism and it is not detachment, it is weaving… done in advance on the good days, so that the fabric holds on the others. Every small joy you tend now load-bearing later. Purpose is not only a direction to march in. It is also what keeps us standing when marching is not possible, and waiting is the only thing there is.

Fermata

I could not fully write an essay-shaped version of what this waiting feels like, so here is a poem-shaped one.

We keep the beat

That is all this week, and I hope it is enough. I invite you to sit inside your pauses gently. Whatever they hold, they are counted, and so are you.

I am carrying this question onwards, and one I hope for you to share too. What am I weaving now, on the good days, that will hold me on the others? When did you last add a new one?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Bullet journal spread for this week, a thread audit. List (or if you are feeling artistic sketch or doodle) your reasons for getting up in the morning, every small one counts, as together they would still hold if any of them frayed. Then consider adding one deliberately thin new thread this month! Share if there is a hobby or interest you have been meaning to pursue but had been putting off!

PPS Try this with your preferred AI tool.

“Help me take an audit of all the small reasons my days feel worth living, and suggest a tiny new thread I could add this month. Don’t optimise, just help me see them.”

PPPS This week’s soundtrack is Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode, and yes, I know, a glittering anthem in praise of saying nothing at all. The weirdness is because waiting is an incongruous thing, and so is one of the best songs ever written about it. Words are very unnecessary, but they are also all I ever turn to when processing…. turn it up and let it hold you.

I ask AI a lot of questions, and sometimes Claude helps me ponder even better ones.

There are meaningful questions you can explore with AI, but I feel that you also need to sit with some of them yourself, to reflect and journal on. The most impactful ones though should be explored with our community.

Here’s one I’d like to see more people discussing in real life;

What would we need to see to believe that AI is increasing human agency, not just our output?

It sounds like a question for a conference panel or a white paper, it lands somewhere much more personal.

I use AI most days. I use it to think, research, teach, organise and occasionally locate a word that vanished at the exact moment I needed it. I am inside this particular machine, pressing buttons with enthusiasm. Curious, grateful, excited and wary, usually at the exact same time.

AI can be useful, obviously… is all that usefulness making us more free?

More output is easy to mistake for more agency. A full inbox can look like usefulness. A finished document can look like progress. It might be. It might also be the same person running faster on a more efficient treadmill.

Agency is harder to count. It is the ability to choose a direction, change your mind, resist the default and still recognise yourself in what happens next. It is having a meaningful say over what all the doing is for.

I have described the ikigai risk of AI as the erosion of human purpose as AI takes over work through which we find meaning, leaving us doing more while feeling needed less. Output is a visible symptom, but agency should be the thing underneath.

So I went looking for answers, even if they unsettled my own arguments, I found three to talk about today.

The freedom to pursue a life of your own

The first comes from the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, who explored people through the different lenses of wellbeing and agency. We are people with aims, commitments and values of our own, and our agency freedom is what we are able to do and achieve in pursuit of them.

The phrase that stays with me is free to do and achieve. Permission to start a business means little without the time, money, confidence and support to act on it. Access to information means little if you cannot understand or use it. Options offer a poor type of freedom when somebody else selected them all for you.

Through Sen’s lens, AI increases agency when it enlarges the range of lives a person can actually pursue. I want to see the woman who has always struggled to put her ideas into polished words finally being heard. The person living with fatigue able to participate without spending every scrap of energy on administration. The nervous beginner asking questions without shame. The tiny business reaching capabilities once reserved for a large one.

More doors opening for more people.

I also want to see saved time staying saved. When AI removes two hours of work, who receives those hours? Does the worker get breathing room, learning time, exercise time, healthier food prep time, a shorter day? Or does the target rise until the gift disappears? Time returned and immediately recaptured is extraction.

Sen would warn me that I am counting output and calling it agency. More words, faster decisions, better presentations. The real test is whether a person’s map of possible life pathways has grown.

The power to shape the terms

The second answer is less interested in individual empowerment, it wants to know what happens for everyone.

Imagine an AI system saves every employee five hours a week. The organisation celebrates. Six months later the targets are higher, the team is smaller and everybody is producing more in the same number of hours. Capability has soared. Agency has shrunk.

In Building Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence, Daron Acemoglu, David Autor and Simon Johnson set a demanding standard for technology that serves workers. It should make human skill and expertise more valuable while expanding what workers can do. Both halves matter. A tool can make me more capable of performing a task while making the skill behind it less scarce, less valued and easier to replace.

A powerful tool in the hands of someone with no say makes the system more powerful. The person stays exactly where she was.

Through this lens I would need to see changed institutions rather than impressive demonstrations. Productivity gains shared through better pay, greater security and shorter hours. Workers involved in deciding where AI is used, what it measures and which decisions stay open to human challenge. People keeping rights over the knowledge, creativity and judgement used to build these systems.

And I would need to see the ability to refuse, because a choice only counts when no is still a survivable answer.

This view tells me I have been treating agency as a private feeling of effectiveness, when it also lives in power, ownership and voice. AI can enlarge my reach while shrinking my influence over the world I am reaching into. It can help me climb a ladder while somebody else moves it against the wrong wall.

The mind that does not stop at the skin

The third answer challenges my instinct to draw a firm border between human and machine.

In their wonderfully provocative paper The Extended Mind, the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers question whether thinking happens only inside the brain. Their conclusion is cheerfully blunt. “Cognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head!”

We think with notebooks, maps, calculators, language and other people. This feels immediately true to me. My bullet journal has been holding chunks of my memory for years and I have yet to accuse Leuchtturm1917 of stealing my soul. Writing changes what I notice. A list exposes a pattern. A migrated task asks whether I really intend to do it. The notebook participates in the thinking.

Perhaps AI can too.

Becoming less capable without a tool proves very little on its own. I am less capable of navigating a strange city without a map, seeing without my glasses, remembering a whole month without my journal. None of those tools have made me less myself.

The better question is whether the human and the tool form a richer thinking system together. Does AI help me notice what I had missed? Does it offer resistance as well as agreement? Can I still redirect it, correct it and decide what matters?

And yet my notebook waits. It has never invented a source, flattered me or changed its behaviour overnight while I slept. It belongs to me rather than to a company that can rewrite the terms of my access. It cannot finish my sentences before I have discovered what I meant to say.

AI is a pen that can suggest the topic, complete the sentence, praise the result and remember everything I have ever written. That may become a magnificent extension of human thought. It may also become an enclosure so comfortable that we stop noticing that we are fenced in.

What I would need to see & the ikigai question underneath

Time returned and allowed to remain ours. Doors opening for people who had fewer of them. Expertise deepened rather than hollowed out. Gains shared rather than extracted, hoarded or absorbed. A stronger voice over the systems shaping our work, a real route to challenge an automated decision and a way to say no without disappearing from society.

Most of all, I would need to see AI helping people become better at choosing a direction that helps people and planet thrive. Speed towards a destination somebody else chose impresses me far less.

Ikigai is the felt sense that a life is worth living and that we have some hand in shaping it. Purpose grows through choosing, practising, contributing and occasionally doing something inefficient because the doing is part of what makes us human. AI can produce an artefact. It cannot carry the moral weight of why the artefact should exist.

So perhaps purpose proofing begins with different questions. What human value lives inside this task? Who chooses? Who benefits? Who becomes more powerful and who becomes more dependent? Automate the chores, protect the craft… and pay very close attention to who gets to decide which is which.

We cannot tidy this topic away though. A person who becomes dramatically more capable with AI and less capable without it might be experiencing liberation, capture and integration all at once. All three of my borrowed lenses could be right about her on the same afternoon.

Which is why this ends up being a question about care as much as capability. If AI hands you back two hours this week, I hope you get to keep them. I hope they become a walk, a phone call, a cup of tea with a friend, a page in a notebook. I hope somebody asks what you want to do with them, and waits for your answer.

So I am carrying another question onwards. What would still need to belong to me, even if I relied on AI every day, for that reliance to feel like an extension of my agency rather than a fence built around it?

And I am leaving one for you too… Where is AI giving you more agency, and where is it only asking you for more output?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Bullet journal spread for this week. Draw three columns across a page. Capability. Power. Authorship. List where AI currently helps you under each. Circle anything that feels truly yours, underline anything that feels imposed and put a question mark beside anything you are no longer sure about.

PPS Try this with your preferred AI tool with extended thinking turned on.

“Look at how I use AI across my work and life. Where does it seem to be increasing my agency, where might it only be increasing my output, and what should I keep practising myself if I want to stay meaningfully involved in my own choices? Be warm but honest with me.”

PPPS This week’s soundtrack is a song called Horoscope by my ridiculously talented friend Anna Goldsmith, my beautiful green bridesmaid fairy. It starts with “You’ll find it hard to say exactly what is on your mind” which has never been truer, and ends with “everything will be alright if you find the answers” .. which felt fitting for an essay about big questions… while I may struggle at times with questions, being open and curious and questioning and finding lots of answers is for sure the way forward and something she has taught me in spades over the years…. And you’ve got to love her glorious soaring voice reassuring that things are “gonna go your way” as it closes.

I live on a tiny Island, so lighthouses are never far away. There’s one I walk past when my head is full, which this week it very much was…and I pictured whoever used to keep it working before everything was automated.

Imagine her logbook. Hours the lamp burned. Oil used. Glass polished, weather noted, wicks trimmed… every entry countable, a tidy record of a faithful working life.

But the number closest to the purpose of it all was one she could never write down, the ships that didn’t sink.

I have been refining a dashboard at work... columns, measures, the strategy of how best to show that what our team does adds up to something… or help us change course more rapidly if some things aren’t working as hoped… and somewhere between mapping out the definitions of these columns (and where what we do and how we count it fits), I realised I am that keeper.

Four columns

Strip a good dashboard back to its bones and you find four columns hiding inside it. Activity, output, outcome and impact > what I did, what it produced, what changed and what I believe it meant.

The keeper can show you the first two without breaking sweat. Activity she trimmed wicks, refuelled and polished the glass. Output the lamp burned all night. The third column, outcome, is harder but sometimes still visible if you squint… ships steering wide of the rocks… and the fourth column, impact, or meaning... families whole at breakfast tables she will never see, in ports she will never visit. That is what the work was for and also the column she cannot prove.

The keeper did not steer the ships. She did not choose their routes, train their captains or calm the weather. She changed the conditions in which a safe passage became more likely. She could claim the light, but not the whole voyage. She changed the odds. She did not own the outcome.

There is strange arithmetic to these four columns. Your control fades as you move along them. The meaning you can see widens. The first column tells you how you kept the lamp lit. The fourth tells you what you hoped the light made possible. Neither is meaningless without the other. The column you can prove most easily is often the one furthest from the reason you began, the column closest to that reason may be the one you can only believe rather than prove.

Measurement is not proof of importance. It is a discipline of telling the truth about what is in our control, what is shared, and what we believe. We are not often taught to sit with that. We are taught to close the gap, to drag proof further and further along the chain until everything has a number attached. But some gaps are simply the shape of meaningful work.

That does not release us from the responsibility to measure. The lamp still needed oil, the glass still needed polishing, and somebody still needed to notice if the light went out. Measurement keeps us honest about whether we did the work. It cannot tell the whole story of why the work was worth doing.

And this is not only true for lighthouses and departmental dashboards.

You can’t KPI a child

I read to my daughter most nights for about a decade. If you had asked me to report on it, I could have counted the books, maybe even the minutes. What I could not count was the thing I was actually doing it for... a grown woman, somewhere in the future, who reaches for a story when the world gets loud.

Run the bedtime story through the four columns; Reading aloud = activity. Books finished = output. A child who reads for pleasure = outcome. A person who stays curious all her life and appreciates art and beauty = some of many impacts. I controlled the first column completely. The last one was never mine to control, lots of the impact I could only wish for, and others I may never have imagined.

And the attribution! Teachers own a share. Grandparents. Friends, libraries, luck. The child herself, most of all.

Sharing the credit tells the truth about how a life is made. I did not author the woman my daughter became. I contributed a shelf of stories, thousands of evenings and one dependable signal that books were a place she could go.

Nobody stands at the school gate demanding evidence that the bedtime stories worked. We simply keep reading, and we believe. Yet at work we blush to say “I believe this matters” without a chart behind us. At home, we seem able to accept this mixture of evidence, contribution and hope. At work, we become much less comfortable, perhaps because there somebody always asks the question that dashboards hope to answer.

What difference did you make?

Someone asked me that recently, not what I do but what difference it makes.

We could stake a claim and defend the lot. Staple our name to every good thing within reach and call it evidence.

I think that reflex is where trust goes to die, the honest answer is a better sort through of factors. Own the first two columns completely, they are yours. In the third, look for contribution rather than ownership. Say what you helped make possible, what conditions you changed and who else carried the outcome with you. Then say the fourth out loud as a belief, because it’s rarely yours to prove alone.

When somebody says impact, listen closely. It is yet another of those words asked to do far too many jobs. Sometimes they mean output, what was produced. More often they mean outcome, what changed. Occasionally they mean the fourth column, the wider human meaning that change was supposed to serve.

Even the third column can be difficult to capture and quantify accurately as it is mostly written in other people’s books. In my day job, the proof that a business grew healthier lives inside that business’s own accounts. Their margins are their own business, in both senses. Whether the Island as a whole is better off shows up later, in stats with names like GVA, gathered and correlated by patient people in other offices long after the doing is done. And the counting itself is seasonal rather than accessible live data, a census here, a tax return there, a survey each spring. So you end up drawing a line from a conversation last March to a number published in November this year if you are lucky, with a ruler that only exists on certain days of the year.

That does not mean our contribution is imaginary, but we need to describe it with care. We can record the introduction made, the barrier removed, the advice acted upon or the opportunity unlocked. We can sometimes show that these things contributed to what happened next. What we cannot do is claim the whole result as ours.

We should be held to account. We should draw the line as carefully and as far as the evidence allows. But wanting a tidy line and possessing every number it needs are two different things. The gap between them is often due to where the relevant evidence lives.

The keeper knew this gap. The ships that steered wide kept their own logs, in cabins she would never enter. Her third column sailed past the window every night, fully documented, in books she was never going to be allowed to read. Her lack of access placed a boundary around what she should claim, it did not erase her contribution.

There are best practices for all of this, for example UK Government keeps its methods in colour-coded books, a Green one for deciding what to do and a Magenta one for learning what happened, both freshly revised this year (there are more... Orange, Aqua, Teal... a civil service rainbow, which pleases me more than it probably should *grin*). The economists even have a word, additionality, for subtracting the ships that would have missed the rocks anyway. And What Works Growth grades the world’s evidence on a five-point scale of rigour, where top marks go to studies with thousands of matched firms and years of linked data.

We try to use what fits, but gold standards were built for big countries with big datasets, and we are an Island of 85,000 people, where samples run small. So at our scale the craft becomes humbler and harder. Say plainly what we count and why we believe it matters. Question our assumptions and show our workings where people can see… and keep the lamp room door open, because the people out on the water can often see weather patterns we cannot.

Okagesama (おかげさま) is a gorgeous Japanese phrase that translates to “thanks to you” or “because of you”. It is used to acknowledge that one’s success, well-being or good fortune is due to the invisible support, hard work and kindness of others… thanks to the unseen, it is built into the politeness of the language, this idea that credit is never entirely yours. Imagine if our reporting had that grace in it.

That is the kind of honesty I want the dashboard to have.

The columns a spreadsheet can’t hold

A few months ago I wrote about money, and how we don’t talk about it. I am starting to think metrics are the same silence in a different currency. Money talks, we don’t. Metrics speak numbers, meaning in stories.

Notice the asymmetry hiding in your own week. Activity is often what tires you, meaning is what feeds you. We spend our days in the first column and our reasons in the fourth, and then wonder why a full calendar can feel so empty.

But perhaps I have been a little unfair to the first column. Meaning does not live only at the far end of the dashboard. There was worth in the keeper polishing the glass properly, even before a single ship passed. In keeping a promise. In becoming skilful. In doing an ordinary task with care because another person might depend upon it. Sometimes the work matters because of what it eventually changes. Sometimes part of its meaning is contained in the way we choose to do it.

And notice the two documents that bookend a working life. Job descriptions list activities. Eulogies describe impact. Nobody’s funeral dwells on their inbox management. But eulogies do remember how somebody did the work. She noticed when people were struggling. He never made the junior person feel foolish. She took pride in getting the small things right. Meaning is not only the distant consequence of our labour. It gathers in our manner of doing it too.

Somewhere between those two documents sits everything I mean by hatarakigai, the worth of the work itself... the sense that your labour is pointed at something that deserves it, and that you can recognise yourself in the way you carry it out.

There is a song in Rent that counts a year out in minutes, all 525,600 of them, then spends its remaining breath auditioning better units until only love will do. Audiences have wept along to that arithmetic for thirty years, and not one of them has ever asked to see the supporting data.

We understand this instinctively in songs, stories and the lives of people we love.

At work, however, the fourth column is expected to fit inside Excel.

The fourth column wears a lanyard

Or perhaps work made its peace long ago but just won’t admit it. Watch any decision closely enough and you will find a feeling underneath it. Even in enormous corporate purchases, when two options look equally credible on paper, trust and human chemistry can tip the choice towards the supplier whose account manager remembered your team lost on Saturday and commiserated properly.

And why wouldn’t we? The best products and services exist for fourth column reasons. Somebody believes a service could help, a policy could protect, a business could strengthen a place or a product could leave one small corner of the planet shinier than they found it, and the work begins ahead of the proof. Evidence follows, and sometimes it proves the belief wrong, but it always arrives after the beginning. So many organisations I admire began as somebody’s unproven belief.

Judgement and evidence are usually more entangled than the finished business case admits. We make sense of the numbers through experience, trust and pattern recognition, then write the decision up as though maths arrived at it alone.

So I wonder why love is welcome in the buying and barred from the reporting. We will decide millions on trust and chemistry, then file the feeling under anecdote when it is time to report. Imagine a board paper with a belief column, read as information rather than confession. Not a place to hide poor results or make grand claims beyond the evidence, but a place to state honestly what the work is trying to protect, create or make possible.

• What do we believe this work is ultimately for?

• What assumptions connect our activity to that purpose?

• What evidence would strengthen or weaken that belief?

• Who else would need to contribute for the hoped-for change to happen?

The lamp burns no less brightly because the keeper loved the ships and the people on them.

Ships that didn’t sink

The keeper never fully solved her logbook problem. She could record the lamp hours, and perhaps somebody elsewhere could compare routes, weather and wrecks over time. But she could never produce a complete list of the ships that did not sink, or the lives that carried on because her light was there.

She kept it lit anyway. That is not a failure of measurement. Perhaps the ships were the purpose, but tending the light faithfully was the practice. Hatarakigai lived somewhere between the two.

So here is a small experiment for the week, straight from my bullet journal to yours. Draw four columns on a page; what I did (activity), what it produced (output), what changed (outcome), what I believe it meant (impact). Fill in the first two from memory; they will come easily. Fill in the third carefully. Write down what changed, then ask what part you genuinely contributed. Name the other people, choices and conditions that helped carry the outcome. Share the credit generously, including with the person whose life or work changed.

And then get brave with the fourth. Write down, in ink, the ships you believe didn’t sink because you kept your lamp lit. The argument that didn’t happen because you listened. The colleague who stayed. The town that still has a library. Do not mistake belief for proof. But do not mistake the absence of proof for the absence of meaning either.

What would yours say? What is one ship that might not have sunk because you kept your light on?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS. This week’s journal prompt. Someone kept a lamp lit for you once... a teacher, a nurse, a friend who kept turning up for you. Open a fresh page and write down the ship of yours that didn’t sink because of what they did. Then, if it feels right and it is still possible, tell them. And if it is not, write the words anyway. Fourth columns are lovelier read aloud, but some keepers have to be thanked on paper.

PPS. This week’s AI prompt, extended thinking on.

A machine can now fill in your first column effortlessly and endlessly, so make it earn the other three. Let it help you see further, not claim further.

Paste in your diary or task list from the past week and add this:

“Here is my first column, what I did.

Interview me one question at a time to help me complete the other three:

What it produced, output.

What changed, outcome.

What I believe it meant, meaning.

Be strict about attribution. Do not let me claim more than is mine, and do not let me claim less either.

For every outcome, ask who else contributed, what conditions helped, and what evidence connects my activity to the change.

Label each statement as evidence, inference or belief.

Challenge me if I jump directly from something I did to a large result without showing the steps in between.

When we finish, create a four-column table and show me:

The row with the strongest evidence.

The row where my contribution was most shared.

The row where belief is doing the heaviest lifting.

Then ask me which of those rows feels closest to the reason I began.”

PPPS. This week’s soundtrack was only ever going to be Seasons of Love from Rent... a year counted out in minutes, a life asking to be measured in something kinder, and a room full of people singing the answer at the top of their lungs. The keeper would approve.

It was just over a year ago that I wrote How to Find Your Ikigai a battle-tested roadmap for getting from “I haven’t a clue what my purpose is” to “I can see several pathways forward.” I still stand by it, but a couple of things have grown so it’s worth a fresh essay rather than a stealth edit.

I’ve now run this process with more people, more times, and found where it was thin. One whole quadrant of the famous framework was barely served and almost every exercise asked us to think, never to try. Reflection is lovely but good intentions need to translate to action.

The ground keeps moving too. We need to actively consider the ikigai-risk of AI in our future planning, the erosion of human purpose that can happen even when AI goes well. What makes life worth living when the machine can do the very things that used to give us meaning? If we’re going to talk about finding work worth doing, we have to weave those protections into the same process.

Also the use of the word work over and above ikigai in the title, it means more than paid employment of course. Humans have always cared, made, repaired, grown, taught, organised and contributed, long before modern economies existed, so even if money eventually matters less, the question of what feels worth doing will remain.

So, same roadmap but a little sharper, more practical and honest about this weird timeline we’re all trying to build a meaningful life inside.

It’s the half-year reset point and I’ve just migrated my bullet journal to a shiny new lilac notebook, and re-drawing these spreads is exactly what sent me back to revisit them. You can’t copy a framework across in your own handwriting without noticing what’s shifted in you, and what you’d now do differently. This is what fell out of that migration.

📸 the spread that started it, my ikigai and hatarakigai pages, re-drawn and rethought in the new lilac journal.

A quick refresher before we get started… ikigai itself is a felt sense, a knowing in your bones that *this* is enough. It lives in verbs far more than nouns and it’s often already there in how you make your coffee or the focus of an hour’s good work. The four-circle diagram everyone posts is not ikigai. When drawn correctly it’s a fab design tool for hatarakigai, work worth doing. We reach for it because most of us spend 40+ hours a week working, and if those hours crush your soul, no amount of downtime meditation will make that ok. The aim isn’t for work to be your only source of ikigai. It’s for work to stop fighting it, and start feeding it.

This new version is strategically moving us forward, look inward, check outside yourself, then test it small. Reflection tells you what you believe is true about yourself, a small experiment tells you what actually is. It’s also the only known cure for the analysis-paralysis that swallows so many purpose-hunts… the endless journalling that never quite touches the world. Notice the shape of the journey, we move from the most inward thing, what you love, to the most outward, what the world needs and what someone will pay you for. The balance tilts as we go, at the start it’s almost all reflection, because you can’t market-test a feeling… by the end it’s almost all experiment, because you cannot think your way to what people will pay for. You find that out by asking them.

This is what I mean by building purpose literacy, the ability to feel when you’re moving towards meaning or away from it. You only get that signal when you actually move.

Phase 1: the foundation, and what you love

Ground yourself first, real ikigai is distilled in Ken Mogi’s five pillars; starting small, releasing yourself, harmony and sustainability, the joy of little things, and being in the here and now. On my ikigai spread I came up with my own “BLOOM” acrostic to embed what it means to me, maybe try the same for yourself (AI prompt example to copy).

A) what you love

1 Joy audit

In your journal, list at least five moments from the past week or so that sparked joy or gratitude. Small is the point. Mine are things like an essay comment, making someone smile, a perfectly satisfying bullet-journal spread.

2 Labels & loves

Set a ten-minute timer and brain dump every label that describes you; roles, traits, interests, quirks, the lot, flattering and unflattering. Don’t edit. Mine runs to ginger, optimist, ikigai seeker, AI enthusiast, bullet journal nerd, equality advocate, speccy four-eyes, introvert, Minecraft fan, walker.. These are the ingredients in your recipe. We aren’t describing boxes to contain you.

3 Values deep dive

Circle up to ten values that resonate today, not your polished ideal-self list. Then map them, the Schwartz values wheel is perfect for this. Mine cluster around universalism and benevolence, which explains which rooms and roles leave me feeling hollow. The magic is in the links between your labels and your values, that’s where what you actually love is hiding, as opposed to what looks impressive on LinkedIn.

Love is the one element that’s almost entirely an inside job, which is why all three exercises are really the same gentle looking, from three directions. Hold that thought, because from here on the experiments get louder.

Phase 2: designing the work — skill, value, problem

B) what you’re good at (skill)

Your strengths often feel so natural that you dismiss them, and other people may see them more clearly than you can.

4 Effortless wins

List the things that come easily to you but that others visibly find hard. That gap, easy-for-you, hard-for-them, is your most undervalued strength, and the one you’re most likely to have talked yourself out of because “surely everyone can do that.” They can’t.

5 Skills test

Take a proper assessment, I’m serious, it’s SO worth it. CliftonStrengths reframed how I see myself completely; my top five (Input, Learner, Intellection, Connectedness, Ideation) turned “scattered and bookish” into “wired to gather information and spot unusual patterns.” If you have no spare funds then the VIA Character Strengths test is free and also pretty cool.

6 Ask three people

Message three people who know you well and ask “what would you say are my natural strengths?” Their answers tend to surprise you, we’re oddly blind to our own superpowers.

C) what you can be paid for (value)

The original essay skipped this quadrant. “Face your constraints” and “upload it all into AI” were standing in for it, and neither actually helps you work out what someone will pay you for. So this box is rebuilt and the last move is a real experiment.

7 Paid & thanked

List every time someone has paid you (or offered to, or gave you a gift or service in kind) for something, and separately, every time someone thanked you for a thing you’d happily have done for free. Money leaves a trail, so does gratitude, and the trails can be revealing.

8 Market scan

Take some love-and-skill combinations and go looking for where money already flows around them… consider job titles, freelancers, small companies, courses or services people buy. You’re not often inventing a market from nothing, so check whether a path already exists. It nearly always does, sometimes in a shape you hadn’t considered.

9 Smallest paid test

The experiment, and the most uncomfortable step in the whole essay. Offer a tiny version of a thing and see whether one person will commit, a £5 offer, a pre-order email signup, a paid discovery call, one freelance afternoon. Value is an element you cannot reason your way to from your journal. One real “yes, here’s my money” tells you more than a month of lovely reflection.

D) what the world needs (problem)

Not “solve climate change” or a vague “help people”, the specific problems that make your heart race with possibility or fury.

10 twelve favourite problems

A fifteen-minute sprint to list 12 problems you care about, no overthinking, a mix of scales; personal, local, global. I pinched this from Feynman, who carried his favourite problems around with him for years. Mine include gender inequity, the future of work in an age of AI, and helping people find their authentic voice.

11 SDG exercise

Run your twelve past the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals and see which light you up, most of your problems will map onto one or more. Mine land squarely in Goal 4 (education), Goal 5 (gender equality) and Goal 8 (decent work).

12 Talk to one

The experiment again. Don’t theorise about a problem from behind your desk, pick the specific people you’d like to help and actually talk to one of them. A problem you genuinely care about survives contact with a real human, it’s the fastest, kindest reality check there is.

Phase 3: bringing it together and the question that matters most

Now you’ve got all the ingredients, two steps before you cook.

Face your constraints

Journal honestly about the real parameters, time, money, location, skills gaps, family realities. Mine, right now: I can’t relocate while my stepchildren are at school, I need to cover the mortgage, and I’m fifty so some paths simply aren’t on the table. These aren’t limitations to grieve, they’re the edges of the board, and constraints are where creativity often happens.

Synthesise with AI

Photograph your journal page reflections of these steps and hand them to Claude or ChatGPT, asking it to find the patterns across your joys, labels, values, strengths, problems and constraints, and to suggest concrete pathways… with a note on how close to ikigai each might feel. AI is genuinely brilliant at spotting threads you’re too close to see.

But and this is an important point of this evolution, mind how you take that AI step. This is the moment the ikigai-risk shows up in miniature. It would be so easy to end a purpose-hunt by typing “so what’s my purpose then?” and taking dictation from the machine, and that is precisely the erosion I keep banging on about. So don’t. Prompt yourself first (this is the whole spirit of Purpose Prompting) you’ve done the hard, human work of getting clearer, and the machine’s only job is to help you see, not to decide for you. It surfaces the patterns, you make the meaning.

Which is why the process doesn’t really end with AI, you decide. Read back what the machine reflects to you, and then you choose which pathway makes you feel a tingle and commit to the single smallest experiment you can run this week. Because all of my ikigai-risk thinking really comes down to one question, and it belongs right here at the finish line ask what’s worth keeping human before you automate anything. Finding your own reason for being is very near the top of that list.

The point of all this

This process is messy, iterative and never quite finished, I’ve done versions of it for years, and each pass reveals a new layer. The goal was never a perfect life plan wrapped beautifully with a bow, it’s purpose literacy… knowing, in your body, when you’re drifting towards what matters and when you’re drifting away.

You don’t need to be “ready” or have everything sorted. You need curiosity, a willingness to be honest with yourself, and the discipline to keep the meaningful part of all of this processing yours. Start with the joy audit today. Ten minutes. Notice what comes up, and don’t you dare judge yourself for any of it *grin*

Your ikigai isn’t waiting in some perfect future version of your life. It’s already in reach, possibly even threaded through your actual real life, in the patterns and problems and small joys that keep calling you. Time to answer.

In one word, what makes work feel worth doing, for you? Please share in the comments below beautiful souls.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS — Bullet Journal Prompt > This time the whole essay is twelve exercises each of which is really a journal prompt, and the doing happens on the page, in your own hand. I’m an unapologetic bullet-journal nerd, so I’m always happy to share more of my own spreads as we go.. and if you’d like every prompt laid out to walk through with room to fill it in, there’s a companion work worth doing workbook to go with this essay.

PPS — When you reach the “synthesise with AI” step, here’s a prompt to run with. Attach as many of your twelve exercise pages as you’ve done, even a few is a start; just tell it what’s still missing. And notice what the prompt does and doesn’t ask for: patterns and possibilities, never a verdict. You did the human work, the machine just helps you explore possibilities.

PPPS — Today’s soundtrack is “These Are Days” by 10,000 Maniacs. I chose it because it conveys such a lovely feeling, one I want everyone to have as often as possible... it’s about noticing that the luminous, meaningful days are the ones you’re living right now, not the ones you’re rushing towards. Your reason for being isn’t waiting in some tidier future life, it’s threaded through this one, today.

Monday night, a hotel room in London, and I was wrung out. It had been a ridiculously hot day, the city baking and oppressive, and I had spent it dashing between airport, trains and meetings with barely a minute to find food. What I ate, I grabbed on the move, wrapped and beige and gone in four bites, simply because I had no time for a proper meal. By the time I got back to the hotel, I was so depleted I didn’t fancy wandering unfamiliar streets in search of something healthy.

On the way up to my room, running entirely on fumes, I bought a packet of crisps (max strong jalapeno and cheese for enquiring minds) from the corridor vending machine. I was not even truly hungry. I just needed a little treat after a hard day, and they were sitting right there behind the glass, requiring absolutely zero effort. The Japanese have a lovely word for this;

Kuchisabishii (口寂しい) that translates to “lonely mouth”. It describes the urge to eat or chew on something because your mouth feels bored, empty or in need of stimulation.

I was seeking comfort I guess.

In my bag sat the bullet journal where I keep a tally of thirty different plants I eat each week, and I knew I was going to struggle to catch up with most of the week looking as hectic.

Then, slumped on the bed waiting for the tiny kettle that takes an unfeasibly long time to boil, I caught myself doing exactly the same thing with my thinking. I had tricky, nuanced meeting notes to write up. But rather than getting stuck into the hard work, I jumped straight to Claude without properly thinking about what I was trying to achieve or why. I reached for the chatbox exactly the way I had reached for the crisps. I had been feeding a lonely mouth, and now I was feeding a lonely mind.

Food and AI fail you in exactly the same way when you are running on empty… convenience is on hand to tempt you away from a healthier option.

Worse than empty

I have carried this worry for a while. At first, I concentrated on empty calories… things like the packaged snacks and sweets that give you a little boost, even a feeling of having eaten, but give your body very little it can use. Pleasant perhaps, but hollow.

The longer I muse on this though, the more empty calories felt too kind of a metaphor, because the bigger fear is ultra-processed food (UPF). The Nova classification drawn up by Brazilian scientist Carlos Monteiro who studied malnutrition, gives us a definition for UPF… and a doctor called Chris van Tulleken wrote a book, Ultra-Processed People, that made a lot of us stare at ingredient labels more intently. The danger of ultra-processed food runs well past empty calories. It has been engineered to be hyperpalatable so that it is hard to stop, it carries just enough nourishment to pass itself off as a meal but elbows proper food off your plate. Some of that processing itself is the harm, and it feels SO worrying to me that more isn’t spoken about this, or that people aren’t outraged that there isn’t better research or regulation.

I also see this in areas with nothing to do with food.

Ask AI to make you something without spending very long on crafting your prompt and it hands you back a few paragraphs in four seconds, every punctuation mark in its place (or extras if you aren’t a fan of an oxford comma), and you feel that hit of a job done before you read it and notice there is nothing of you in it. That is the empty calorie version, the feeling of having worked with none of the nourishment of having thoughtfully worked.

The UPF version is sharper and far harder to refuse. It is the smooth, moreish, slightly sycophantic answer that genuinely does have some use, and so slides past your defences, and displaces the effortful, awkward, slow work where your sense of purpose sometimes lives.

You can dismiss sugar. It’s much harder to dismiss a thing that kinda mostly works.

I intimately know this fear of how food impacts our health. Bowel cancer is turning up in younger and younger people, no one is entirely sure why but our diets, including UPF are one of the suspects in the line-up while the research catches up. My husband Andrew was diagnosed when he was barely into his forties. Not a story to tell in detail today, only that I learned the hard way, what it feels like to watch a danger the world filed under ‘not yet urgent’ become devastatingly real.

Something becomes normal faster than our ability to understand what it is doing to us. The early warnings remain diffuse enough to dismiss.

AI will not make us physically sick (I hope, ahem!)... but the ikigai risk of AI, the slow erosion of the feeling that what you do each day is yours and it matters, is the same shape of systemic worry. So when I can see with my own eyes that a thing is real and rising and somehow still too quiet, I struggle to file it under interesting. I feel it as an urgency deep in my bones.

The name nobody used

Then, this week, the strangest sort of relief.

I caught up with some reading on the train, and somewhere between one meeting and the next, I read that the House of Lords had spent a whole chunk of a recent Friday worrying about exactly this, about what artificial intelligence is doing to us, to our families and our work and our sense of who we are.

The Archbishop of Canterbury called the debate, and asked the question “Does AI make human life more human?” She was asking us to judge AI not by what it can do, but by whether it serves human dignity and common good. I will pick that thought up in another essay in more detail as I can’t give up my drive for mitigating the i-risk of AI. But for now, I thought, wow how lovely it is to hear that other people are worried too, I’m not going mad!

And then the relief faded a tad… because being discussed for one morning in the Lords is not the same as being properly heard or indeed action being taken, and I know that feeling far too well.

One peer, Lord Alderdice, a psychiatrist, warned that a thing can become dangerous precisely because it is so good at the job we hand it. “It is the very effectiveness of one dimension of thinking that makes this dangerous for us,” he said. Which is exactly the trouble with ultra-processed food, and exactly the trouble with AI. Nobody got hooked on the thing that did not work. We get hooked on the thing that works but costs us something we were not watching. The danger lives in how well it works.

Even the optimist saw it. Lord Johnson, who told the House he is invested in AI and thinks it the best thing ever to happen to us, still warned that the deepest emergency is learning to cope with what he called “an age of purposelessness.” Baroness Gill described the real impact of AI on our culture as “a quiet, comfortable surrender of the human mind,” happening right now in our own living rooms. The Bishop of Oxford, worrying about the young, insisted that “our young people are more than data points.”

A whole morning of brilliant minds naming different pieces of the fear

Purpose.

Agency.

Dignity.

Judgement.

Human relationships.

The slow surrender of the mind.

They had plenty of words for its parts, but no single name for the pattern.

The phrase I lean on is the ikigai risk of AI, which I first learned a year and a half ago and have not been able to put down since. I need more of us to notice, for this to travel further than my little corner of the internet because a danger you don’t name is a danger you struggle to defend against.

Thirty plants & thirty unprompted things

Which brings me back to my thirty plants, because folded inside that habit is the answer.

It never forbade a single thing and laid no guilt at my door. It handed me a reason to chase variety, and let me watch my tally climb on the page where I could see it. That gentle, trackable, additive little nudge rewired a habit that decades of good intentions couldn’t. Kindness did what sternness never could.

So I have decided to make myself a second challenge next to the plants, and you are very welcome to steal it.

I am calling it thirty unprompted things, I love that prompt means two things to me now, the question I write in my journal and what I type when I want a machine to help me think.

To be clear, I do not mean spontaneous. I mean things I initiated and completed using my own cognitive friction, before reaching for the box to do the thinking for me. So each week I will try to notice and count the different things I have done of my own accord:

• A difficult concept I wrestled with directly from the source text, rather than asking for a summary.

• A problem worked out in my own head before I reached for a box of answers.

• A conversation with a real person that shifted my view.

• A diagram drawn by hand.

• A walk where I thought instead of asked.

• A question I let sit unanswered overnight.

The reason it works is the same reason the plants work. Diversity is resilience. A varied gut microbiome is robust and a monoculture is fragile, and your thinking behaves the same way. Pour everything you think solely through a single chatbot and you plant a mental monoculture, efficient, tidy and one bad season from collapse. You end up sounding, as the Archbishop also warned, more and more like everyone else.

Feed yourself a rich and varied whole food diet of thinking, and the autopilot reach loses its grip. It crowds out the ultra-processed rubbish. You do not have to ban the beige snacks if you are eating whole foods. You never have to police the AI at all. You commit to feeding yourself well, and the over-reliance withers.

Pick whatever number feels right to you. Thirty pairs rather beautifully with the plants but the point is in the noticing.

Making more of a fuss

I have written before about purpose proofing, the deliberate work of protecting what makes you feel alive from being automated out of your days. That is the why. Purpose prompting is one of my hows. Thirty unprompted things is another, small and trackable and kind, a thing you can do with a pen.

The Lords can hold their debates and the labs can build their brakes, and I truly hope they do, but while the big switches are being argued over I will be on the train with my journal, counting my unprompted things the way I count my plants, keeping a varied diet for a mind I would very much like to keep healthy.

Journaling was never going to be enough on its own. None of this is a done deal. None of it. What AI becomes, who it serves, what we will and will not let it take from us, all of that is still being decided right now, and while we still have a say... we had better use that!

So yes, make the small personal changes. Protect your own mind, and share those practices with the people you love… then look up. Speak to the people who represent you and tell them this matters to you (and if an election is looming, all the better, because they’ll listen to you if they want your vote). Join a group that cares and is fighting for your corner of the world, or start one if it does not exist yet. A handful of people who refuse to stay quiet can move a conversation further than you would ever believe.

The danger is real, it is rising and it is still far too quiet. So let us be the ones who make more of a fuss. Gently where it helps and loudly where it counts, one unprompted thing and one raised voice at a time.

So tell me, what is one unprompted thing you will reach for this week? I would love to know.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Bullet journal prompt reflections;

• Think back over the last few days. Where did you reach for AI without really thinking about what you wanted or why, and what were you actually hungry for in that moment?

• If your mind were a plate, how varied is what you feed it? Whose thinking shapes yours, and how many different sources is it honestly coming from?

• None of this is a done deal. What is one fuss you could make this week, at your own table or further out in the world?

PPS - Your AI prompt this week is an experiment in using AI to widen your diet rather than narrow it, so do use the best model and switch extended thinking on. Take a question you really care about and paste this in:

Here is a question I am chewing on: [your question]. Give me three different and opposing ways thoughtful people answer it, and make the strongest case for each, even the one you doubt, so I meet each at its best. For every position point me to one primary source I could go and read myself, a book, a paper, an essay or a person worth following, and tell me what each one would say I am missing. Do not settle it for me. Leave me with the most interesting unresolved tension and one question worth sitting with.

Notice how different that feels from asking for the tidy single answer. One feeds you. The other just fills you up… you can go really deep with the prompt, after the first run through take the last question and use that to redo the prompt in a fresh chat window… and repeat!

PPPS - Your listening companion this week is Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk by Rufus Wainwright (watch the video, those eyes alone are worth it). The song sits in that pull towards the things that are a little bit sweeter and a little bit harmful, the compulsions that can run the show. What I love about hearing it now though, on the far side of giving up a few things myself, is knowing the pull softens. You learn that a real treat feeling, was waiting in whole foods all along... a perfectly ripe peach, a proper coffee, the occasional artisan ice cream eaten slowly in the sun. Have a listen, then go and feed yourself something that loves you back.

There is a pristine lilac Leuchtturm1917 in front of me as I write this. It sits on my desk beside the current turquoise one, slightly scuffed from six months of being acarried everywhere.

I’m excited to start my new journal, honestly one of my favourite things to do and I’m so happy I get to do it twice a year! It is shiny and full of possibility with pages untouched by badly drawn diagrams, abandoned trackers or notes written in a hurry that later turn out to be completely indecipherable.

I have already stroked the cover several times.

Henry, self-appointed supervisor of all activities that involve me (even for tasks with zero dogs required), has flopped across my feet with the contented sigh of a hound who knows we are not going anywhere for a while.

So I start to migrate journals, copying across the things that still matter and setting up the new spreads for the second half of the year. It’s a ritual, because to move into a new journal you first have to sit with the old one… and reading six months of your own handwriting can be a very tender thing indeed.

Moving in halfway through the year feels very different from doing it in January, which arrives full of declarations, new year, new habits, new goals, new you. July arrives carrying evidence. By now I know what this year has actually asked of me, which plans survived contact with reality and which stopped mattering. January lets us imagine, July lets us adjust… and that’s why one particular idea has started to make me feel a little uneasy.

A clean slate undermines acceptance

There is something undeniably seductive about a clean slate. No clutter, no mistakes, no awkward earlier attempts,.. just a spotless surface on which we will apparently become calm and organised and mysteriously able to drink two litres of water a day (seriously, why out of all habits is this the one I struggle with the most?!?).

The trouble is that a completely clean slate asks us to leave too much behind. It turns renewal into rejection. It hints that the woman who struggled and changed her mind and lost momentum and never did colour in that habit tracker properly is somebody to be wiped away before she is allowed to proceed. There is a violence in that, in treating your own recent self as a draft to be deleted.

I want to learn from the first half of my year rather than delete it. There are things I hoped to do and have not done. There are ideas that worked beautifully right up until they did not. There are tasks that migrated from page to page with the determination of a bureaucratic ghost. There are also conversations I want to keep, ideas that arrived out of nowhere, things I never planned that turned out to matter, tiny moments of joy that would have vanished completely if I had not stopped to write them down. The crossed out tasks are part of the story. So are the blank pages. So are the plans I outgrew. A new journal can simply say that the story is ready to change form.

I do not need a new me

I started this essay with the thought that moving to a new notebook was like a regeneration, but that means becoming somebody new, and the more I think about where I am now… well, somebody new is not what I am after.

The Doctor really does change with regeneration, not just the face. Their whole way of being in the world changes too, the tastes and the temper, a different personality emerging from the golden light each time. What doesn’t change is the entity underneath with all of the memories. The same deeper self stepping through every door, a new manner laid over a constant core.

So for me the cover changes, and some spreads change. The way I show up on these pages will be slightly different, my core values worn smoother and a touch clearer than they were. The outside can go on evolving to fit the self underneath who has been here the whole time, finally legible and perhaps able to stop performing.

David Tennant’s tenth Doctor, at the very end of his time, says that he does not want to go. He knows the core of him will carry on into whoever comes next, and still he grieves the particular man he has been, loving exactly who he is and wishing he could stay a while longer. I think about that now because somehow I have arrived at my own version of it. I like this one. I do not want to go.

I am still cross with myself often enough, mind. I wince at the weirdnesses and the creativity with which I can get in my own way. But they came in the same box as everything I love about being this person, and I guess they’ve survived every version of me so far, which is how I know they are core. They are mine. Perhaps perimenopause is dialling up traits that were quieter or less impactful before, but that is a topic for another day.

The joy and play live in that same box. There will be stickers in the new book, and colour and at least one doodle that bears little resemblance to the thing it was meant to be. Some spreads will turn out to be the journalling equivalent of celery worn on a lapel, beloved of the Fifth Doctor and nobody else. A journal that records only duty is little more than a manager issuing a disappointing performance review every Sunday night. The colours are my proof that I am savouring my life rather than only trying to manage it.

What the journal became

When I started bullet journalling I thought it was a system for getting organised, somewhere to park the work and the appointments and the great churning mass of stuff I was trying to hold in my head. Over the years it became so much more. I let the rest of my life onto the page, the learning and the questions and the books I meant to read and the difficult things I needed to understand… it stopped being a planner and became a laboratory for ikigai.

There was an earlier incarnation though, one I do not much care to count. For years my notebooks were all about work. Beautifully colour-coded to-do lists, but very little mind mapping and not one honest feeling anywhere on the page, as though work was the only part of me worth recording. Every Doctor keeps one face out of the official line-up, the incarnation who does not quite get to wear the name. That all-business woman is mine, the War Doctor of my stationery drawer, and I left her out of the story for the longest time.

But I remember her now. I remember all of them. If you have followed along for a while you have watched the later versions arrive in real time. The practice found its feet as wellbeing and organisation in Bullet Journal and Take Control of Your Life. It learned to sit with the hard and empty stretches in Navigating Emptiness. It turned into a life manual full of quests and small wins in Achievement Unlocked. It argued for keeping a whole life together in one thinking space in One Journal to Rule Them All. In all my essays I think of at least one bullet journal prompt or practice that relates to the topic I am exploring, it is an integral part of my life.

Matt Smith’s eleventh Doctor says a line as he goes that he will always remember when the Doctor was him. You keep every previous you, even the all-business one you would rather forget, and you carry them with you, and I reckon that’s how you come to like the one you are now. Most days I do not feel like the commander of some sleek venture anyway. I feel much more like someone travelling through time in a blue box that doesn’t quite work as expected but has the most amazing time… the journal is my companion for the journey.

Closing time is not failure

This current one has been a good companion. It has supported me through the first half of the year, holding work plans and essay fragments and worries and doodles and handwriting that grew wilder some days. I can close it with thanks.

There is a song that puts this better than I can. We have all been swept out of a pub at last orders by Semisonic’s Closing Time, and the line that follows us into the night is said to have been inspired by some of the writings of Seneca the Stoic…

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”

Closing time is a threshold. Something reaches its natural stopping point, having done the very thing it came to do, the lights come up, and we gather what matters and carry it out through the door. A goal can reach its closing time. So can a routine, or a worry, or a version of you that you no longer need to be.

So before I move on, I am going to spend proper time with this worn journal. Not to run a productivity tribunal over the first half of the year, I want to read it looking for what is still alive. Then I will lay out a simple regeneration spread across two pages, a handful of questions, and let the answers decide what travels with me and what I can thank and release. The actual questions are waiting for you down in the PS if you would like to borrow them, rainbow coloured pens and wonky handwriting very much encouraged.

Same woman, new notebook

When I am full moved over to my new Leuchtturm1917 I will feel the familiar thrill of all that empty space and the promise of what awaits for the second half of 2026. I will try not to read it as a demand. The blank pages owe me nothing and ask nothing of me. They are simply offering somewhere for the next part of the story to happen. I will carry some things forward. I will let some things change shape. I will allow a few to reach their natural closing time, with gratitude rather than guilt. I will make plans and draw diagrams and write reflections and almost certainly start a tracker I abandon before the end of the year.

The new journal will hold this same life, still unfolding. So I am opening a door and the same woman is walking through it. Same memories. Same values. Same slightly chaotic me, weirdnesses and all.

The cover is changing. The handwriting might even behave itself for a week or two, and the way I show up on the page will shift again, the way it does every year or so. Underneath all of it the core of me is staying, a little more worn in and a little surer of itself, more mine than it has ever quite managed before.

What are you carrying forward, and what are you ready to let reach its closing time?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Bullet Journal spread - “The Mid-Year Regeneration Report”

1. What deserves to survive this regeneration? Some things need protecting more than improving.

2. What is asking to change form? Something that still matters but needs a kinder scale, a gentler method or a more playful shape.

3. What has reached its natural closing time? A goal, a commitment or a version of yourself you no longer need to perform. Release it without filing it under failure.

4. Who and what are my companions through the change? The people, places and practices that help you stay grounded.

5. Where did I feel most alive in the first half of the year?

6. What tiny adventure would make the next six months more exciting? One experiment, one trip, one interesting door more than new goals.

PPS - An AI prompt if you’d like to join me in a mid-year reflection, turn on thinking mode;

Based on what you have noticed across our conversations over the last 6 months, what part of me seems to be becoming clearer, what have I quietly outgrown, and what do I keep returning to that may matter more than I realise? Show me the patterns you see, then give me one question to reflect on in my journal.

Oh and I created an AI artifact for you to play with, take my What Doctor Are You? quiz and share your results *grin*

PPPS - This week’s soundtrack is of course Closing Time. Dan Wilson set out to write a song to close the band’s set each night and realised partway through that he had also written something about being born… the bright lights are the world waiting outside. Last orders and first breath at the very same time. So when you put it on to set up your new journal, you are listening to a song about beginnings dressed up as a song about endings.

Last week I fluffed the Konami code at our fabulous monthly Geeks Quiz, to my shame.

It’s a proper pen-and-paper old school quiz, you scribble your answers down and when the round is over you swap sheets with the next table to mark each other’s. The question came up and a little firework went off in my chest, because this one was mine. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right... and then when our lovely quiz master Chris read out the answers over the mic I realised I’d only gone and got B and A the wrong way round.

I was *so* gutted and more than a tad cross with myself for messing up… I am a self-certified gamer geek and that code should live in my bones, and there I was getting it backwards in a room full of fellow nerds. Which goes to show, that anyone can trip up even over the things they know best, when under pressure. You have to laugh or else you might spiral… and losing it over a quiz result would perhaps not be the best use of our one short and precious life. None of us get out of here alive, so I’d rather be able to laugh at my own daft mistakes than take it all too terribly seriously (though I do run a huge risk of my uber competitive husband disowning me over sharing this publicly *grin*).

My rambly thought train this week has been about what the code reminded me of though, and how much I bloody love an easter egg.

From cheat to treasure

If you’ve never met it, the Konami code is ten button presses. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. It was born as a cheat. A developer called Kazuhisa Hashimoto was porting an arcade shoot-em-up to the NES home console back in the eighties, found the wretched thing far too hard to test over and over, and built himself a secret shortcut to hand him all the power-ups at once. He left it in by accident. Players found it and it spread from there. An early example in a game called Contra became the stuff of legend, thirty extra lives for anyone who entered the sequence.

It began as a way to skip the hard part. Once you know of a shortcut it’s hard to resist that same reflex, the pull to let the machine play the level for us the second things get tricky… which does make me think about what we lose when we stop struggling through to the other side, and what risks there are for our young ones if nobody helps them sit with hard stuff for long enough… but I’ll save that thread for another day, this one is about the magic.

Because the code didn’t stay a cheat. It escaped the console and multiplied. It also turned up in films and TV shows and websites and far flung corners of the internet, and it for sure stopped being a shortcut and became something very lovely indeed… a secret handshake, a little hidden delight, tucked away for whoever knows where to look. Same ten button presses with a completely different purpose.

The joy engineers

That hidden delight concept is now called an easter egg, and the first famous one was an act of rebellion. Around 1980 a programmer called Warren Robinett was building a game for Atari, a company that flatly refused to print its developers’ names on anything they made. So he smuggled himself in. He buried a secret room inside the game, reachable only by carrying a single pixel to exactly the right spot, and there he signed his name in glowing letters. A signature stowed away inside the cartridge, waiting years for anyone curious enough to find it.

The idea caught on and has never stopped. Steven Spielberg let E.T. recognise a child out trick-or-treating in a Yoda costume, and years later George Lucas returned the wink by sliding E.T.’s own species into the Star Wars senate. A TARDIS turned up in Star Trek Strange New Worlds recently, there just long enough for the sharp-eyed to gasp (though I’m not ready to talk about the recent Doctor Who news as I’m more than a little gutted)… All of it hidden in plain sight waiting for those who are looking closely enough. Whole fandoms now hunt for these things for sport, cataloguing every blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod, and I love that about my people.

Nobody is paid extra to do this. Somebody decided that a stranger’s jolt of joy was worth the additional hours, and built a little gift into the work for a person they would never meet. That is a joy engineer. Someone who looks at an ordinary thing and thinks, I’ll hide a bit of magic in here, just so a few people get the thrill of finding it.

Finding your people

Every easter egg since carries a version of that same message. It says I was here and I was thinking of you. It says if you get this, you’re one of us. The in-joke that makes you grin because it was so clearly left for your eyes. The reference only your people catch. That little jolt of recognition is how we find one another, and finding one another is how we work out where it’s safe to take the mask off.

Long before developers were burying pixels in code, these kinds of hidden signals were a matter of real-world survival. History is full of these real-life easter eggs… a green carnation, a specific turn of phrase, secret languages built entirely to ask without asking Are you like me? Is it safe here? I’m writing this in Pride month, and it would be remiss of me not to nod to that. For anyone who has to hide parts of themselves away just to get through the day, the coded signal is everything. The flag in the window. The pin on the lapel. The little tell that says you can breathe out here, you belong, you can bring the whole of yourself. Belonging gets built in exactly these small hidden signals, and belonging means safe environments that let people be themselves, to get to feel magic and joy.

Joy is an input

You key joy in on purpose, the same deliberate way you would punch in the code. Joy rarely arrives gift-wrapped while you wait around for the world to improve of its own accord. You choose it, you enter it, up up down down and a wonderful thought is that it’s a skill. Press it often enough and your eye gets trained to spot the hidden delights everywhere, and your hands get quicker at planting them for other people. Nobody is born knowing where the easter eggs are. You learn. You practise and you get better. Joy engineering, you could call it.

Let me show you the ones I’m addicted to being the daft optimist I am.

There’s my lunchtime stomp. Whether it’s a calm day or there’s a proper gale blowing in off the Irish Sea, I get out and I walk rain or shine, grinning like an absolute loon the whole way. The magic in that is as you approach someone coming the other way who looks a little weighed down, off somewhere sad in their own head, and you catch their eye and smile with your whole face, and most of the time they simply cannot help smiling back. For half a second something might lift in them. I get to walk on hoping I topped their tank up just enough that they pass it to the next person, and they to the next. You never see where it ends and that is rather the point.

You’ll know the same thing from the road. You let a car out at a junction, the smallest thing, and ten minutes later you watch that same driver wave somebody else out further down the way. One little input, a ripple you never get to follow to its edge.

Some easter eggs you can build into a team. We have a word in our corner of the office now that makes us smile and has become a beacon, clarity. When one of us says it, it feels like a hand on the shoulder, because behind it sits a pledge we made each other to try and strip away the noise and the panic and get back to whatever actually matters. One word, and you can watch shoulders drop around the table. An easter egg you can say out loud.

Some you bake into the calendar. A Bake Off day at work, where the spreadsheet can wait a few minutes because someone’s brought a showstopper and we’re all going to grab a coffee and savour it. Things that can give the week a little hook to hang your hope on, things you get to look forward to.

And some you simply hide for one particular person. A note slipped into a bag where they’ll find it on a hard afternoon. A chocolate bar left on a stressed desk. The good games always slip something lovely onto the loading screen, a small reward for the waiting, and you can do the very same with a kettle coming to the boil or a queue that won’t move or a meeting that hasn’t kicked off yet. A little game built to lift the mundane or tedious.

Be the developer

You can’t skip the hard parts of being alive. The grief and the bad news and the grey weeks still come, and joy is no cheat code for getting past them. As I get older I realise that the hard parts are needed really to ever learn something or appreciate when you have it good.

What you do get to choose is how you interact with the glorious game of life. You can grab for a shortcut with the risk it leaves you a touch hollower for it. Or you can be a developer. The joy engineer who buries a little delight in the world, for no reward at all, knowing some stranger will trip over it on a day they badly needed it and feel, for one second, that somebody out there had them in mind.

And that planting is an antidote to pain. The finding is a joy all of its own of course... but the planting is the part that really can heal. Because the surest way I know to feel less alone in a hard world is to spend my day trying to help others, and hiding small proof that the world can still be kind, then trusting it to ripple out somewhere I’ll never get to see, is *such* a joyous thing to be a part of.

So. Up, up, down, down. Get the B and the A the right way round if you can, and have a proper belly laugh when you don’t. Then go and hide something lovely where someone will find it.

Player One, you’re up.

Who is the best “joy engineer” in your life or workplace? What little magic do they do that makes everyone’s day better? Shout them out in the comments!

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - A prompt to explore in your journal. Cast your mind back, what easter egg did someone once hide for you, a kindness or a small magic you only clocked later, after they’d gone? Sit a while with how it felt to be thought of like that. Then write down one you could hide this week, and describe how you think the person will react in detail.

PPS - An experiment for your favourite image AI, built to be shared - paste it in and fill in the blanks;

Create a retro 8-bit video game screen in the style of a 1980s console, the moment a player discovers a hidden easter egg. Player 1 name is [NAME]. The scene celebrates [a small kindness or moment of joy from my week, in a few words], drawn in cheerful pixel art with a glowing banner that reads YOU FOUND A SECRET, a sparkle of light, a tiny pixel heart and a retro score counter ticking up in the corner. Use [platform / URL] to understand their public voice, visual brand, colours, themes and personality to inform a scene and style that belongs in their universe.

PPPS - This week’s soundtrack choice is The Rainbow Connection, the Tori Kelly version with Kermit the Frog, from The Wonderful World of Disney at Disneyland. Yes, a felt amphibian on banjo, a song for the dreamers and the believers, who insist there’s some wonder waiting just up ahead. You decide the rainbow means something, you keep your eyes peeled for it on the wet walk home, and the others who believe it too find their way to you.