I sign every essay “Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx” and I’ve been wondering if I should stop.

I worry that “seeking” sounds like I haven’t found anything worthwhile. Does it read as flaky, a woman in her fifties who can’t quite get to the point? Sarah, after all this time, when are you going to find it?

I’ve been musing on whether I’ll always be seeking? Should I be? Is this an admission or a stance? The answer came to me already familiar, because the phrase spoke to me for a good reason but I hadn’t consciously appreciated or articulated why.

The seeking is the point.

Not the warm up act for a future state where I announce I’ve cracked it. The seeking itself is the answer. The disposition is the destination.

The Japanese concept that has anchored my essays for nearly three years. Iki meaning life, gai meaning worth or value. Life-worth, a thing that makes getting up in the morning feel worthwhile… and seeking ikigai, properly understood, has no destination you can fail to reach. It’s a way of moving through the world that keeps a question alive. Almost the opposite of a polished mission statement on the office wall. The opposite of the moment you stop asking because you’ve decided you’ve found it.

The people I most want to talk to are still asking questions, I worry about what happens to us when we stop.

So this essay, the third in our little mini series on the components of meaning, is about purpose. I know it might feel like a contradiction, but I don’t have a purpose, well not in the way most purpose discourse means it *grin*.

Goal, mission, purpose

Let’s define our terms, because purpose is one of those words that gets used SO much. People use it interchangeably with goals, mission, calling, vocation, dream, aim, ambition. They are not the same thing, the differences matter for what we’re working through here.

A goal is a destination. You can reach it then it’s done. Hit your subscriber number. Finish the chapter. Run the marathon. Goals live in a closed system. They have a finish line, which is what makes them useful and also what makes them limited. You can have a goal and still not know what your life is for.

A mission is a campaign, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Take the product to market. Get this team home safely. Missions are usually bigger than goals because they’re other-directed and need more hands, but they finish. Companies refresh their missions because the market moves or leadership changes. The danger comes when we treat mission as forever instead of for-now. The words get framed and posted on the office wall, and in the process they drift from soul to slogan, from direction to performance.

Purpose is something else. Purpose is direction. You can travel with no end, watching where you are already pointed and pay attention to what the patterns tell you.

I love how language and cultural framing can add nuance, for example in Japanese. Mokuteki (目的) can mean purpose, aim, objective or intention, but often lives closer to the language of aims and objectives. It’s the sort of word that belongs to a thing you are trying to do. Ikigai (生き甲斐) reaches for something wider. Life-worth. The felt value of being alive. The thing you are living towards, not just a task you are trying to complete.

Two different meanings. English can collapse both into “purpose” and I don’t think that helps us thrive.

Lots of modern purpose discourse (especially on social media) encourages us to declare our purpose. Write it down and make it pithy for your LinkedIn header. Tattoo it on your forearm if you are feeling brave. The assumption it’s something you decide and then announce.

I suggest that purpose is something you recognise. You watch where you keep returning. You notice what you cannot put down… and then, slowly, with humility, you start to articulate what you have been doing all along, shaping it intentionally.

Declared purpose can feel like a loud performance. Recognised purpose is perhaps more of a truthful way of being.

The seeker is doing the recognising, and still consulting the compass.

The pattern that picks you

Last week we talked about coherence as foundational. The whole self walking through every door roughly the same shape and size. A laser focused you. I left you with a line about how a scattered self cannot point anywhere.

Coherence is who you really are. Purpose is where that whole self is pointed.

If coherence is the laser, purpose is the direction the light is travelling.

We’ve been taught to think about purpose as something we choose. We sit with a journal, we do a workshop, we read a book about finding our why, and we try to select a purpose the way we might select a paint colour. Then we wonder why nothing seems to stick.

Try a different starting point. Look at what you are already doing.

Be honest about it too, perhaps not the things you wish you were doing or had planned to do. The things you keep finding yourself doing, even when you said you’d stop. Especially the things nobody is paying you for.

You don’t choose your purpose. You notice the pattern of what you cannot put down or ignore.

In essay 130 I wrote about Richard Feynman’s twelve favourite problems, the small set of questions a person carries through life and tests every new piece of information against. The favourite problems are the ones that picked you. They appear in the corner of your eye and refuse to leave, following you into rooms where they have no business being.

That is purpose in its truest form. The problems that won’t let you go.

Purpose is inherently beyond me. Whatever your problems are, even when personal they also point outward. Toward people you could help or something you want to build. Toward a corner of the world you want to leave shinier than it was.

Self-improvement is so important. It is often the work that gives us enough steadiness to turn outward, and wanting to feel happier and more alive is not selfish in the small grasping sense of the word. Many people argue purpose has to start there to be authentic and sustainable, and I think they’re largely right. You cannot pour from an empty cup… but if the project begins and ends with making myself shinier, we are not in purpose territory yet. Self-improvement is a foundation, not itself the destination… having a sense of community care, the beyond me is the bit that elevates it.

The enough line

So purpose is direction. You watch where you are already pointing. You notice what you cannot put down. Lovely. Now to a question you don’t hear often enough in modern life.

What is enough?

When I wrote what purpose felt like to me, in plain language, it came out as twenty three words.

Make my corner of the world shinier than it was. Do more good than harm. Enjoy myself every day as much as possible.

Read it again. The shape of an enough line is in there if you look for it. Shinier than it was tells me when the corner is shiny enough. Not the shiniest or shinier than yours. Just shinier than the version that existed before I started trying. More good than harm tells me when the ledger has tipped. Not perfect, just net positive. And enjoy myself every day as much as possible refuses to defer joy. It’s claimed daily, not earned later.

Three check-ins with none about scale or more.

Enough.

The enough line is purpose’s secret backbone. Without it you can be pointing in exactly the right direction and still grind yourself into dust because you’ve never asked the question how much would be enough today. Purpose does not only ask, what am I here to do? It also asks, how much of myself am I allowed to spend doing it?

This is where AI can get dangerous. AI doesn’t tire. It has no muscles to ache, no eyes to strain, no Sunday afternoon when the body says we are done now. So when we adopt AI as a thinking partner we can absorb its tirelessness without noticing. We start using its clock instead of ours. Another iteration while the kettle boils. The thing is bottomless and we forget that we are not.

This is the ikigai risk of AI at the level of purpose. Productivity without orientation. Movement without meaning. Output without rest. You’re producing, the metrics look great, but somewhere along the way you stopped being able to tell the difference between doing more of the work that matters and simply doing more.

If you never reach enough, you stop being able to tell which way you’re pointing. The compass needle spins because there is no still moment, no calm in which to read it.

The enough line is what gives the seeking its rhythm. Purpose without enough is panic in pretty packaging.

In praise of seeking

Which brings me back to the thing I have been worrying about for weeks, whether seeking sounds too flaky.

I don’t think it does, but I’m really keen to hear your thoughts!

I see a seeker as someone who knows which way she’s heading because she checks her compass periodically. She has an enough line and remains curious as she knows she doesn’t have all the answers. She listens to other perspectives for hers is still being shaped, asking better questions and genuinely wanting to learn with others.

The opposite of the seeker is the certain. The certain person has stopped asking and the problem begins when their perspectives and framework become a fortress. When the brand voice gets louder than the inner human voices. When the tidy sentence has to be defended long after it has stopped feeling true.

I’m not as interested in being certain as I am in being honest or helpful (is what I am trying to articulate kind, necessary or true?).

So if seeking is a stance rather than an admission, what does that look like in practice? Three things, I think.

🌸 A willingness to be wrong, because if you’re seeking you haven’t arrived, which means everything you currently believe is provisional. That is the only condition under which you can keep learning.

🌸 A softness toward other people’s compasses, because if yours is still moving, you can imagine theirs is too. The seeker doesn’t need everyone else to validate her direction, she is too busy walking her own path.

🌸 And a reverence for the imperfect, because the seeker knows you don’t get to ikigai by polishing yourself into something flawless, but by paying attention to what calls to you.

There’s an Indigo Girls line I love “The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.”

Closer to fine is the rhythm of life being lived. Still being shaped and noticed, keeping you moving in roughly the right direction with kindness and curiosity and a willingness to be wrong about most of it.

So when I say I don’t have A purpose, I don’t have one punchy sentence I could hand you. I have several things that keep changing shape, a direction I keep noticing, an enough line that keeps me honest and a small handful of problems that won’t let me go. It’s what purpose looks like when you stop trying to make it sit still.

Next week, the third component of meaning, significance. The bit that asks does this count? It turns purpose from direction into something with weight. We’ve talked about who you are. We’ve talked about where you’re pointing. Now comes the question of what your work is worth, and to whom.

For this week, sit with the seeking.

So I’d love to know… when you hear the word purpose, what does it mean to you? Pressure, curiosity, a vision board you started in 2019 and never finished? And if you had to describe yours in plain language today, which direction would you say you’re pointing, and how would you know when you’d done enough today? Tell me in the comments, the seeking is always richer when we do it out loud together.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Bullet journal prompts for you to try

A small audit for the seeker in you. What are you still genuinely curious about? Where have you been pretending to be more certain than you are? What’s one thing you’d dare to say I don’t know yet about, out loud, this week?

PPS AI prompt to test in your favourite AI helper with thinking mode turned on

I’m exploring purpose as something I unearth rather than performatively declare. Help me notice the patterns, I’d like to reflect on where my life is roughly pointing, the ethical compass I want to use and what enough looks like on an ordinary day, so I don’t grind myself into dust chasing more. Ask me five questions, one at a time, to help explore (we might start with things like what I’ve been doing lately that nobody asked me to do, or what keeps quietly calling me back, or what enough might look like on an ordinary day). After I answer, reflect back the themes you hear without tidying them into something slogan worthy. I want to see the raw and honest shape, not a polished sentence.

PPPS - Today’s soundtrack is “Closer to Fine” by Indigo Girls

This essay is about not needing one final, polished, purpose statement. The line “the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine” feels like a seeker’s manifesto. By loosening our grip on certainty, paying attention to the patterns and trusting the direction we learn that purpose is what the seeking teaches us to recognise in lots of aspects of our journeying.

People keep asking me “where do I start?”

So here’s my answer.

I wrote this guide because I kept getting the same message in my inbox. I love what you’re doing, where should I begin? The quick answer is #085 Why Should I Care About Ikigai. The longer answer is everything else below.

132* essays is a lot to take in.

I’ve picked sixteen essays that do the structural work for everything else in the archive and organised them into five tracks. Read them in the order below within each track. Skip tracks if a later one catches your eye more than an earlier one.

If you’re short on time, #085 alone does a lot of the work as I consciously wrote it to update my summary thinking. It’s the foundational essay if you don’t want to have to start from the very beginning and watch my messy evolution in real time hehe, and the one I’m most likely to hand to anyone asking what this publication is about.

* As at 19th April 2026, I will periodically update this *grin*

Track 1: The Entry Triptych

If you read nothing else, read these three. They are the why, the what, and the how, in that order.

#085 Why Should I Care About Ikigai?

“A slightly sweary guide to making Thursdays feel magical.”

The foundational essay. If you only read one piece from this guide, read this one.

In around 1,700 words I name the thesis (the ikigai risk of AI, defined in the essay itself as “the danger of AI disconnecting us from purpose rather than helping us find it”), I make the case for hatarakigai (work worth doing) as distinct from ikigai, and I explain why a Japanese philosophy, a bullet journal and an AI tool belong in the same practice.

“There’s magic hiding in your ordinary Thursday, I promise” If a line like that makes you want to keep reading, you’re in the right place.

#086 What Actually Is Ikigai?

This is where I layout my understanding... a felt sense, a quiet knowing, iki (life) plus gai (worth)... and it’s why your ikigai cannot be automated.

#087 How To Find Your Ikigai

The practical piece. Two phases, ten exercises, a bullet journal and an AI as thinking partners. Phase one grounds you in the five pillars, phase two shifts you toward the Venn diagram as a hatarakigai design tool. If you want purpose literacy, this is the one to work through with a pen in hand.

Track 2: The Five Pillars

If Track 1 lands and you want the full architecture, this is where I walk through Ken Mogi’s five pillars of ikigai, one essay each. They were published as a series in spring 2024.

#027 The Power of Starting Small (Pillar 1)

Starting Small is such an important lesson, it’s not a compromise but a learning stance. Atomic habits, 1% improvements... all aimed at helping you break down what matters into something you are more likely to be able to do.

#028 Let Go To Grow (Pillar 2)

Why releasing the illusory self is the pre-condition of self-acceptance. Via thinking about karaoke, while singing loudly in my car early on a Sunday morning. Windows up or windows down, depending on your nerve!

#029 Seeing Earth From Space Changes Everything (Pillar 3)

The Overview Effect and the Gaia installation, enlisted to argue that harmony and sustainability are active practices, not the absence of conflict. About decisions scaled across generations, not just this weekend.

#030 Craft A Contented Life Under A Vanilla Sky (Pillar 4)

Tom Cruise’s “the little things... there’s nothing bigger” pressed up against Mogi’s fourth pillar. Gratitude as a muscle you train, not a sentiment you feel.

#031 Douze Points For The Doctor (Pillar 5)

Doctor Who and Eurovision share one night, one couch, and one argument: fandom and present-moment attention are not separate things. Being In The Here And Now, via shared passion.

Track 3: The Hatarakigai Turn

This is where I work through why I am still so drawn to the purpose venn diagram most people wrongly think of as ikigai.

#024 Hatarakigai = Work Worth Doing

The arithmetic of a typical weekday: 8 hours sleep, 10 hours for work and commute, about 6 hours for everything else a human needs to be whole. Making the case why hatarakigai is actually a good thing to strive towards for ikigai.

#033 Venn-ture Towards Ikigai

A detective story. Who actually drew the now-famous ikigai Venn diagram? (Answer: Mark Winn, 2014. Not a Japanese philosopher.)

#062 Everyone Gets The Venn Diagram Wrong!

The definitive reckoning. The four-circle diagram is brilliant... for hatarakigai, but it is NOT ikigai… it is also mathematically impossible the way most people draw it!

#128 Money Talks, We Don’t

The current edge of the thread. Three money traps (Guilt, Survival, Hustle) and the question almost nobody’s asking: what if the fourth circle of hatarakigai didn’t have to look like exactly like how we do capitalism today?

Track 4: The Bullet Journal

The personal operating system that holds all of this together. I’ve kept one since July 2017. It’s the bridge between the philosophy and the practice, and the tool the AI essays in Track 5 sit on top of.

#034 Bullet Journal And Take Control Of Your Life

Talking about what Bullet Journal is, why I picked it up in 2017 and never put it down.

#064 Achievement Unlocked: Life Manual Found

The essay where the bullet journal clicks as something more than a to-do list. A life manual. A compass. A way of seeing the same things differently once you’ve slowed down enough to write them down. This is the essay where I explain how it was bullet journal that really unlocked ikigai and hatarakigai for me.

#075 One Journal To Rule Them All

If you’ve ever had a work diary, a planner, a notebook, a journal, and a separate to-do app... this is the case for collapsing them into one bullet journal.

Track 5: The AI Practices

The working theory of how to stay human while using AI.

#125 What Is Purpose Prompting?

The signature practice, named at last. A daily loop I’d been running unofficially for years before I had a word for it. Prompt yourself first, prompt AI with intention, return to yourself. If you take one tangible thing from this archive into your working week, take this.

#126 What Is Purpose Proofing AI?

The philosophy underneath Purpose Prompting. Fireproof what’s flammable. Soundproof what’s loud. Purpose-proof what gives your life meaning. This essay elevates the daily practice into a way of living alongside AI.

How the tracks fit together

Tracks 1 and 2 are the foundation. Track 3 is the structural reckoning. Track 4 is the personal operating system. Track 5 is the working theory building on top of all of them. Read in whatever order calls to you.

If you’ve read an essay that changed something for you and it isn’t on this list, tell me. If one of these essays from the list didn’t make sense to you, tell me about that too! My exploration, my writing and this guide gets better the more honest feedback I am given.

If the tracks land, the full archive is waiting. 132 essays and still counting, new ones arrive every Saturday.

Subscribe and the next one will find you.

Tell me, what brings you to this corner of the internet today, and what are you seeking? What’s one essay or book or song that changed something for you, that you’d hand me if we were swapping reader’s guides?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Bullet journal spread to try. Open to a fresh double-page spread and make your own reader’s guide. Not of this publication... of you. Five tracks of your life so far. Three to five essays (conversations, books, memories, moments) per track. The ones that did the structural work. The ones you’d hand to someone who wanted to understand you. It’s the most revealing bullet journal exercise I know.

PPS - Share this guide with your AI of choice and ask it this: “Based on what you already know about me, which of Sarah’s five tracks and/or individual essays should I start with, and why?” Then read whichever track it picks first. Then journal about whether it got you right. Purpose Prompting in action, with this Guide as the reflective surface.

PPPS - Our soundtrack is “Hallelujah” the Jeff Buckley version (though I nearly went KD Lang). I wanted something epic to convey how it feels to have written 132 essays, something that expresses love for the beauty and complexity of life, but also a song that isn’t perfect or finished either. I believe that Leonard Cohen wrote hundreds of versions. “I’ve heard there was a secret chord” is such a poignant message for someone who has started looking for their ikigai… you’ve heard it exists, you’re not sure yet what it sounds like, but you’re moving toward it anyway. I’m here still singing about the same word from 132 (and counting) different verses…. Hallelujah ikigai

I walk into a room and I trim a little of me. I sand down a corner, soften a word, swap an opinion for a question. By the time I’m sat in the meeting, or on the Zoom, I’ve already done a little edit of myself. Not a conscious performance exactly, just a translation.

Last week I said coherence is the first component of meaning, the foundation that lets everything else grow. I said it means this makes sense of who I am. I’ve been sitting with that all week, wandering along the prom with Henry Hound and musing on how to go deeper into the WHY of my thinking on this.

The dictionary says that coherence is the state of the parts fitting together;

Coherence /kə(ʊ)ˈhɪər(ə)n(t)s/ is the quality of being logical, consistent and having all parts fit together to form a unified whole. It refers to the connection of ideas in writing, the structural integrity of a system or the fixed phase relationship between waves in physics. It implies consistency, clarity and orderly structure.

It’s from the Latin cohaerere, to stick together. I find it fitting that the word I reached for first, instinctively, as a key component of meaning or purpose, makes you question how stuck together or whole you really are… and whether you are allowed to be.

So yeah, it’s even bigger than the story you tell yourself inside your own head. It’s also the version of you that walks through every door roughly the same shape and size. Perhaps an outrageously unreasonable thing to ask for in a world hell bent on making you fracture into increasingly smaller and duller pieces.

And yet this is exactly where ikigai can begin. Without coherence, the reason for being has nowhere to settle. Nothing to stick to. No self in one piece for it to rest on. Which might be why one of the most generous four-word invitations of my lifetime has been on repeat in my head all week.

Come as you are, Kurt Cobain sang in 1991, on an album called Nevermind (possibly the most Gen X shrug ever committed to vinyl *grin*) “Come doused in mud, soaked in bleach” … bring the whole mess… bring the contradictions… come anyway.

Kurt was a beautiful soul who struggled, and I wish life had been easier for him. The invitation he wrote thirty five years ago is still one of the most generous things ever set to a melody.

Come as you are. What an astonishing thing to be offered. What a difficult thing to do.

Coherent light

Go back to that definition for a second. I almost skipped over the physics mention... it reads technical, dry… but I was hunting for a metaphor, something that would let me feel coherence in my bones rather than just define it. A little voice said “go and look that up properly”... so the dictionary led me somewhere I did not expect, down a rabbit hole into optics.

Ordinary light, the kind pouring through my living room window as I type this, is scattered. Waves moving at different angles, bumping into each other, cancelling as often as they help. It’s enough to see by, or to warm the air a little.

Coherent light is different. Same photons. Same energy. The only thing that has changed is that all the waves are moving in phase. When you line them up, something extraordinary happens. The light gets strong enough to cut through steel, we call it a laser.

I think our lives can work a bit like that too. You have the same hours, the same attention, the same strange and specific collection of things you care about. Scattered, they dim. They cancel each other out. You arrive at Friday evening knowing you were busy all week and having no real idea what any of it added up to.

In phase, those same hours can do something else entirely. You feel it as clarity… as concentration. The beautifully bewildering experience of being tired by the weekend but NOT drained.

I realised that the ‘sanding’ I do to myself in those rooms creates the very texture that scatters light. Every softened word and swapped opinion acts like a rough, uneven surface, sending my energy in a dozen conflicting directions.

Being recognisably yourself in every room is a kind of concentration. It’s waves finally in phase. You walk in and nothing in you has to fight anything else in you to be there. Cut through the noise as laser focused you.

The cost of code switching

Masking is exhausting. The invisible labour of scripting and rehearsing. Checking which version of yourself this particular room asks for. That labour has a price, paid in cortisol and flatness, paid in tiredness.

This is a human truth that neurodivergent people have been kind enough to articulate first. The work of naming an experience that sits harder on some bodies than others but lives somewhere in almost all of us.

For a very long time we’ve taught people to “be professional”. We didn’t always notice that “professional” was never a neutral standard. It was one particular way of being in the world, shaped around a particular class, a particular gender, a particular race, a particular neurotype. If you happen to fit that shape, professional is easy, just be exactly who you are. If you don’t, professional is a performance you have to learn and maintain, at a personal cost nobody is in any hurry to count or adjust for.

Deeply coherent people often get labelled “difficult”. Their values are held together brilliantly, feeling the injustice of the systems around them so deeply they just can’t keep quiet. The system asking them to contort is the thing that’s broken and harmful to human thriving. We call the coherent ones awkward because the incoherence comes from the rooms, and they are much harder to rebuild apparently (though I’m sure healthy humans would cost society MUCH less overall), the framing I can’t unsee.

And now AI has arrived, learning from the way we live within these weird system designed rooms we don’t talk about enough.

It does worry me that coherence struggles to get prioritised, even when we are conscious of it! The words we type, the emails we draft, the posts we polish, the prompts we sharpen... these are often our code switched selves. Our professional voice. Our sanded, trimmed, translated version. When AI learns from those, it’s learning the mask. The face underneath (the expressive, emotional, contradictory and very much alive and human version of us) barely makes it into the training.

Which means the more we code switch into these tools, the more AI becomes a mirror of our code switching. It will cheerfully help us produce even more of the acceptable, professional, polished selves that were already costing us so much to maintain. Usage is curriculum, and the curriculum we’re writing is that humans are their edited versions.

That’s the cost of code switching and increasingly, it’s the thing we’re teaching the machines to amplify. Of course, used well, AI can also help us notice the mask and hear ourselves more clearly again…but only if we bring more than the polished version to the exchange.

In one piece

Here’s another word I’ve been turning over in my journal all week…integrity.

I’ve always understood integrity to mean being decent or honest. That’s how we use it now. Person of integrity. Code of integrity. Question of integrity. It lines up, roughly, with ethics.

Integrity comes from the Latin integer, meaning whole, intact or complete. The word we still use for whole numbers carries the original meaning perfectly, while the ethical version has drifted. Before integrity meant honesty, it meant oneness. A person of integrity was someone complete, in one piece. Not fragmented or split.

You cannot really have integrity in the ethical sense without integrity in the structural sense. A scattered self cannot reliably hold a line, because there are too many selves and too many lines. The coherent self keeps its word, obvious once you see it.

Aaron Antonovsky, a medical sociologist spent his career asking a really good question. Instead of “what makes people ill,” he asked “what keeps people well” He called this salutogenesis, health-generation, rather than pathogenesis, disease-generation. The thing he kept finding, across cultures and decades and populations you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be resilient, was something he named the Sense of Coherence, with three named ingredients.

🌸 Comprehensibility (the world I’m in makes sense to me).

🌸 Manageability (I have the resources to meet it).

🌸 Meaningfulness (any of this is worth showing up for).

He was writing decades before Martela and Steger. Here we are again, finding coherence at the root of what keeps humans functioning. Not thriving, mind… functioning that’s how foundational this is.

Coherence is the state of the parts fitting together. Integrity is the same thing, wearing older clothes. Antonovsky’s Sense of Coherence gives us a useful way to think about what helps that fitting-together hold. Underneath all of it is the same truth. A human in one piece can do things a human in pieces simply cannot.

Where the signal is

So this is where I am, this Saturday morning, coffee gone cold next to me, Henry sat in the bay window waiting for his lunchtime walk, my turquoise journal open.

Coherence is what happens when the whole of you gets to walk through the door. When the waves move in phase. When the Latin integer holds. When Antonovsky’s three ingredients show up at once. When Kurt’s invitation to come as you are stops being a rhetorical ache and starts being a practical possibility.

This is where ikigai begins. With the simple, difficult act of showing up as the whole of who you are. Iki gai, life-worth, needs a life in one piece to settle into.

Coherence is bedrock because everything else needs something whole and strong to stand on. Next week I want to write about purpose through this lens of the components of meaning. If coherence is who you are, purpose is where that whole self is pointed. You can’t point a scattered self anywhere.

Before we get to that though, as you interact with the world and the machines this week remember Kurt’s invitation. Where do you already come as you are? Which room? With who? Start there, that’s where the signal is. And while you’re there, consider this too. The AI tools you reach for, do they get the whole you or the polished version? Because they’re learning from whatever you give them.

Your face is beautiful exactly as it is and worth showing, even to a machine.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Bullet journal spread idea

Make two columns. On the left, list or doodle three rooms where you come as you are. On the right, three rooms where you don’t. Just name them initially. Then perhaps a day or so later look back at the two lists and ask yourself what the left-hand rooms allow that the right-hand ones don’t. That’s your coherence signal. Notice it, protect it and try to spend more time there.

PPS - Purposeful AI prompt to try with your preferred AI tool with extended thinking turned on;

“I want to think about where I’m coherent in my life and where I’m not. Interview me. Ask me one question at a time. Start by asking me to describe a room, meeting, relationship or context where I feel most like myself. Then ask me about one where I feel least like myself. After we’ve done a few of each, help me notice the patterns. What is the first list allowing that the second list isn’t? Be warm but sharp with me. I’m not looking for comfort, I’m looking for where I’m paying a tax in code switching that I could work towards not paying.”

PPPS - This week’s soundtrack is “Come As You Are” by Nirvana, arriving in 1991 the year I turned sixteen. Coherence as an invitation and an insistence.

Kurt Cobain said about the lyrics

I have a confession, a personal quirk to share.

It’s Saturday morning and I had to drag myself away from messing with yet another AI Literacy curriculum design to get this essay written. I’ve got SO many ideas for the most fabulous AI course ever ™, not just another guide to how to use Claude responsibly and well. No-one has asked me to do this, and I’m not really thinking about this being a chargeable side hustle. The courses I crafted for learnai.im have long since been delivered, that role ended. The professional reason to care so much about AI literacy... technically... has gone.

And yet here I am, again… rewriting the explanation of why AI isn’t Google... why you shouldn’t just ask it questions and expect factual answers, because the magic of it is generative, probabilistic, creative… and that’s exactly why it sometimes gets things wrong. Playing with different ways to explain context windows that don’t sound too technical (or boring)... why your conversations have memory within them but not between them, why starting fresh matters, why stuffing everything into one chat eventually makes the whole thing worse. These are things I keep trying to make simple. The things I lie awake thinking about how to teach. Nobody commissioned this.

I wrote about AI literacy yet again relatively recently, in essay 120 “Rethinking AI Literacy“ where I reframed it as learning to speak a language rather than passing a test. Fluency, not certification. Practice, not perfection. I meant every word of that essay and it perhaps should have been enough to scratch my itch.

It wasn’t.

I keep coming back. Like it’s a question linked to several of my twelve favourite problems I wrote about last week... the ones that keep choosing you. AI literacy is clearly one of mine as it won’t leave me alone.

But this morning, part way through yet another draft that nobody requested, I stopped and asked myself a different question. Not “how do I teach or express this better?” but “why can’t I put this down?”

What makes something stay with you?

I think everyone has a version of this. A project that outlasts the job it came from. A question that survives every attempt to answer it.

We usually call it passion. But that word has been a tad overused or possibly even flattened, so I worry it barely means anything anymore. “Follow your passion” has become the motivational equivalent of “live, laugh, love” It’s not wrong exactly... it’s just not enough.

What I’m describing is something more specific. I think I more mean the word ‘meaningful’, but then you can get a little meta thinking about what is the meaning of the word meaning *grin*... so yeah, when I sat with that thought this morning, really sat with it, it reminded me that I have had a scrappy essay planned for ages on “The components of meaning” and I spotted in my compulsion three things happening at once.

The first is coherence. This makes sense of who I am. AI literacy connects my helping and teaching instinct and my business innovation brain and my Isle of Man community care and my whole ikigai thesis into one legible story. Without it, some pieces of my life could feel scattered... with it, they form something I can narrate. It makes me make sense to myself.

The second is purpose. This work points beyond me. I’m not refining these guides purely for self improvement. I’m doing it because I genuinely believe people deserve access to this technology without being made to feel stupid or left behind. That’s the democracy argument from essay 120, but it goes deeper than I realised at the time. It’s not just about access, it’s also about agency and fairness, who gets to shape what comes next.

The third is significance. This work feels like it counts. I know because of what happens when someone suggests it doesn’t. If someone told me to stop... that AI literacy isn’t important, that I’m wasting my time, that the world doesn’t need another guide... something rises up in me. Not defensiveness exactly, more like clarity and a stubborn knowing that I have an important perspective on this. You wouldn’t fight to keep some of what’s on your to-do list. But this? This I’d argue for even though I exceedingly dislike arguing. Significance is something that makes you plant your feet. The work that, if threatened, you’d protect.

The place where the three things meet

So yeah, I’ve been wondering for a while ‘what are the components of meaning’? Or is it even meaning I mean (ahem)... is there a better word? Meaning and purpose often overlap but they’re not the same thing, and I haven’t fully untangled the definitions for myself yet.

What I do know is that coherence kept surfacing as the first component word I reached for instinctively. Before I’d read anyone else’s thinking on this or went looking for frameworks. Something in me just knew that having a legible sense of who you are, a story that holds together, was foundational to everything else.

Then I did go looking and found that Frank Martela and Michael Steger have been mapping this territory together... arriving at something close to what I’d been mind mapping in my bullet journal. Their joint paper, “The Three Meanings of Meaning in Life” distinguishes three components I’d been circling:

Coherence means a sense of comprehensibility and one’s life making sense.

Purpose means a sense of core goals, aims and direction in life.

Significance is about a sense of life’s inherent value and having a life worth living.

Their argument is that examining these three in detail, where they interlink and where they don’t, gives us a far more nuanced understanding of what makes life and work feel meaningful than any single definition can.

I’m not claiming I’ve arrived at anything original here, but I find it extraordinary that the thing I felt instinctively... coherence as bedrock... is backed by research. It also makes me look with new eyes at some of the things I’ve been circling across 130 essays. When something feels genuinely meaningful, not just enjoyable or productive, but meaningful in a way that organises your days off and won’t let you walk away... it’s because all three are present at once.

🌸 Coherence says this makes sense of who I am.

🌸 Purpose says this points somewhere that matters beyond me.

🌸 Significance says this counts.

Though I’ll be honest, I’m already wondering whether significance is doing too much work on its own. In lived experience, “my life feels worth living” is not quite the same as “I matter to other people” which is not quite the same as “what I do makes a positive difference beyond myself”. Those are three different feelings. I wonder if significance is actually nourished through two especially important channels: connection, the sense of belonging and being known and mattering to others; and contribution, using your life in ways that help or create or improve something beyond yourself. I haven’t finished thinking about this, but I wanted to share where the thinking is still going, not just where it’s landed. I also want to learn what the Manx translations for these words are to see how my place of birth may help me see these concepts through a new lens.

So yeah, the place where all these three overlap? It’s another fabulous contender to illustrate what hatarakigai, or even ikigai, feels like from the inside. Not a concept you study, but a lived experience you recognise in your bones because the work won’t let you go.

Maybe that is also why so much AI literacy work still feels incomplete to me. Most approaches treat it as a skill to acquire rather than a practice of meaning. Something that could be foundational to both your own, and societal wellbeing.

The i-risk of AI disruption

If meaning lives at the intersection of coherence, purpose, and significance... what happens when AI disrupts all three at once?

🌸 Efficiency without coherence - you’re getting more done but you can’t explain who you are anymore.
🌸 Productivity without purpose - you’re outputting constantly but none of it points anywhere.
🌸 Achievement without significance - the metrics look great but nothing feels like it counts.

That’s the i-risk. Not that AI takes your job, but that it fragments the conditions that make any work feel worth doing.

The antidote might be simpler than we think. Not a framework or a course or a five step plan. Just... noticing. What won’t let you go? What do you keep returning to when the external reasons disappear? What makes you make sense to yourself?

Build and create there.

What’s the work that stays for you? The thing you keep coming back to even when nobody’s watching, nobody’s paying, nobody’s asking? I’d genuinely love to know... tell me in the comments.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS This week’s journal prompts, one for each component... grab a pen.

Coherence: What’s the thread connecting the work you keep choosing, even when nobody asks you to? Write down the things you keep returning to, what story do they tell about who you are?

Purpose: Who benefits when you do this work? Name one person, one community, one conversation that’s different because you showed up.

Significance: If the money, the title, and the audience all disappeared tomorrow... what would you still do? That’s your signal, write it down.

PPS Try this with Claude (with extended thinking on):

“I want to explore what gives my life meaning right now, but I’m not sure where to start. Interview me. Ask me one question at a time and wait for my answer before moving on. Start by asking me what I’ve been spending time on lately that nobody asked me to do. Then gently explore why it matters to me, who it’s for beyond me, and how it connects to the person I’m becoming. After five or six exchanges, reflect back what you’re hearing in terms of three things: coherence (does this work make sense of who I am?), purpose (does it point somewhere beyond me?), and significance (does it feel like it counts?). Be warm but honest. If something doesn’t hold up, say so. I want clarity, not comfort.”

PPPS This weeks soundtrack is “The Blower’s Daughter” by Damien Rice. Obsession, perhaps a love story, but definitely the absolute inability to look away from something ... not usually about the beauty of something, but because it won’t release you. That’s what this essay is about, really. The question you can’t stop asking. The thing your gaze keeps returning to when everything else says look away. I love that it just... stops. No resolution, no tidy ending. Which feels right for an essay about thinking that isn’t finished yet.

I don’t think I consciously chose my 12 favourite problems. They chose me.

If you’ve ever found yourself sitting bolt upright at 4am thinking about the same question you were also overthinking a year ago... you know exactly what I mean. Some problems just won’t leave you alone. They tap you on the shoulder in the shower. They shape the things you read, the conversations you lean into, the rabbit holes you fall down when you were supposed to be researching something else entirely.

Richard Feynman understood this. The Nobel winning physicist kept a running list of twelve favourite problems... his most important unsolved questions, always simmering away in the background. “Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps” Feynman didn’t avoid problems or race to solve them. He collected them, carried them around like companions. Notice the word favourite. Not twelve urgent problems, not twelve important ones. Favourite. The ones you’re drawn to, not the ones you feel obligated by. That distinction matters hugely.

His weren’t all physics, either. How can I keep track of time in my head? How can I sustain a two-handed polyrhythm on drums? How can I write a sentence in perfect handwritten Chinese? He was curious about everything.

We can flinch at the word “problem” because we’ve been taught it means something’s broken… but your favourite problems don’t have to be, or aren’t *just* broken things. They’re invitations. To learn, to grow, to change your mind, to really properly see things you’ve been looking straight through. The problems that won’t leave you alone? They’re a curriculum, not an enemy.

We’re often taught how to function outwardly, to be ‘logical, responsible, practical’, but we aren’t always guided on how to look inwardly at what truly moves us.

I first came across this idea in 2023 on Write of Passage, a brilliant learning community of writers exploring how to make a difference with their words. One of the exercises was to write your own twelve favourite problems. I scribbled down seven in the five minutes we were given, later fleshed out to twelve and published as a rough essay (my 4th substack post ever), and moved on.

I had no idea at that point that those twelve problems would go on to write many of the next one hundred and twenty five essays for me.

The problems behind the essays

My original list included questions like; why does our education system stamp out curiosity and individuality? What happens to the structure of work as AI reshapes everything? How do we accelerate gender equality without unintended consequences? Why isn’t there more outrage about ultra-processed food harming us and our kids? How do I make peace with injustice without getting bitter? Oh and, of course, how do I help others find their own sense of ikigai in a way that lands?

Most of those questions became essays. Several became very many essays. My question about education fed into “Rethinking AI Literacy“. The work question resurfaced in “Money Talks, We Don’t“ when I explored hatarakigai and why we can’t talk about the money circle. Social media negativity showed up in “AI’s Awkward Teenage Phase“. Gender inequity drove “Your Awkward Voice Matters“, which started as a brainstorm, became a workshop discussion that completely challenged my original thesis, and ultimately became an essay about why men’s silence on violence against women is itself a form of harm.

Gender inequity is one of the problems that has deepened for me over time. Amy Watson’s work with HASSL is one inspirational example of what happens when a global scale favourite problem becomes a life’s work, trying to tackle root causes through education, systemic change and community action.

A system to stay with your 12 favourite problems

So I wanted to share this, as I don’t see people talk much about systems for all of this stuff. The list becomes a fabulous thing, a fuel for your ikigai, if you don’t treat it as a one-off exercise. It’s a living system for me.

I’ve recreated the same bullet journal spread in each of my last three journals now, every six months. On the left page, I write my twelve topics or headings. Then I leave it. Let it marinate. Days or weeks later, I come back and brainstorm the sub-questions... the new angles, the sharper framings, the things that have shifted since last time.

Some problems merge. Some split. Some I rephrase entirely because I’ve learned something that changes how I see them. My question about social media negativity eventually separated into two; one about addictiveness and connection, another about how to reward positivity and optimism. That felt important, the refinement was its own kind of clarity.

On the opposite page, I keep a reminder of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)... all seventeen of them. If you haven’t come across the SDGs before, they’re essentially the world’s shared to-do list; seventeen goals agreed by 193 countries in 2015, covering everything from ending poverty and hunger to climate action, gender equality, quality education, decent work and peace. A blueprint for a fairer, kinder, healthier planet.

Having them right there, opposite my twelve problems, does something powerful. It frames my personal questions within the context of what the world really needs the most. The world’s problems can feel too big to hold, hard to feel a personal ‘spark’ for a bullet point on a PDF in Geneva… but when you map your own curiosities against them, the apathy of scale turns into the energy of choice. It also reminds me that there is a $4 trillion annual gap in funding for these global goals, aside from being the right things to do there is also a massive opportunity for anyone brave enough to pick up a ‘favourite problem’ and run with it.

And below that, I generate more lists: a braindump of all the problems I see around me that burn the most... the ikigai risk of AI, mental health crisis, sleepwalking into AI automation, toxic work environments, consumerism... and alongside that, a list of things I’ve personally already solved or contributed to. Live a life of gratitude. Quit alcohol. Built a business to multi-millions. Taught older adults to use mobile phones and the internet. Found my way back to positivity after burnout. That list matters because it’s evidence. Evidence that you’ve already been solving problems that matter... it builds the confidence to go bigger.

Starting from what matters most and trying to fix it, rather than creating something nobody needs? That’s not just ikigai thinking, it’s good product management thinking too.

If you want to try this yourself, the PS below has the full journal process and the PPS has an AI prompt that might help you surface problems you didn’t know you were already carrying. But the short version? Get a rough book or blank piece of paper, write “My 12 favourite problems” at the top, set a timer for 5 minutes and just write what comes to your mind first. Start with the headings if easier. Just twelve things you can’t stop thinking about, try to balance some on a personal scale, some a local scale and some a global scale. Don’t try too hard or think too long, this isn’t about who can be the most noble. The world won’t be helped by you listing the most impressive problems you can think of. It needs your most honest ones, the ones you won’t get bored thinking about or working on.

The net and the ocean

Think of the SDGs as the ocean. Vast, deep, overwhelming in the best possible way. Now think of your twelve favourite problems as your net. You don’t need to catch the whole ocean. You need to know where to cast.

When I look at my twelve now, I can see the SDGs running through them, threads I didn’t consciously choose or prioritise. Gender inequity? SDG 5 is all about it. Work and AI reshaping society? SDG 8, Decent Work, tangled with SDG 9, Industry and Innovation and more than a sprinkle of SDG 4, Quality Education.

My problems picked these for me. The SDGs are there to give language and structure to the things you already care about.

I didn’t start with ‘SDG 5’ I started with anger and fear about why women’s voices were being ignored so often. The SDG gave my care a home, connected a personal ‘favourite problem’ to a global nervous system. Turning one of my ‘4am bolt-upright’ thoughts into a conversation with 193 countries.

This matters for the bigger picture. If you’ve been following the hatarakigai thread, you know there are four aspects to ‘work worth doing’; what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. Your twelve favourite problems are the most powerful way I’ve found to fill in that third circle... “what the world needs”... with something real and personal rather than vague and overwhelming… and once that circle has your name on it, it starts talking to the others. What you’re good at gets sharper because you’re practising on problems you care about. What you love becomes clearer because you’re following genuine curiosity, not obligation. Even the money circle starts making more sense when you know what specific value you’re bringing. The twelve favourite problems don’t just feed hatarakigai. They feed your whole ikigai.

Why this matters now (the i-risk bit)

We are living in a moment where AI could help us solve problems as fast as we can articulate them. It can summarise the SDGs in seconds. It can generate action plans for any of the seventeen goals before you’ve finished your tea. That efficiency is genuinely wonderful... right up until it isn’t.

Because the risk, the i-risk, is that we outsource not just the solving but the caring. That we let algorithms tell us which problems matter instead of feeling it for ourselves. That the sheer volume of global crises, amplified by our feeds, curated by algorithms, paralyses the very impulse to contribute. We scroll past seventeen emergencies before breakfast. AI summarises them neatly for us and somehow that efficiency makes us feel less connected to the reality of the problems, not more.

AI has no skin in the game. If we outsource caring to an algorithm, we risk losing our own sense of agency in the process. In a world of infinite automated solutions, your 12 favourite problems are proof that you still care. Proof that your attention belongs somewhere real. If we let AI tell us what matters, we risk losing our own place in the story.

Your twelve favourite problems show you care about something *specific*. They’re a compass and a filter. They’re the thing that makes your contribution to the world irreplaceable... whether or not you’re the best person to solve the problems, you’re the person who can’t stop thinking about your unique combination from your own wonderfully weird perspective.

I wrote my twelve favourite problems in a notebook two and a half years ago, thinking it was just an exercise. Those twelve questions have guided over a hundred essays, shaped my life and answered the very question I started this whole series asking ‘how do I find my ikigai?’

It was never one answer, it was always in the magic of twelve questions that kept choosing me.

I’m curious... what are yours? Even if you share one or a few, what problems are top of mind for you?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS: Bullet journal ideas for this week’s essay

The first time (the brainstorm)

Set a timer for five minutes. Write “My 12 Favourite Problems” at the top of a blank page. Write whatever comes... don’t filter, don’t try to sound noble. You might get seven. You might get fifteen. Try to let some be personal (how do I speak up more fearlessly?), some local (what would make my community healthier?) and some global (why are we sleepwalking into this?). Come back a few days later and see which ones are still buzzing. Trim, merge, or rephrase until you’ve got your twelve. Then underneath each, brainstorm the sub-questions... the why, the how, the what if, the who else is working on this?

Every new journal (I do this every six months)

Recreate the spread fresh. Write your twelve headings ideally from memory first, before looking at the old version. What you remember without prompting tells you something. Then compare. Some will have sharpened. Some will have merged. Some might feel done, or replaced by something you didn’t see coming. On the opposite page, print or sketch the 17 SDGs as a reminder of the bigger picture. Below, brainstorm two lists: “problems that burn right now” and “things I’ve already solved or contributed to” That second list matters more than you think.

Ongoing reflection prompts (whenever you journal)

• Which of my twelve have I been most drawn to lately... and which am I avoiding?

• Has a new problem been tapping me on the shoulder that isn’t on my list yet?

• Have any of my problems merged, split, or evolved since I last looked?

• What have I actually done about any of these, even accidentally, even small?

• Am I being honest with my list... or trying to impress?

• If I could only keep three, which three would I fight for?

PPS: AI prompt to try, I recommend Claude *grin*

“I’m going to share [some things I’ve written/bookmarked/been thinking about recently OR my current list of 12 favourite problems]. Please:

1. Identify the recurring themes, tensions and questions I seem drawn to, and frame them as 12 open ended favourite problems in the style of Richard Feynman.

2. For each one, suggest two or three sub-questions that might sharpen or deepen the problem... the kind of questions that would make me sit up and say ‘oh, I hadn’t thought about it that way.’

3. Map each problem to whichever of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals it most closely connects to, and explain why.

4. Looking at the full list, which three seem to carry the most energy? Where do you see me leaning in hardest?

5. Is there a problem you think I’m circling around but haven’t actually named yet?

6. If I’ve shared a previous version of my list, compare them. What’s shifted? What have I outgrown? What’s emerging?”

PPPS: Song choice

“The Logical Song” by Supertramp. Roger Hodgson wrote it from a problem question that never left him “The Logical Song was born from my questions about what really matters in life. Throughout childhood we are taught all these ways to be and yet we are rarely told anything about our true self. We are taught how to function outwardly, but not guided to who we are inwardly.” If that isn’t the ultimate favourite problem disguised as a pop song, I don’t know what is. We’re taught to be logical, responsible, practical, but nobody teaches us how to ask the questions that actually matter. This essay is about reclaiming those questions.

I’m about to start a new Minecraft world.

I know, I know. Stay with me, because this is actually about you and AI, and whether you’re the protagonist of your own life or just wandering around a village bumping into walls.

Minecraft just dropped its latest update, the Tiny Takeover, which introduces new super cute baby versions of all the mobs, including some that would normally try to kill you.

“Mobs” in Minecraft is shorthand for “mobile entity”, referring to any AI-driven entity (creatures, monsters, NPCs) that can move around the game world, as opposed to stationary objects like blocks.

Tiny zombies, reimagined as adorable little threats, something you want to scoop up and take home. There’s something in that, isn’t there? Taking things that should alarm us and making them so cute (or agreeable) we forget to be cautious… Is AI our ‘Tiny Takeover’, reimagining the friction of life into something adorable and effortless? … but that’s a thought for another day *ahem*.

Today I want to talk about something that started as a Minecraft dilemma and turned into a question about how we’re living alongside AI.

New world or forever world?

Every time Minecraft releases an update, I face a choice. Do I start a brand new world, fresh and full of all the latest content, ready to stumble across baby mobs and new biomes within minutes of spawning? Or do I go back to my forever world... the one I’ve been building for ages, block by block, where every structure holds a memory and every landscape tells a story of decisions I’ve made over time?

New worlds are exciting. They’re full of possibility, everything is undiscovered. You spawn in and anything could happen… but my forever world? That’s where I’ve built something. That’s where purpose lives.

The catch is that if I want the new content in my forever world, I have to travel. Far. Beyond the edges of everywhere I’ve already explored, out past the known borders of what I’ve created, into ungenerated territory where the update’s new features finally appear. The new stuff doesn’t come to you, you have to go find it.

I think about this when I hear someone waxing lyrical about abandoning their current workflow to start fresh with the latest AI tool. New model drops, new world. Clean slate, infinite possibility, instant access to the shiny new thing. I get it, that fresh start energy is intoxicating.

I’m wondering though what we’re leaving behind every time we do that. What forever worlds are we walking away from?

The NPC problem

If you’ve never played Minecraft, or any game really, let me explain NPCs. Non-player characters. They’re the villagers, the shopkeepers, the figures who wander around the world following scripts someone else wrote. They trade the same items. They walk the same paths. They make the same sounds. They exist to serve the player’s story, not showcase their own.

The internet gave us “main character energy” as a kind of aspirational identity. You’re the protagonist. You’re the one making bold choices, driving the plot, living cinematically…and in no surprise at all to anyone who has been reading my essays I LOVE this concept for all of us, I want everyone to wring every drop of joy and magic possible out of life… but I’m increasingly noticing in the how some people are trying to push AI to us, and what they want it to be doing even more of in all of our daily experience, the i-risk of AI.

AI autocompletes our sentences and suggests our next purchase. It predicts which podcast we’ll choose, which route we’ll drive, which email we’ll write. It generates social media captions and drafts our messages and even, if we let it, shapes the rhythm of our thinking.

If someone else, or something else, is writing your dialogue, predicting your movements and scripting your interactions... are you the main character? Or are you the NPC?

NPCs don’t know they’re NPCs. They go about their routines feeling perfectly purposeful. They think they’re choosing to walk that path and say that thing and trade that item. They have no idea that every decision was made for them before they rendered in on screen.

This is a glitch in ‘Main Character Energy’, if AI predicts your next word and a recommender engine predicts your next desire, you aren’t living a story you’re fulfilling a forecast. The difference between a protagonist and an NPC isn’t the outfit, it’s the unpredictability of their soul. If your future is a solved equation, you aren’t the player; you’re just the code.

Main character energy is not a lie exactly, but it can become one. A costume of authorship worn over a life increasingly shaped by autocomplete.

Main character energy was supposed to be about agency, authoring your own story… but if AI is ghostwriting a significant chunk of your life... suggesting your words, curating your choices, smoothing every edge... then “main character energy” has become the aesthetic of protagonism without the substance of it. You look like the hero, you feel like the hero… but the quest was on rails the whole time, the destination decided before you headed out.

The Sandbox

This isn’t all set in stone though. AI isn’t a linear game with a fixed plot. It’s a sandbox.

Like Minecraft.

A sandbox game gives you the tools and the space and says build whatever you want. There are no mandatory objectives handed to you. No quest markers. No narrative arc unless you create one. The game is as boring or as extraordinary as your imagination makes it.

I wrote down a thought ages ago in my essay ideas bullet journal spread > AI is like a sandbox game, which can be awesome with imagination, but we need the guides and the innovators to help show us the art of the possible.

In Minecraft, there are creators who do exactly this. Pixlriffs is someone I watch religiously. Week after week, he creates content that is carefully, consistently brilliant... his survival guide is aimed at beginners but deep enough to keep longstanding players engaged. He makes the complex accessible without ever dumbing it down. He’s the person who shows you that the tools you already have can do more than you thought.

Then there’s Mumbo Jumbo, who is something else entirely. Mumbo is a joyful artist who takes a blocky, simple game and creates things you would never have believed possible. Filmic stories with layers of vision and sound and character. Intricate redstone machines that feel like magic. Animation, beauty, focal points that make you forget you’re looking at cubes. He doesn’t just play the game, he transcends the medium… He’s a relatable and whimsical and talented human whom I adore.

Both of them, in very different ways, show us what it means to be a main character in a sandbox world… by bringing imagination, skill and creativity to an open-ended space.

That’s what we need with AI. Not people who accept the first autocomplete suggestion or let algorithms curate their entire existence. We need the Pixlriffs... the careful, consistent guides who help everyone understand what the tools can do. And we need the Mumbos... the wild, joyful innovators who show us what’s possible when you refuse to let the medium limit your imagination.

I call this Purpose Prompting. The practice of bringing your questions, your values, your weird specific human curiosity to AI, rather than just accepting what it offers you. In watching these creators, I think it also goes deeper than prompting. It’s about whether you approach the sandbox as a player or a spectator. Whether you build, or just consume what others have built.

The forever world is a solo project (and that’s ok... mostly)

I love playing Minecraft with my family and friends the most. There’s nothing like building together, exploring together, laughing together when a creeper blows up your carefully constructed front porch. Multiplayer is where the joy lives for me (also why I was an obsessive World of Warcraft player and Guild leader for many moons hehe).

I have to come to terms with the fact nobody else in my life currently seems to want to build a forever world with me.

They want the excitement of starting fresh. New world, new adventure, new dopamine hit… and I understand that, I *so* do. So I give them what they want. We start new worlds together and it’s brilliant and fun and social.

Then I go back to my forever world alone.

It’s where I’ve invested the most time, the most care, the most of me… and building there is cathartic and relaxing and genuinely developmental in ways I can’t fully articulate… but it’s mostly a solitary pursuit. The deep work of building something that matters over time, block by block, doesn’t tend to draw a crowd.

There is another way, though. In Minecraft, there’s a community called Hermitcraft where a small group of creators (Mumbo among them, with Pix doing a wonderful weekly recap) build together in the same shared world for a year or two at a time. They each have their own projects, their own styles, their own corners of the map... but they’re building alongside each other. Collaborating, visiting, riffing off each other’s work. It’s not quite a forever world. They do eventually reset. It’s something rare and beautiful, a group of people who’ve found each other and said, yes, I want to build in the same place as you, in my own way, for a meaningful stretch of time.

I think that’s what we’re all looking for, really. Not just in games. In life. In work. In our relationship with AI and purpose. We don’t need everyone to share our forever world. We just need to find our Hermitcraft... a few people who want to build in the same direction, even if they’re building something completely different.

This is what building purpose feels like in the age of AI. The world keeps offering fresh starts. New tools, new platforms, new ways to reinvent yourself with zero friction… and the social energy follows the new. Everyone’s excited about the latest update, the latest model, the latest paradigm shift.

… but the forever world... the ongoing, evolving, deeply personal project of figuring out who you are and what you’re for... that’s slower work. It’s less immediately exciting, and sometimes it’s lonely. Unless you find your people.

The best of the new stuff doesn’t come to you. You have to travel further to find it. You have to push past the edges of what you’ve already explored, into uncharted territory, carrying everything you’ve built so far with you.

That’s a main character journey.

Building in a world that keeps updating

I don’t think AI is the enemy, I never have. A sandbox is just a sandbox. It’s morally neutral, creatively infinite and only as meaningful as what you bring to it.

I’m a geeky gamer girly, of course I ADORE Claude and all the magical things it can do.

But I do think we’re at a moment where it’s dangerously easy to become an NPC in the most sophisticated sandbox ever built. To let the autocomplete finish our thoughts. To let the algorithm author our tastes. To start a new world every time the update drops, never building anything that lasts, never travelling far enough in our forever world to discover what’s out there beyond the edges of the familiar.

Main character energy was never about aesthetics. It was supposed to be about authorship. About writing your own story, even when it’s messy, even when it’s solitary, even when nobody else wants to build in your world with you.

So here’s my question, and I’m asking it genuinely. In your relationship with AI... are you building? Or are you just spawning in, picking up whatever’s nearest and following the path that was already there?

Because the sandbox is open. The tools are extraordinary… and somewhere out there, past the edges of everything you’ve already explored, there’s new territory waiting.

But you have to walk there yourself.

I did start the new world. The baby mobs are ridiculously cute… and then I went back to my forever world and built something new there too… because both/and, always.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - This week’s journal prompts, if you’re up for some… grab a pen and answer honestly;

1. What’s your forever world? The thing you keep going back to build on, even when nobody else seems interested. Why does it keep pulling you back?

2. Where do you keep starting new worlds? What’s the fresh start pattern... and what are you leaving behind each time you do it?

3. Look at your last week. How many of your decisions were actually yours, and how many were suggested by an algorithm, a notification or a default? Where are you the main character, and where are you following someone else’s script?

PPS - 🎮 Main Character Energy Card Generator

Copy and paste this into Google Gemini:

“I want you to interview me, then create a character card IMAGE based on my answers.

You’re going to help me discover my Main Character Energy profile. Ask me these questions ONE AT A TIME. Wait for my answer before asking the next:

1. What’s your name, or what name would you give your character?

2. When you have a completely free day with no obligations, what do you actually end up doing? (Not what you think you should do... what you really do.)

3. What’s the thing you keep coming back to build on in your life, even when nobody else seems that interested? Your “forever world.”

4. Think about a moment recently when you felt completely like yourself. What were you doing?

5. What’s something you know you’re brilliant at but rarely get credit for?

6. What’s something you admire in other people but haven’t developed in yourself yet?

7. Pick a visual style for your card, or describe your own: Pixel Art, Solarpunk, Dark Academia, Vaporwave, Painted Fantasy, Neon Noir... or tell me a game, film, or art style you love and I’ll design around that.

Now, based on my answers, you MUST generate an image of my personalised Main Character Energy card. This is the most important part.

Before creating the card, analyse my answers and:

• Choose a unique character class for me (don’t use generic titles... craft something specific to who I am, like “Quiet Architect” or “Chaos Gardener” or “Reluctant Oracle”)

• Identify 5 character attributes drawn from my answers (e.g., Resilience, Vision, Curiosity, Warmth, Precision... whatever fits ME, not a preset list)

• Max out 3 of those attributes (8 to 10 out of 10) to reflect my strengths

• Set the other 2 lower (4 to 6 out of 10) as growth edges... areas with potential, not weaknesses

The image should look like a character selection screen from a beautifully designed indie video game, in my chosen visual style. Portrait orientation. Include all of these elements:

• My character name in a stylised game font at the top

• A symbolic character portrait in the centre (an avatar, silhouette, or emblem... not a realistic face)

• My unique character class with a small icon beneath the portrait

• The 5 attribute stat bars, clearly showing which are maxed and which are growth edges

• A one line character tagline you write for me based on my answers, in the style of a game loading screen tip (e.g., “Builds slowly. Means every block.” or “Finds the plot twist nobody else saw coming.”)

• The text “Main Character Energy · seekingikigai.online” along the bottom edge

Use colours from my chosen visual style, but include touches of turquoise and cherry blossom pink as accents.”

PPPS: This week’s soundtrack is “I Feel Alive” by Jack Black, from A Minecraft Movie... what else could it be? *grin*

There’s a brand new journal on my desk.

It sits alongside my trusty turquoise bullet journal which is covered in stickers and dog-crumpled pages where I’ve scribbled things like “WHAT IS THE POINT OF ALL THIS” in capital letters on a particularly difficult day.

This one is different, a Leuchtturm1917 Thesis Journal with a structured process printed right into its pages. A methodology for turning a question into something defensible.

I’ve written on the first few pages. Tentatively, as if I’m stepping into cold sea water, one toe at a time.

It feels a little scary and I’ve been reflecting on that feeling, trying to work out why.

Oh and this essay idea woke me at 2.33 am this morning and I had to dictate the bones of it to Wispr Flow before I could fall back asleep!

A man in a tower

In 1571, a 38-year-old Frenchman locked himself in a tower. Michel de Montaigne was tired of politics and performing certainty in a world that made no sense. So he picked up a pen and started... trying. He called these written attempts essais. From the French essayer, meaning to try, and from that beautifully honest admission, an entire form of writing was born.

Here I am, on my tiny Island between England and Ireland, even on a gloriously sunny Saturday I am driven to block it all out and write, the impulse is the same as he had.

Trying to make sense of things by writing about them. Trying to be helpful without pretending I have all the answers.

Montaigne’s motto was Que sais-je? What do I know? As the most honest place from which to begin.

One light, many colours

I used to blog. For years I wrote about my mental health, about my days, about feelings I needed to untangle by putting them into words. Sometimes those posts were rambly word salad poems and I loved them fiercely. They helped me, and (to my genuine surprise) they seemed to help other people too. It’s SO tempting to say “I was only blogging” but I take that back immediately. It was brave and beautiful and necessary.

Somewhere between my old blogs and this Substack, between processing my feelings and processing my ideas, I started essaying. Attempting. Reaching for something bigger than “here’s how I feel today” and toward “here’s how I think the world works and how I want to move through it”.

Now, with that thesis journal on my desk, I’m reaching again.

Imagine light entering a prism. White light... the raw impulse to make meaning... hits the glass and splits into its component colours. A blog post. An essay. A TED talk. A book chapter. A thesis. A course. A workbook. A poem. Each colour is the same light, expressed differently and reaching eyes the others cannot.

An essay, structurally, is a (relatively) light exploration. It follows the writer’s thinking as it unfolds. You start somewhere honest and you walk forward and you let the reader walk beside you. There’s no obligation to arrive, Montaigne certainly didn’t. He would contradict himself from one page to the next and leave both versions standing, because the point was never the destination. It was the walking.

I love this. I love writing essays and can’t see myself stopping in the near future. There is something irreplaceable for me about both the discipline AND the freedom of it, the way ideas can breathe on the page and morph over time.

A thesis (or dissertation) is a different beast I think. Where an essay explores, a thesis defends. It makes a specific claim about the world and then marshals evidence to support it. There are rules and methodology. You have to define your terms, gather your data, anticipate objections and address them honestly. It is rigorous in a way that perhaps demands you know what you think before you start writing in earnest, rather than discovering it along the way.

These aren’t competing impulses though, they’re complementary ones;

🔴 Exploration (essay) - writing essays about purpose helps me feel my way into what matters

🟠 Defence (thesis) - working through my thesis journal forces me to sharpen a feeling into a defensible claim

🟡 Performance (TED talk) - strips everything back to its emotional core because you’ve got 10-15 minutes and an audience who needs to feel something

🟢 Teaching (course) - designing a course demands I think about sequence and scaffolding and what someone needs to understand first before they can understand what comes next.

🔵 Participation (workbook) - asks me to stop holding the idea and create a space where someone else can walk into my question with their own answers

🟣 Distillation (poem) - sharing your heart and soul, forcing a kind of distillation where every single word has to earn its place

Each medium asks a different question of the same idea, and every time I answer that question, I understand the idea a little better. The prism doesn’t just split the light, it reveals what the light was made up of.

The “content” flinch

The world now seems to call all of this “content” and it makes me recoil a tad, even as I use the word myself at times as it is so ubiquitous.

Content is what fills a container. Content also conveys undifferentiated stuff, measured in engagement metrics that can’t really quantify impact. When we call an essay “content” we flatten it into the same category as a product listing or a sponsored carousel or an algorithm-friendly hot take fired off quickly by someone who may not care heart and soul about that topic.

AI can take this flattening even further. To a large language model, everything we write becomes training data. Our love letters and our grocery lists and our attempts to understand what it means to be alive... all reduced to tokens. Patterns to be predicted. Meaning to be statistically approximated.

Montaigne gave us the word essai > Attempt.

Algorithms gives us the word content > Filler.

I know which side of the spectrum I’d rather be responsible for *grin*

The tenderness of rigour

So here I am with my thesis journal, and I want to tell you something that might sound contradictory. I want to help people, and I want to be rigorous about it.

Those two impulses are often positioned as opposites. The warm fuzzy helper versus the cold hard scientist. Heart versus head.

Genuine care demands evidence though. If I tell you that seeking ikigai can improve your one wild and precious life, I want to mean it in a way that goes beyond “it worked for me and I reckon it might work for you too”. I want to know. I want data. I want to be able to defend this with something sturdier than my own enthusiasm.

The most tender thing I can do for you is also the most honest, real honesty requires rigour.

The gap nobody is measuring

Which brings me to what I’m scribbling in those early tentative pages.

The World Happiness Report for 2026 was launched this week. Its core measure of happiness is a single question > “Imagine a ladder from 0 to 10. Best possible life at the top, worst at the bottom. Where do you stand?” The Isle of Man isn’t listed separately, and the UK scores a rather depressing 29th.

That tells us something important about life satisfaction. What it doesn’t capture is whether people feel their life has purpose. Whether they wake up with a reason to get out of bed that goes beyond obligation. Whether the things they do each day feel like theirs. Gallup had previously measured “purpose well-being” in their “State of Global Well-Being” report from 2014 where out of the five elements they measured purpose was the one struggling the most.

There are people working on this though. The Global Meaningfulness Index, published by the Voluntās Foundation, surveyed over 18,000 people across 31 countries in 2025. Despite high GDP and material wealth, countries like the UK (ranked 25th) and Sweden struggle with a deep sense of meaning in life, while people in nations facing far greater economic challenges report significantly higher levels of it. Their research on meaningfulness at work found it accounts for 49% of our overall sense of meaning in life. Half of our felt purpose, wrapped up in what we do every day.

Now layer AI on top of that.

If purpose is already a weak link in human wellbeing, and under strain in the wealthiest parts of the world, and AI is rapidly taking over activities through which many of us find meaning (our creative work, our problem-solving, our learning, our sense of being needed), then we have a problem. Nobody is properly measuring it yet. Researchers are calling the space between AI adoption and understanding its impact on the workforce “the AI Measurement Gap.” I think there’s a deeper gap underneath that one, a purpose gap which is the one I want to try to measure.

This is why I am so drawn to the concept of the ikigai risk of AI. Not the dystopic risk of superintelligent machines, or the economic risk of job losses (though they matter hugely too). The creeping risk to human purpose itself. The gradual erosion of the feeling that what you do each day is yours, and it matters and the world is slightly different because you showed up.

What I want to defend

Here’s what I think my thesis journal is reaching toward. I’m writing this as an essai, an attempt, because I haven’t figured it all out yet and Montaigne would tell me that’s the point.

I want to explore whether ikigai, the felt sense of a life worth living, can be meaningfully measured. Something that captures whether you feel you’re growing, contributing and creating in ways that feel authentically yours.

Then I want to understand what happens to that felt sense when AI increasingly features in that picture. Does your purpose increase when AI handles some of the tedious stuff and does it free you for meaningful work? Or does it decrease when AI starts doing the things that used to make you feel capable and needed and alive?

If or when it decreases, what do we do about it?

I think part of the answer lives in conscious choice. In things like what I’ve been calling Purpose Proofing... asking, before you hand something to AI, “what human meaning lives here?” Sometimes the answer is “none at all, please automate this immediately and save me the drudgery”... and sometimes the answer is “actually, this struggle is where I find meaning, leave it alone”.

I don’t have a fleshed out methodology yet. I have a thesis journal with a few tentative pages and a head full of questions and a stubbornness to not give in or pretend to have answers I haven’t earned.

Montaigne didn’t have answers either. He had attempts, and 450 years later, those attempts are still teaching us how to think.

Essaying, together

So this is me, trying. Stepping into the cold water one toe at a time. Light hitting the prism and beginning to see the colours.

The essays will keep flowing. The thesis journal will keep filling. Somewhere in between, maybe a talk will take shape, or a course, or a poem that says in twelve lines what this essay needed two thousand words to reach toward.

If you’re also trying to figure out what you’re for in a world that’s changing faster than any of us can process... maybe we can try together?

I’ll bring the thesis journal and you bring your thoughts and questions.

Que sais-je? What do I know?

Not much in the grand scheme of things, but I’m willing to investigate and learn.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Your journal prompt this week;

Open a blank page and write at the top “What do I know for certain?” Underneath, write everything you can. Then turn the page and write “What am I trying to find out?” See which list is longer and which entries make you feel the most alive.

PPS - Your AI prompt this week;

“Please help me work out whether there is something in me that wants to be written, spoken, taught, researched, or shared. Ask me reflective questions about the ideas I cannot stop returning to, the things I feel protective of, the questions I wish more people asked and the experiences that seem to contain more meaning than I have fully articulated yet. Then help me explore what form that emerging idea might want to take; an essay, a poem, a talk, a thesis, a course, a workbook or something else. Please end by helping me name the idea succinctly and suggest the smallest possible first step to honour it.”

PPPS - This week’s soundtrack “The Whole of the Moon by The Waterboys”

It felt right for an essay about perspective. About the difference between looking and truly feeling or knowing. Between having a question and learning how to hold it well. Also, it opens with “I pictured a rainbow”, which gives it extra points from me *grin* 🌈🎵

I drew out the four circles in the hatarakigai Venn diagram for you two years ago. Then realised I got it wrong just over a year ago, ahem!

Regardless though, it’s a really helpful model I’ve been thinking about ever since.

🌸 What you love
🌸 What you’re good at
🌸 What the world needs
🌸 What you can be paid for

Three parts of this feel noble… pure, even. You can talk about passion and purpose and mastery at dinner parties without anyone shifting uncomfortably in their seat.

But that fourth circle? The money one? She’s the guest nobody quite knows how to introduce. We know she has to be there... we can’t sustain anything without her in our current societal models... but we’d rather she sat quietly in the corner and didn’t make a fuss.

I think it’s time we had a proper conversation with her.

Most of us spend at least 45 hours a week working or getting to work. Forty five hours. That’s not a footnote in our search for meaning. For most of our waking adult lives, work IS the main event. Hatarakigai says that those 45 hours don’t have to be a tax on your purpose, they can be a contributor to it. How bloody gorgeous would that be? If the thing that takes up the lion’s share of your time fed your ikigai rather than draining it?

It’s tricky to get there if we keep whispering about the money circle. If we keep treating her like she’s somehow less important, or less worthy of honest examination, than the other three.

The great British money silence

I grew up poor on a council estate on the Isle of Man. Working class roots I guess, and an unspoken rule that we don’t talk about money. Not how much you earn, what you do with it or don’t do with it. Money talk is vulgar.

I think this is partly a British thing. We’ve been collectively trained that discussing money is rude, right up there with asking someone’s age or commenting on their weight. This polite silence doesn’t help anyone, it protects the systems that benefit from our ignorance.

It’s a weird class thing too, obviously. Some people just seem to know that you can structure things in certain ways. That salary alone rarely leads to freedom so you need to create businesses and assets. That there are ISAs and pensions and investment vehicles and tax efficiencies that nobody teaches you about in school but everybody in certain circles understands intuitively. Financial literacy isn’t equally distributed. It’s passed down in families and networks and dinner table conversations that some of us are never invited to.

Nobody makes it easy either. The language is deliberately complicated. The forms are impenetrable. The advice industry profits from your confusion. And so millions of intelligent, capable people... people who can navigate complex careers and raise children and manage households with military precision... feel stupid and overwhelmed when it comes to money.

That’s structural.

It keeps us distracted. While we’re busy feeling embarrassed or confused or guilty about money, we’re not learning the things that could change our lives. We’re not seeing the exits. We’re not building the security that would give us the freedom to align our work with our purpose.

The silence protects the status quo and not our dignity.

The good girl and the fourth circle

I grew up with a strong work ethic and huge drive to never be poor again, to be able to provide for my own daughter. So I pushed myself and worked hard and as a result I have a reasonably well paid job.

A job I’m grateful for, at an organisation whose values I share, doing work that contributes to my community. By many measures, I’m fortunate. And I struggle with money thoughts anyway. Not as often with bills anymore (though my broken boiler and knackered car are competing to make that true once more *grr*), but with the feelings. The guilt. The weird internal flinch when I think about wanting more.

Because I do want more. And writing that sentence makes something in my chest tighten.

I don’t really go on holidays. I haven’t got a flash car. Our house hasn’t got the latest and greatest of everything in it. We’re careful. We’re sensible. We’re fine.

But “fine” is that word again, isn’t it. The one I wrote about in Human Should Be Baseline. The performance of fine that Gen X women have turned into an art form.

When I start to think about how I protect myself in future... how I build security... how I create more headspace and more options... it all feels weird. Greedy, even. I catch myself mid-thought and the inner voice pipes up “you don’t NEED more, Sarah. Other people have far less. Who do you think you are?”

This is where it gets really tangled. Because if I had more money? I wouldn’t hoard it. I know exactly what I’d do.

I’d spend it with women building better societal systems. I’d support people trying to build something meaningful. I’d give more to charity. I’d have more headspace to show up for my community in bigger ways. I’d invest in the kind of work that lights me up and lights other people up too.

The money isn’t the goal. The money is the enabler. But the guilt doesn’t care about that distinction.

There’s a voice... she’s been with me since childhood... that says wanting more is the same as being greedy. That good girls don’t ask for stuff. That if your purpose is real, the money shouldn’t matter. That somehow, caring about financial security undermines the authenticity of everything else you’re trying to build.

She means well, but she’s also keeping me stuck.

Three traps (pick your poison)

I’ve been sitting with this for a while now, and I think the money circle catches most of us in one of three traps. Sometimes we rotate between them. Sometimes we’re stuck in two simultaneously. See if you recognise yourself.

The Guilt Trap

This is mine. The feeling that charging for purpose work makes it less pure. The hesitation before turning on paid subscriptions, before launching a paid workshop or asking to be valued in pounds as well as praise. The belief that money contaminates meaning.

The guilt trap whispers if you really cared, you’d do this for free. It conveniently ignores the fact that doing it for free means you can only do it in the margins. Evenings. Weekends. The scraps left over after the work that pays. Which means your best ideas, your deepest purpose, gets your most exhausted self.

How is that serving anyone?

I could have started building something years ago, well, once the kids were old enough. But it took too many years to learn that loyalty to a job wasn’t really rewarded. Also the good girl in me waited for permission. Wondered if it was okay to build for myself, worried about doing the right thing. While other people... people who perhaps didn’t carry the same conditioning or who had been taught to expect more, or were the types of people the system was designed for... just got on with it.

I’m not bitter about that but I notice it. The head start that comes with not having been taught to ask permission before wanting things.

The Survival Trap

This is the one where you stay in work that pays but doesn’t align, and try to find purpose in the remaining 5 hours of your evening. Golden handcuffs. The “I’ll do what I love when I retire” bargain that so many of us make.

The survival trap says be grateful for what you’ve got. Gratitude is real and important, but it can also become a cage if it stops you from honestly assessing whether your 45 hours are contributing to your ikigai or eroding it.

If you’re spending the majority of your waking life doing work that doesn’t feed any of your other three circles... if the only thing your job gives you is money, and nothing else... that’s endurance, and survival is a terrible long term strategy for a joyful life.

The Hustle Trap

This is the overcorrection. The one where you monetise every hobby, turn every passion into a side hustle, slap a price tag on everything that brings you joy. When “what you can be paid for” swallows the other three circles.

The hustle trap says your worth is tied to your bank balance. Social media reinforces this constantly with six figure launches, passive income streams… the relentless optimisation of every human impulse into a revenue opportunity.

I see brilliant, purposeful people fall into this one and lose the love. The thing that made their work meaningful gets hollowed out by the pressure to scale, to convert, to perform. The hatarakigai that started as genuine alignment between purpose and prosperity becomes just... commerce wearing a purpose costume.

Most of us don’t sit squarely in one trap. I’m primarily guilt, with occasional field trips to survival (the gratitude cage) and brief, uncomfortable flirtations with hustle (usually prompted by something in my feed that makes me feel like I’m behind).

Where does your relationship with money get stuck most?

The mottainai of silence

Mottainai (勿体無い), the Japanese word and concept for a feeling of deep regret over waste. It’s often translated as “what a waste!” and it carries a sense of something precious being squandered.

I think our silence about money is mottainai.

What a waste... that intelligent, purposeful people don’t understand how to build financial security because nobody taught them and asking feels shameful.

What a waste... that women with extraordinary ideas and genuine purpose hesitate to charge for their work because they’ve internalised that wanting money undermines wanting to help.

What a waste... that the fourth circle of hatarakigai, the one that could enable everything else, sits neglected and unexamined while we pour our emotional energy into the other three.

What a waste... that entire communities remain excluded from financial literacy because the system profits from their confusion.

And what a waste... that some of us could have started building years ago, but the conditioning said wait, ask permission, make sure it’s allowed, be good.

The silence costs us more than money. It costs us time, options, freedom… the ability to fully occupy all four circles of our hatarakigai diagram without flinching at one of them.

There are other ways

I don’t think the answer is to simply “get over” our money discomfort and become the bestest capitalists. The discomfort isn’t entirely wrong. Some of what we’ve been taught about money IS true... hoarding wealth while others suffer IS a problem. The relentless pursuit of profit at any cost IS corrosive. Greed IS real and IS destructive.

The problem is that caring about the ethics of money has become confused with refusing to engage with money at all.

There are people who have always known this, who have been building different structures for centuries.

Indigenous communities who understood that wealth is communal, circular and relational long before anyone drew a Venn diagram. Black women who built mutual aid networks and savings circles because traditional financial systems excluded them, and in doing so created models of economic solidarity that the rest of us are only just discovering. Co-operatives where the people who do the work own the work. Movements like Buy Women Built, where supporting each other’s businesses is strategic.

These aren’t radical new ideas. They’re ancient wisdom that the dominant economic model tried to bury.

What if the fourth circle of hatarakigai didn’t have to look like traditional capitalism? What if “what you can be paid for” could also mean “what your community values enough to sustain”? What if the money circle was less about individual accumulation and more about collective investment in each other’s purpose?

I find that thought enormously freeing, because it reframes the question entirely. It’s not “how do I get rich from my purpose?” It’s “how do we build structures where purposeful work can sustain itself and the people who do it?”

That’s ikigai made visible, by the way. When your community sustains your purpose and you sustain theirs... when economic support flows in circles rather than upward... that’s not just a nicer way to do business. That’s a reason for being. Yours and theirs, intertwined.

That feels like a really important mission.

Can AI help us?

We’ve established that financial literacy has been gatekept by class, by jargon, by systems that profit from our confusion. The private club conversations some of us were never invited to.

AI is pulling up a chair to that table.

I can ask Claude to explain an ISA in plain English. I can upload a pension statement I don’t understand and ask it to walk me through what it actually means for my future. I can say “I earn X, I spend Y, I have Z in savings, and I feel paralysed... help me understand my options” without anyone judging me for not already knowing. The financial literacy that was passed down in certain families? AI can start to democratise it. Not as a replacement for proper financial advice, but as a way to get past the embarrassment and start asking the questions you’ve been too ashamed to ask a human.

That excites me, another language made accessible by removing the fear of getting it wrong.

But I’d be a rubbish ikigai writer if I didn’t name the other side too.

AI also makes the hustle trap more seductive than ever. It can build you a landing page in minutes, draft your sales copy, optimise your pricing, automate your email sequences. The distance between “I have a purpose” and “I have a monetised purpose” has never been shorter. And that speed is genuinely dangerous if you haven’t done the slower work of examining your relationship with money first. Desire mining applied to your financial aspirations... algorithms showing you what you “should” be earning from your passion, what other people are charging, what’s possible if you just scale... that’s the hustle trap wearing a very convincing AI hoodie.

The ikigai risk here is real. AI can help you engage with the money circle more honestly. It can also help you skip the honesty entirely and go straight to hustle. The tool doesn’t care which you choose, so you have to.

Looking at the fourth circle honestly

I’m not going to pretend I’ve resolved this… but I am learning to look at the fourth circle without flinching quite so hard. Here’s what I’m practising, in case it helps you too.

Naming the conditioning. When the guilt flares, I try to notice it and ask… is this my values speaking, or is this my programming? There’s a difference between genuinely not caring about money (rare, and fine) and having been taught that caring about money makes you a bad person (common, and limiting).

Getting financially literate, imperfectly. The same way I’m learning Manx... badly, slowly, with an accent that’s entirely my own. The same way I learned to prompt AI... by doing, not by memorising theory. Also being unembarrassed to call out the systems that don’t make sense, asking for help, demanding that the barriers are lowered.

Reframing “more” as “enough to enable.” Not more for more’s sake. More so that the other three circles have room to breathe. More so that I can invest time in the work that matters. More so that the people I love aren’t getting the scraps. More as a tool, not a trophy.

Building with, not just for. Seeking out the co-ops, the women-built spaces, the mutual aid models, the communities where economic support is also circular and sustainable. There are people who want to see me succeed, and I want to see them succeed, and those two things aren’t in competition.

I think the fourth circle has been waiting for this conversation. She’s not embarrassed to be there, we’re the ones who’ve been making it awkward.

Maybe it’s time we pulled her a chair, poured her a cuppa, and asked her what she actually needs.

I think she’d have a lot to say.

So beautiful souls, when was the last time you had an honest conversation about money? Not bills or budgets. But what money means to you... what it enables, what it costs you emotionally, and whether your relationship with it is helping or hindering the life and work you’re trying to build?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Here’s a bullet journal prompt that might help. Create a “Money Circle Audit” spread across two pages. On the left, draw your hatarakigai ovals and score each out of 10 for how honestly you’ve examined it... not how good you are at each one, but how honestly you’ve looked at it. On the right, create three columns: Guilt, Survival, Hustle. Under each, list the specific thoughts, behaviours and stories you tell yourself that keep you in that trap. Things like “I should be grateful for what I’ve got” or “if I just launched that course...” or “real purpose work shouldn’t need to be paid for.” Now reflect and underline the ones that aren’t really yours... the ones you absorbed from family, class, culture, gender, society. Those borrowed beliefs are the ones to question first. What shifts in your body when you imagine letting them go?

PPS: And an AI prompt to try with Claude or ChatGPT: “I want to examine my relationship with money and purpose honestly. Here’s my situation: [describe your work, what you love doing, what you’d do with more financial freedom, and the feelings that come up when you think about money]. Please help me with three things. First, based on what I’ve shared, tell me which money trap I’m most stuck in: guilt (believing money contaminates purpose), survival (staying safe but misaligned), or hustle (monetising everything and losing the love). Second, help me trace where my money conditioning came from... what messages did I absorb from family, class, culture and gender about what’s ‘okay’ to want? And third, help me draft a one paragraph ‘money manifesto’ that honours both my values AND my right to be financially secure and thriving. Challenge me if I’m being too soft on myself.”

PPPS: This week’s soundtrack is “Dirty Cash (Money Talks)” by Adventures Of Stevie V. A proper late 80s banger that most of us danced to without thinking too hard about the lyrics. “Money talks, money talks, dirty cash I want you, dirty cash I need you.” It captures something honest about the push and pull... we want money, we need money, and we’ve been taught to feel a bit grubby about admitting it. The song doesn’t apologise, maybe we should stop apologising too.

Diamonds are made under pressure.

So is graphite… and so is dust.

Same force. Same carbon. Different conditions, completely different outcomes. The difference is what surrounds you when the weight comes down.

This has been on my mind as I’ve been digging into research on AI’s impact at work this week. The stats tell mixed stories and nobody knows for certain what the next decade holds… but AI will for sure continue to change how lots of us do things, and I want to be equipped to help people through that in ways that work for how real humans actually learn effectively... not how tech bros or consultancy reports would like them to *grin*.

Section AI looked at 4,500 work-related AI use cases across 5,000 knowledge workers and they found that only 15% are likely to generate any return on investment, 59% classified as basic one-off tasks and a mere 2% qualify as advanced.

Meanwhile, a BCG and Columbia Business School survey found that 76% of executives believe their workforce feels enthusiastic about AI adoption, whereas only 31% of individual contributors agreed!! And Slalom’s 2026 research found that 68% of people said they can keep pace with AI, yet 93% reported that barriers like underdeveloped skills and inadequate training limit their progress.

People simultaneously saying “I’m fine” and “I don’t have what I need.” If you’ve ever been that human trying to look competent while privately drowning, that will feel painfully familiar.

🎶 Pressure, pushing down on me, pressing down on you 🎶

In defence of graphite

Maybe 59% of people doing basic AI tasks isn’t the crisis the headlines want you to think it is.

Graphite is made from the same carbon as diamonds. It’s what makes pencils work. It conducts electricity. It lubricates engines. It’s genuinely useful. Not every AI interaction needs to be a diamond. Sometimes you need a pencil to sketch or write a rough draft, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The problem comes when organisations expect a diamond mine when they haven’t provided the heat, the time or the support those transformations require… and then they’re looking at the graphite and calling it a failure of the carbon.

In some workplaces, “experimentation” doesn’t really mean genuine inquiry. It means visibly performing adaptability inside an innovation story the organisation wants to tell about itself. People are not always being asked to explore, sometimes they’re being asked to look like the sort of person who explores.

Some of those 59% might be doing exactly what they need to do right now. And some of the people who appear slow to adopt AI aren’t scared or behind, they’re correctly unconvinced. They’ve looked at the available use cases, sensed that the tool they have access to is immature for their context or that the promised productivity gains are mostly theatre, and decided to wait. Section AI’s own data supports this... if only 15% of use cases generate ROI, the sceptics might have better instincts than the early adopters performing enthusiasm for their quarterly reviews.

Not all hesitation is deficiency. Sometimes it’s discernment.

Why “just experiment” is a threat, not an invitation

For the people who do want to learn, who are ready and willing... the environment matters hugely.

When an organisation says “we encourage everyone to experiment with AI,” they may very well mean “we’ve given you permission and we’re excited” … but what many employees hear is “figure it out yourself and don’t mess it up”.

Section AI found that the majority of C-suite executives said their company encourages experimentation. When individual contributors were asked the same question? Only 10% agreed.

For many people, the fear is not really the technology. It’s the exposure of becoming a beginner again in a culture that rewards polish.

That gap goes deeper than communication, it’s about three things that permission alone can’t fix;

• First, boundaries. People need clarity on where experimentation is welcome, where it isn’t, and what good use actually looks like. Without that, “just experiment” produces shadow AI, low-value busywork and a lot of hidden anxiety. BCG’s global survey found that when employees don’t have the AI tools they need, more than half will find alternatives and use them anyway.

• Second, time. If people have no slack, there is no real experimentation. A 2026 L&D report found that 41% of employees lack time to learn. Asking an exhausted workforce to “play around” with AI isn’t a perk, it’s uncompensated labour disguised as innovation. Another item on an already overloaded to-do list, except this one comes with the implicit threat that if you don’t do it, you’ll be left behind.

• Third, safety. MIT Technology Review and Infosys surveyed 500 business leaders and found that 83% believe psychological safety impacts AI success, but only 39% rate their own organisation’s safety as “very high”... and research published in Nature found that AI adoption can actually reduce psychological safety, increasing depression when the surrounding environment is one of ambiguity or fear.

Boundaries, time and safety. Without all three, “experiment freely” is just unpaid risk transfer from the organisation to the employee.

The people meant to help you are pretending too

The managers tasked with creating these conditions? Gallup found that employees with actively supportive managers are 6.5 times more likely to find their AI tools useful, only 28% of employees strongly agree their manager provides that support.

The concern is that some managers are actually more frightened about AI than frontline workers. BCG found 43% of managers and leaders worry about losing their jobs compared to 36% of frontline employees. They can see how dramatically AI could restructure their organisations and they are supposed to steady everyone else while privately wondering whether the ground beneath them is shifting too.

Managerial pretending is contagious. When a leader champions a tool they don’t fully understand while trying to conceal their own uncertainty, teams learn that performance matters more than honesty. The people who might ask a genuinely useful question if they felt safe to, stay quiet instead.

🎶 It’s the terror of knowing what this world is about. 🎶

I know this because I’ve been the dust

I’m supposed to be the AI person. I coach, speak, teach workshops and write about this every week… and there are many moments when I feel the squeeze. When a new model or tool launches and the gap between what I think I should know and what I actually know opens up. When someone asks a question I can’t answer and I could choose to dress up uncertainty as confidence.

I think I already mentioned the friend who messaged me last year asking where to start with AI. I rattled off diagnostic questions. Have you used Deep Research mode? Do you switch on thinking mode? Written any custom instructions?

Their reply “Looking at the questions you asked I can see I haven’t even scratched the surface”.

I was trying to help, but what I did was measure them against a hidden syllabus and watch their enthusiasm drain away. Pressure, applied with the best of intentions… still dust.

That friend had a reason for wanting to learn. A sense of purpose, a curiosity, a professional goal they cared about… and my first instinct was to assess their technical level rather than ask what mattered to them. I nearly disconnected them from their motivation before they’d even started.

This is where ikigai lives in this conversation. Your reason for being, your sense of purpose at work, is the very thing that makes AI adoption feel so loaded. When someone tells you to experiment with a technology that might reshape your role, they’re not just asking you to learn a tool. They’re asking you to renegotiate your competence, your status, your sense of what makes you valuable. That goes straight to the heart of purpose. No wonder people freeze.

The container matters more than the content

At points in “Under Pressure,” the song almost falls apart.. are the fabulous Mercury and Bowie even performing the same piece anymore? … then it resolves into an unexpected plea for love.

Why can’t we give love one more chance?

Every piece of research I’ve dug through points somewhere similar. The difference between diamonds and dust is care. But care alone isn’t enough, you also need structure.

Psychological safety without direction produces a lovely warm room where nobody quite knows what to do. Direction without safety produces compliance dressed up as progress. The hierarchy matters: safety first, then structure, then accountability. In that order. Skip to step three and you’re just adding pressure to an already fractured container.

I’ve watched this done well in so many communal or cohort based learning constructs, whether a community of practice, a workshop or an office hours drop in. People arrive nervous, someone says “this is probably a stupid question” and someone else says “oh thank goodness, I thought it was just me” The whole room exhales. And then we get into the practical stuff, the use cases, the workflow experiments, the things that actually move the needle.

Near the end of the song Bowie sings This is our last dance. I don’t think it’s our last dance with AI adoption, but why wait to advocate for better choices and framing.

We can keep applying pressure and calling it progress. We can keep mistaking permission for safety and visible activity for meaningful learning.

Or we can build containers that deserve real experimentation and innovation… clearer boundaries, protected time, honest managers, shared practice and room to be visibly new.

Safety first, then structure, then accountability.

Diamonds are made under pressure, but only when something holds you while you change.

Beautiful souls, please share your thoughts in the comments… for example, has anyone ever asked you how you feel about AI at work, rather than what you're doing with it?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS ✍️ Here’s a journal prompt for you...

Draw a simple container and inside it write the conditions that help you learn something new. A person who makes you feel safe to be wrong. A physical space. A time of day. A ritual. Now outside the container, write the pressures you currently feel around AI. Look at both. Is there anything inside that you could bring to bear on what’s outside it?

PPS 🤖 An AI prompt to try...

“I’d like to do an exercise based on the idea that meaningful AI adoption needs three things: psychological safety, clear structure and accountability, in that order.

Here’s a list of my regular work tasks: [paste or describe them]

Help me sort these into three categories. First, tasks where AI could save me time without me needing to learn much new (my ‘graphite’ tasks, useful and practical). Second, tasks where AI could genuinely transform how I work, but I’d need support, time and permission to experiment properly (my ‘diamond potential’ tasks). Third, tasks where I might deliberately choose not to use AI because my human judgement, creativity or relationships are the point (my ‘keep precious’ tasks).

For the diamond potential category, help me think about what container I’d need around me to actually experiment well. What boundaries would help me feel clear rather than anxious? How much protected time would I realistically need? Who could I learn alongside so I’m not figuring this out alone?”

Don’t perform competence in the prompt. Be honest. The AI doesn’t care if you’re behind. That’s one of its genuine superpowers.

PPPS 🎶 Today’s soundtrack...

“Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie. Two absolute giants who somehow wrote one of the most human songs ever recorded, about fear and love and what we owe each other, and then never performed it live together. A moment in time between two people who understood pressure and transformation.

Listen to it differently today. Listen for the resolution, less a crescendo and more a plead for love.

And because it’s the eve of International Women’s Day and I can’t resist... I’m also sharing a jaw-dropping rehearsal clip of Annie Lennox and David Bowie preparing to perform this at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992 (complete with DB smoking and George Michael singing along in the crowd!). Annie stepped into Freddie’s part and made it entirely her own, this is what it looks like when a powerhouse of a woman meets a song about pressure and absolutely smashes it out of the park.

We fireproof our buildings. We soundproof our walls. We childproof our kitchens. We waterproof our coats (or grab an umbrella).

Whenever something matters, we learn to protect it from forces that could erode it. We do not wait for the downpour to think about waterproofing. We do not wait for the fire to think about fireproofing. We look at what we value and we say this thing needs deliberate protection and then we build that protection in.

So here is my question.

If your sense of purpose, your ikigai, your reason for getting up and doing the thing that makes you feel most alive, matters to you (and I suspect it does, or you would not be reading this), why are you leaving it unprotected amidst the most disruptive technological shift in human history?

The words that were missing

I have spent over two years exploring the ikigai risk of AI. The idea, in its simplest form, is this; as artificial intelligence takes on more of our cognitive and creative work, it does not just change what we do. It changes why we do it. And if we are not careful, it displaces the things that give our lives meaning.

That was the diagnosis.

What I did not have, until recently, was the words for treatment.

Purpose Proofing is that.

Purpose Proofing is the deliberate, ongoing practice of protecting what gives your life meaning from being displaced by artificial intelligence’s relentless efficiency. It is not a one-time act. It is not a checklist. It is a way of living alongside AI that keeps your humanity at the centre of every decision about what to automate, what to delegate and what to keep fiercely, beautifully yours.

Why “proofing” and not “protecting”?

Language matters, so let me explain why I chose this particular word.

When we “proof” something, we are making something resilient from the inside out. A waterproof jacket does not avoid rain. It walks straight into the storm and stays dry. A soundproofed room does not pretend noise does not exist. It acknowledges the noise and creates conditions for that to exist alongside quieter spaces.

Purpose Proofing works the same way. It does not ask you to avoid AI or pretend the disruption is not happening. It asks you to build your relationship with purpose so deliberately, so consciously, that the forces of displacement cannot erode it from underneath you.

This is different from “future-proofing,” which is the term you will hear often in the AI conversation. Future-proofing feels reactive to me. It starts from fear. It asks what might go wrong? and scrambles to prevent it. It is about survival.

Purpose Proofing is generative. It starts from intention. It asks what matters most to me? and builds outward from there. It is about thriving.

One braces for impact, while the other chooses a direction.

The ikigai foundation

If you have been reading these essays for a while, you will know that ikigai, the Japanese word for ‘life worth’... which I interpret as having a reason for being, is the bedrock of everything I explore here. Ikigai is NOT a career strategy or a productivity framework (despite what the internet would have you believe with its four-circle Venn diagram). Ikigai, as understood in Japan, is something simpler and more intimate than that. It is the feeling that your life has value. It is the thing that gets you out of bed. It is something you become rather than something you find.

Purpose Proofing takes ikigai seriously enough to protect it.

I have come to understand through two years of writing and thinking and journaling and arguing with AI and arguing with myself… that knowing your ikigai is not enough. Not in this particular moment in history. The forces working against human purpose right now are too pervasive, too seductive and too invisible to be met with awareness alone.

You also need practice and habit. You need a framework that helps you notice when your sense of meaning is being replaced by convenience.

You need proofing.

What purpose proofing looks like

Purpose Proofing is not a single practice. It is a philosophy that expresses itself through many practices. Think of it as an umbrella (the waterproofing metaphor extends *grin*) under which specific habits and frameworks live.

Purpose Prompting is one of those practices. Last week I wrote about the daily discipline of prompting yourself before prompting AI, using reflective journaling to surface your values and direction before handing anything to an algorithm. Purpose Prompting is how you start each day with intention. It is the daily layer of proofing.

But Purpose Proofing is bigger than any single daily habit, it also includes;

Knowing your hatarakigai. Hatarakigai (働き甲斐) is the Japanese concept of “work worth doing.” I have written about this before, and it becomes even more important in the age of AI. If you cannot articulate which parts of your work give you meaning, you cannot protect them from automation. You will hand over everything that seems “efficient” to hand over, and one day realise that efficiency has consumed the parts that made the work feel like yours.

Choosing your handoffs consciously. Every time you delegate a task to AI, you are making a choice about what matters. Purpose Proofing asks you to make that choice deliberately rather than automatically. Some handoffs are genuine liberation. Others are small surrenders of agency that compound over time. Learning to tell the difference is a skill, and it is a skill worth developing.

Returning to yourself. This is the step most people skip. After every meaningful AI interaction, Purpose Proofing asks you to come back to your own thinking. What did the AI suggest? What do you actually think? Where do you agree, where do you push back, and what did the interaction reveal about your own values? The return is where your humanity reasserts itself.

Protecting your creative friction. Not all difficulty is bad. The struggle of writing a first draft, the uncertainty of making a decision without all the data, the discomfort of sitting with a question that has no easy answer... these are the conditions in which purpose grows. Purpose Proofing recognises that some friction is useful and deliberately preserves it.

Who this is for

If you are reading this and thinking yes, but I love AI, I use it every day, this sounds like it is asking me to go backwards, I want to be very clear about something.

Purpose Proofing is not anti-AI… it is pro-human.

I use AI every day and LOVE it more than I can say. I use it to think, to create, to explore patterns in my own journaling, to challenge my assumptions and to build on ideas I’d struggle to build alone. Purpose Proofing does not ask you to stop doing any of that.

What it asks is that you stay in the driving seat.

That you know why you are using these tools, not just that they are there. That you can tell the difference between a task you delegated because it freed you to do something more meaningful and a task you delegated because it was easier not to think. That at the end of a day spent working alongside AI, you can look at what you created and say this has my fingerprints on it and reflects what I care about. This is mine.

Purpose Proofing is for anyone who has felt that tension between excitement about what AI can do and concern about what it might displace. It is for journal keepers and technologists, for coaches and consultants, for leaders wondering how to keep their teams purposeful and for individuals wondering how to keep themselves purposeful.

It is for anyone who suspects that the question “what is my purpose?” deserves more than an algorithm’s answer.

Why now

Viktor Frankl wrote that “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”.

AI is reshaping the “how” of lots of things. How we work. How we create. How we communicate. How we learn. How we make decisions. The speed of this reshaping is extraordinary, and it is accelerating.

But the “why” has to come from you. It always did of course, but it mattered less when the “how” was slow enough that you had time to think. When writing a report took all day, you had space within that labour to feel why it mattered. When researching a problem required real effort, the effort itself connected you to the question.

AI can compress the “how” to almost nothing, and in that compression, the “why” loses its natural footing.

Purpose Proofing rebuilds that deliberately. It creates space for meaning that AI’s efficiency would otherwise fill with output.

This is not a future problem. It is happening now, in boardrooms and kitchens and classrooms and creative studios all over the world. People are already feeling it, even if they do not have language for it yet.

The MIT Sloan Management Review is writing about the “existential crisis” facing professional services. The World Economic Forum is discussing meaning displacement. The conversations at every major AI conference in 2025 and 2026 have included tracks on human purpose and AI. The world is waking up to the ikigai risk.

Purpose Proofing is what we do about it.

The practice and the philosophy

Let me draw the relationship clearly, because I think this matters for where we go from here.

The ikigai risk of AI is the observation. It names the problem. It says that when AI handles more of what humans do, it risks eroding the sense of purpose that comes from doing meaningful things.

Purpose Proofing AI is the philosophy. It is the commitment to actively, intentionally protecting your purpose in an AI-saturated world. It is the umbrella under which everything else sits.

Purpose Prompting is one practice within that philosophy. It is the daily discipline of surfacing your values through journaling and then bringing that clarity into your AI interactions.

There will be more practices. This is an evolving framework, not a finished product. I am building it in public, one essay at a time, because I believe the best way to develop ideas this important is to think out loud with people who care about the same questions.

An invitation

If you have read this far, you are already someone who takes purpose seriously. You are already someone who senses that the AI conversation is missing something important, something about meaning and agency and the deeply human need to feel that your life has worth.

Purpose Proofing AI is my attempt to name that something. To give it a framework. To make it practical enough to live by and philosophical enough to matter.

I do not have all the answers. I have one hundred and twenty five essays, a daily journaling practice, an ongoing argument with Claude and a deep conviction that the question “what gives your life meaning?” has never been more important than it is right now.

If that resonates, you are in the right place. Stay. Write back. Tell me what Purpose Proofing means to you. Tell me where I have got it wrong. Tell me what I am missing.

Because this is a practice remember… and practices get better when they are shared.

Beautiful souls, what would you purpose-proof? If you could waterproof one thing about your life from the storm of AI, what would it be?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS ✍️ Bullet journal prompt ideas

1. The Japanese concept of mamori (守り) means to safeguard what is precious. Write about one thing in your life that is precious precisely because it is fragile. What makes its fragility part of its value?

2. If purpose proofing is about protecting what matters, what are you currently over-protecting? Where might you be clinging to something familiar and calling it meaningful when it has actually stopped serving you?

3. We talk about “finding” purpose as though it were lost property. But what if purpose is not something you misplaced? What if it is something you are actively building, and the real question is whether you are building it consciously or letting the current carry the materials away?

PPS 🤖 AI prompt to try:

“I have been thinking about what ‘proofing’ means in the context of my life. We waterproof and fireproof the things we value. I want to explore how I would purpose-proof AI. Here are my reflections from today’s journaling. Help me see what I am unconsciously protecting already, what I might be leaving exposed, and where my instinct to protect might actually be holding me back from growth. Be honest with me.”

PPPS 🎵 Soundtrack “Umbrella” by Rihanna

Rihanna offered to be an umbrella for anyone who needed shelter. “When the sun shines, we’ll shine together. Told you I’ll be here forever.” Purpose Proofing AI is that same promise, except you are making it to yourself. You are saying that whatever storms AI brings, whatever the world reshapes around me, my sense of meaning has shelter. It has me.

The best philosophy is to live loudly. You can stand under my umbrella, your purpose can too.

This essay is a companion piece. Last week I explored What Is Purpose Prompting? which defines the daily practice of surfacing purpose through journaling and intentional AI use. If you missed it, start there and come back. Together, these two essays lay a foundation; Purpose Prompting is the daily practice, Purpose Proofing is the philosophy that holds it.

This is not the last you will hear of either. Both ideas will weave through future essays as I continue to explore what it means to live purposefully alongside AI. But for now, the foundation is laid. Next week, something different I’m sure *grin*

One more thing. If the ikigai risk of AI is an idea that has got under your skin, you can now read my longer exploration of it in print. I wrote Chapter 4, “The Ikigai Risk of AI,” for the forthcoming book AI Everywhere, Volume 1: How Women Are Changing The World With Artificial Intelligence. It is written by 26 women and nonbinary authors from the She Writes AI community, spanning 14 countries and 24 topics in AI, and I am ridiculously proud to be part of it. The book is already the #1 Hot New Release in Social Aspects of the Internet and in Human-Computer Interaction, and it has not even been released yet. Pre-orders are available now for the ebook at an introductory price of US$0.99 via mybook.to/aieverywhere1, with print editions coming soon. You can learn more about all the chapters and authors at aiEverywhereBooks.com.

I’ve been doing something for ages that I didn’t have a name for.

Every morning, before I pick up my phone and see what the internet thinks I should care about today, I pick up my bullet journal and a pen and I write a question. Sometimes it’s a big one, what am I actually building here? Sometimes it’s gentler, what would make today feel like it mattered? Then I sit with whatever surfaces. Just me and the question and whatever honest answer my hand decides to write before my brain can edit it too much.

Later, I might take what I’ve written and share it with Claude. To see what patterns an AI helper can spot that I’m too close to notice. Where am I circling the same fear? What thread keeps appearing that I haven’t spotted yet? The AI support is a mirror, reflecting back a version of my own thinking that helps me see more clearly.

And then I go back to the journal and write what I think about what the AI said.

This loop… purpose first, then AI, then back to purpose… has become the most important practice in my life. It’s how I write these essays. It’s how I make decisions about my life and work. It’s how I stay grounded when the pace of change makes my head spin. It’s how I figure out what to say yes to (and what to walk away from).

I’m calling it Purpose Prompting.

A philosophy needs a practice

I’ve written before about the ikigai risk of AI, the idea that as artificial intelligence handles more of our cognitive and creative work, we risk losing something essential about human purpose and fulfilment. It’s a concept I first encountered through the work of Ken Mogi and AI researcher Roman Yampolskiy, and it’s one I keep returning to because it feels more urgent by the month.

Purpose-proofing AI, making sure we don’t lose what makes us distinctively human as these tools reshape our lives, has become a kind of philosophical North Star for me. It’s the big why behind everything I write and teach and care about.

But a philosophy needs a practice. You can believe wholeheartedly that human purpose matters in the age of AI, and still wake up tomorrow morning and doom-scroll for forty-five minutes before you’ve had a single original thought. Trust me, I’ve done it. The belief alone doesn’t save you.

Purpose Prompting is the practice.

It’s the daily, practical, how of purpose-proofing your life. The thing you actually do, with your hands and your pen and your AI tools, to make sure your sense of direction comes from inside you rather than being mined from your data and sold back to you as a recommendation.

The double meaning that makes it work

I love that “prompt” means two things right now.

In the journaling world, a prompt is a question that sparks reflection. What would you do if money weren’t a factor? What did you love doing at ten years old that you’ve forgotten about? These are purpose prompts in an older sense, invitations to dig deeper into who you are and what you’re here for. Journaling is a proven way to engage in a timeless ritual of self-discovery, connecting us to a lineage of thinkers reaching back to Marcus Aurelius who discovered that the simplest way to heal the mind is to write one’s way through it.

In the AI world, a prompt is an instruction. It’s what you type into Claude (other AI helpers are available *grin*) to tell it what you need. The quality of what AI gives you depends entirely on how much purpose you bring to the conversation. Vague prompts get vague outputs. But when you prompt AI with clarity about what you’re trying to build, who you’re trying to become, what actually matters to you… the results can be incredible, and life changing.

Purpose Prompting sits right at that intersection. It’s the practice of using reflective prompts to surface your purpose, and the practice of bringing that purpose into every interaction you have with AI.

One feeds the other. The journal prompt helps you get clear. The clarity makes you a better AI collaborator. The AI reflection helps you see patterns you missed. Those patterns go back into the journal. And slowly, steadily, you build a relationship with both your purpose and your tools that feels intentional rather than reactive.

What it looks like

Purpose Prompting isn’t a rigid system. It’s more of a rhythm, and it has three movements.

First, you prompt yourself. Pen and paper. A question that matters. This is where ikigai journaling lives… the specific practice of using your bullet journal to explore your reason for being, your values, your direction. It doesn’t have to be profound every day (some days my journal prompt is literally what do I want for dinner tonight and why can’t I decide? which often turns out to be about something bigger than dinner). The point is that you start with yourself. You get to your own wants and intentions before any algorithm does.

Then, you prompt AI with purpose. Armed with that clarity, you bring your thinking to an AI tool to extend your reflection rather than outsourcing it. You share your journal thoughts and ask, what patterns do you see here? What am I circling? What might I be avoiding? The AI becomes a mirror, not a master. You’re using its pattern recognition to deepen your own understanding, not to replace it.

Finally, you return to yourself. You take what the AI reflected back and you sit with it. You decide what resonates and what doesn’t. You write your own conclusion in your own handwriting. This last step is everything, because it’s where agency lives. The AI suggested stuff but *you* chose. That’s purpose-proofing in action.

Where this came from (or the dots I’ve been joining)

If you’ve been reading these essays for a while, you’ll know I’m obsessed with the intersection of purpose (ikigai), paper (bullet journaling) and pixels (AI). I’ve been writing about this intersection for over two years in essays like Purpose, Paper & Pixels, exploring how these forces work together.

Purpose Prompting is what happens when you stop exploring the intersection and start practising it. It’s the framework becoming a verb.

As I’ve been writing and describing moments uploading a photo of my journal to Claude and the AI illuminated connections I hadn’t seen. That was Purpose Prompting before I had the term for it. When I wrote about the NeverEnding Becoming and the importance of getting to your own wants before the algorithm does, I was describing why Purpose Prompting matters. The desire mining age I warned about? Purpose Prompting is how you resist it.

I’ve been circling this idea for a while and it’s only now crystallising into something I can name and share. Which is making me smile as that’s exactly how Purpose Prompting works itself anyway… you sit with something long enough, journal about it enough times, bounce it off enough AI conversations and eventually the pattern reveals itself.

I Purpose Prompted my way into discovering Purpose Prompting *grin*

Why this matters now (more than ever)

We are drowning in AI news and tools. Every week there’s a new one that promises to revolutionise your productivity, your creativity, your whole life… some of them are genuinely brilliant. I use AI every single day and LOVE it.

But all the productivity in the world is worthless if you’re being productive towards the wrong things. If your AI tools are helping you sprint in a direction you never consciously chose, you’re not being efficient, you’re being efficiently lost.

Purpose Prompting flips the equation. Instead of starting with what can AI do for me? you start with what do I actually want, and how can AI help me get there with my humanity intact?

As Viktor Frankl wrote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”. We’re living through one of the most dramatic “hows” in human history. AI is reshaping the how of nearly everything. But the why? The why has to come from us. The why has to come first, and Purpose Prompting is a way to make sure it does.

Who this is for

Anyone who’s ever felt that tension between excitement about AI and a worry that something important might get lost in the shuffle.

If you’re a journal keeper who’s curious about AI but doesn’t want to lose the magic of pen and paper, this is for you. If you’re an AI enthusiast who secretly feels like you’re consuming more than creating, this is for you. If you’re somewhere in midlife, with decades of wisdom and lived experience and an instinct that tells you these tools should serve your purpose rather than distract from it, oh, this is especially for you.

I’ve said before that those of us in Gen X are uniquely positioned for this moment. We grew up pre-internet, lived through the digital revolution and now we’re watching AI reshape the world. We know what it’s like to think without Google. We remember what it’s like to be bored and let our minds wander. That experience is a superpower right now, if we use it.

It’s a practice, not a hack

I want to be really clear that Purpose Prompting isn’t a productivity hack. It’s not “5 killer prompts to 10x your output.” The internet is full of that and I have no interest in adding to the noise.

This is a practice. Like meditation, like running, like journaling itself… it’s something that compounds over time. The first time you sit with a journal prompt before checking your phone, it might feel a bit awkward. The first time you share your journal reflections with an AI and ask it to help you see your patterns, it might feel weird or vulnerable. That’s okay. The Japanese concept of kaizen (改善) teaches us that continuous small improvements are more powerful than dramatic reinventions.

Purpose Prompting is kaizen for your sense of direction. A fraction clearer and more intentional every day. A fraction more you.

Purpose Prompting at its heart is the daily act of naming what you want, what you’re becoming, what matters to you, before anyone or anything else can name it for you.

It’s pen and paper and honest questions and AI reflections and the courage to keep asking.

Becoming was always the point, and Purpose Prompting is how you make sure the becoming is yours.

So beautiful souls, what sort of words would get you started if you opened your journal and wrote ‘what do I actually want’?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS ✍️ Your Purpose Prompting practice

Try this tomorrow morning, before you pick up your phone. Open your journal to a fresh page and write the date and one of these questions;

1. What do I want today? (Not what do I need to do, what do I want)

2. If I could only work on one thing this week that aligns with my purpose, what would it be?

3. What am I becoming? (Based on the choices I’m actually making at present)

Write for five minutes, or as long as you can. Then, if you want to go deeper, take a photo of what you’ve written and share it with your AI tool of choice. Ask it: “What patterns do you notice in my thinking? What might I be circling but haven’t named yet?”

Then, and this is important, go back to your journal and write what you think about what the AI said. That’s the full loop > Purpose → AI → purpose.

PPS 🤖 An AI prompt to try

Here’s a Purpose Prompt you can paste straight into Claude or your favourite AI helper;

“I want to understand what I’m really working towards right now. I’m going to share some recent journal reflections and things that have been on my mind. I’d like you to help me see the thread connecting them, what am I gravitating towards that I might not have fully articulated yet? Please be honest and specific, not generic. Help me see my own patterns.”

Then paste in whatever’s been lighting you up recently. Your journal pages, screenshots, voice notes, saved articles, half-finished ideas. Let the AI help you see you, then decide for yourself what you think.

PPPS 🎧 Soundtrack – “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads

And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

Was there ever a more perfect Purpose Prompting anthem? David Byrne wrote this song about exactly what happens when we don’t prompt ourselves with purpose, we operate on autopilot and end up with a house and a job and a life we never consciously chose. When asked about it, Byrne said the lyrics were about the unconscious: “We operate half-awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven’t really stopped to ask ourselves, ‘How did I get here?’”

That question how did I get here? is the ultimate anti-Purpose Prompt. It’s what you ask when you haven’t been doing the practice. Purpose Prompting is how you make sure you always know the answer.

I love that the song isn’t despairing about it. Brian Eno said Byrne combined “the blood-and-thunder intonation of the preacher” with something genuinely optimistic: “It’s saying what a fantastic place we live in, let’s celebrate it. That was a radical thing to do when everyone was so miserable and grey!”

Radical optimism in the face of everyone being miserable and grey, sounds very me hehe.

This song hits especially hard this week. My friend Arthur passed away, and I’ve been sitting with how he lived and how present he was. Once in a lifetime. We say that phrase so casually, but it’s literal, isn’t it? We get one, and we never really know how long that one is going to be. I miss him already, but the best way I know to honour someone who lived so fully is to take that energy and pour it into something real. So here I am, writing about purpose on a Saturday morning, choosing to celebrate alongside the sadness. For Arthur. For all of us who are still here, still becoming.

Turn it up. Let David Byrne’s glorious awkward dancing remind you that the point isn’t to have it all figured out, the point is to keep asking the question, on purpose, with your whole weird beautiful self 🎶

There’s a Guillemots song I’ve loved for years. “Made Up Love Song No. 43.” In the middle of it, Fyfe Dangerfield sings this line that has lived in my heart ever since “love you through sparks and shining dragons, I do.”

I’ve never fully understood what it means. I think that’s why I love it. It sounds like someone saying I’m here for all of it. The dazzling and the terrifying. The things I can name and the things I can’t yet. I will love you through what I don’t understand.

On Valentine’s Day, that feels like exactly the right place to start.

I dug out an old blog post of mine this morning. Pre-ikigai, pre lots of things really. I’d written it years ago after seeing a quote about how impossibly lucky two people have to be to fall for each other at exactly the right time in exactly the right way… and I’d gone on this long, rambling, Sarah tangent about love and timing and all the near-misses that make up a life.

Reading it back now, sitting in the home Andrew and I built together, Henry Hound snoring at my feet, I found myself smiling for all the things she didn’t yet know.

The luckiest thing

Here’s the version of the story I want to tell you today.

Before Andrew, I’d loved people. Really loved them. But the timing was off, or we weren’t ready, or we were growing in directions that pulled us apart rather than bound us together. Sometimes infatuation felt like love for a while. Sometimes friendship was what it should have stayed at. Sometimes I met someone wonderful and we were simply in completely different places, and if we’d found each other at a different time the whole thing might have been different.

I got to a point where I stopped bumping into people I liked, so I did something that felt both scary and ridiculous. I wrote an extremely honest profile on Plenty Of Fish. What I valued, what I couldn’t tolerate, how I wanted to live. I figured if I was going to find someone, they’d need to recognise me from my words alone.

And then I waited for someone who had done the same.

When Andrew and I started talking, it became clear almost immediately that on our tiny Island, our paths could have crossed SO many times. Friends in common. Same quiz nights in different eras. Same little corners of the same small world. We’d been circling each other for years without knowing it.

But if we’d met earlier? It probably wouldn’t have worked. We hadn’t done enough growing yet. The lives we have now, the children we brought with us, the people we’d become, none of that would have existed.

So the luckiest thing wasn’t meeting Andrew. It was meeting him at exactly the right time, when we were both ready to show up honestly.

I raise a glass to the fairies and my guardian angel Nana Edna every time I think about that.

The sparks

I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of luck recently. The luck of timing. The luck of readiness… and I see this pattern playing out between people and their AI tool adoption.

I know I need to dial my empathy levels down a tad, but I do genuinely have a heartbreak feeling about this kind of thing happening all around me. Brilliant people, people I care about, meeting something that could genuinely change their lives and walking away from it. Concluding it’s overhyped, or shallow, or nothing special.

They tried AI. It didn’t impress them. So they moved on.

There’s something I keep wanting to say gently and with love, the way you’d tell a friend who’d written off dating after one terrible coffee. You met it at the wrong time.

The AI that most people have experienced, the free version they dabble in, is a completely different creature from what exists right now. I know that sounds like hype. I know it sounds like the kind of breathless thing people say when they’re newly in love and can’t stop talking about how amazing this person is and you’re smiling politely while internally rolling your eyes.

I get it.

But there *has* been a fundamental shift in the last week or so (especially Anthropics latest model release of Claude Opus 4.6 on the 5th of Feb), and most people don’t know because they aren’t looking any more. They’ve already decided. They met AI before it was ready, or before they were ready and they’ve filed it under “not for me.”

I want to whisper to them the same thing I’d tell anyone who’d given up on finding their person. Try again. You’ve both grown.

The shining dragons

There is a Japanese phrase, koi no yokan (恋の予感), which describes the feeling upon meeting someone that falling in love will be inevitable. You haven’t fallen yet, but you can feel it coming. There’s a premonition in your bones.

I feel that when I watch someone use a truly capable AI tool for the first time and something clicks. Their eyes change. There’s this moment where the theoretical becomes visceral. Where all the articles and podcasts and LinkedIn posts suddenly make sense because they’re feeling it rather than hearing about it.

You can’t manufacture that moment for someone else. You can’t argue them into it. All you can do is care enough to keep the door open, to keep gently saying this is worth your time, and here’s why I believe that.

Which is, when I think about it, exactly how love works too.

Nobody talked me into loving Andrew. Nobody presented a compelling case study with metrics. I showed up. He showed up. We were honest about who we were and what we wanted. And then something happened that couldn’t have been engineered.

The best relationships have always worked this way. Human or otherwise. You do the work on yourself first. You get clear about what you need and what you can give. You stop looking for a saviour and start looking for a genuine collaborator. And then, when the timing is right, something extraordinary becomes possible.

The sparks are that first moment of recognition. The shining dragons are what comes after. The proposal you’d been agonising over for weeks that suddenly writes itself in an afternoon. The creative project you’d shelved because there weren’t enough hours. The breathing room to think properly about the work that actually matters to you.

A Valentine’s wish

I wrote a tongue-in-cheek poem once, long before Andrew, a sort of job advert for a partner. It started: “not looking for a saviour, I can do that on my own. The vacancy reads lover.” I was being playful, but I meant it. I didn’t need someone to complete me. I needed someone to show up beside me.

That’s how I feel about the tools I work with now. They aren’t here to replace what makes me human. They’re here to walk alongside it. To free up the hours I used to spend on the tedious stuff so I can spend more time on the thinking and creating and connecting that really matters.

So here’s my Valentine’s wish for you, beautiful souls.

I wish you the luck of good timing. I wish you the courage to try again when something didn’t work the first time around. I wish you relationships, all kinds, built on honesty about who you really are and what you genuinely need.

And I wish you sparks. Sparks that light something up in you, that make you lean forward with curiosity rather than pull back with fear.

The shining dragons? They come later. When you’ve been brave enough to stay.

Who or what deserves a second chance from you this Valentine's week?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - ✍️ Bullet journal reflection prompts

“What have I dismissed or given up on because of one experience at the wrong time? What might be different if I tried again now?”

“Where in my life am I waiting for perfect timing instead of creating the conditions for readiness?”

“If I wrote a brutally honest ‘job advert’ for what I need right now, professionally or personally, what would it say?”

PPS - 🌟 AI super prompt

“I want to explore where I might be stuck in outdated assumptions about a tool, a relationship, a career path or a habit. I tried something once and it didn’t work, and I’ve filed it under ‘not for me.’ Help me identify which of these deserve a second look. Ask me questions about what’s changed since I last tried, what I’ve learned about myself in the meantime, and whether the thing itself might have evolved. Be warm but honest. Help me see where I might be protecting myself from something that could actually be wonderful.”

PPPS - 🎶 Soundtrack this week: “Made Up Love Song No. 43” by Guillemots.

Here’s to loving someone or something you don’t fully understand yet, through sparks and shining dragons and all.

Someone is trying to steal your want.

Not your attention, we already know the battle of the infinite scroll. We’ve been fighting that for years and mostly losing *grin*. Some of the smartest people in Silicon Valley are building systems designed to understand what you intend to do before you’ve quite decided for yourself. Mining your dreams like a gold rush.

Your deepest motivations and half-formed desires. Your whispered “what if” moments... those are the new currency.

I think we need to get to them first.

I’ve been thinking about this since listening to Dr Laurie Santos on The Happiness Lab this week, chatting with Dave Evans and Bill Burnett from Stanford’s Life Design Lab. They were talking about how to live a meaningful life and described it all as “the story of becoming”.

The story of becoming, and the fact it is never ending.

I know it might seem obvious when you read it like that, but we don’t think about how important a concept this is to really come to terms with day to day, do we? We often think about getting somewhere. We optimise and plan and set goals and imagine some future version of ourselves who has finally figured it all out and is sitting in a sunlit room feeling whole.

That person doesn’t exist. She never will... she doesn’t need to.

The Nothing is here

Have you seen The NeverEnding Story?

I LOVED it as a kid, and it lodged itself in me deeply. I adored Falkor the flying luck dragon, was traumatised by the scene with Artax in the swamp… but what really got to me was The Nothing.

The Nothing was the force destroying Fantasia. It wasn’t war or some dark army but the absence of imagination, of desire. The absence of humans caring enough to dream. Fantasia was dying because people had stopped wanting things, stopped believing their inner worlds mattered.

I worry that we are inviting The Nothing in.

Opening your phone and an hour evaporates into other people’s curated lives, or nonsense. Every time an algorithm decides what I should want before I’ve had the chance to sit with my own desires. Every time someone tells me AI will “handle” the creative bits so I can focus on... what, exactly?... that’s The Nothing wearing a Silicon Valley hoodie and calling itself progress.

I don’t think I’m being *too* melodramatic. I think it’s a defining tension of our time and lots of us feel it in our bones even if we struggle to articulate it.

The battle has moved

For two decades, the attention economy was the game. Capture eyeballs. Monetise scrolling. Turn human curiosity into advertising revenue. We all know this story. We’ve read the articles, watched The Social Dilemma, felt guilty about our screen time and then picked up our phones again anyway.

But things are changing, and I want to tell you about two very different visions of what comes next.

Back in 2006, a writer and technologist called Doc Searls coined the term “the Intention Economy.” He wrote a book about it and spent years building tools and communities to make it real, and his vision is genuinely lovely.

Searls imagined a world where you declare your intentions and the market responds to you. Where customers lead and systems follow. Where your agency is the starting point, not the target. He wrote that “relationships between customers and vendors will be voluntary and genuine, with loyalty anchored in mutual respect and concern, rather than coercion.” His Intention Economy was always about putting humans in charge of their own desires and decisions.

I love that vision. It aligns so deeply with everything I believe about how AI should serve us.

And then, in late 2024, researchers from Cambridge published a paper in the Harvard Data Science Review that used the same term for something that feels like its shadow. They described a future where AI systems don’t just capture your attention but learn to predict and shape your motivations before you’ve fully formed them yourself. Searls has publicly and rightly asked them to find a different label, because what they’re describing is the opposite of what he’s spent nearly two decades building.

I agree with him. So I’m going to call the dark version what it actually is: desire mining.

Think about it. When you type a prompt into an AI tool, you’re sharing something far more intimate than a Google search. You’re sharing your desires in full sentences. “Help me write a resignation letter.” “I want to feel less anxious.” “How do I tell my partner I’m unhappy.” These aren’t search terms. These are confessions. And every single one of them is data that tells a system what you want, what you fear, where you’re vulnerable and what you might pay to feel better.

In the attention economy, your gaze was captured. In the age of desire mining, your choices could be shaped before you even fully form them. Not to serve you, in the way Searls envisioned, but to sell to you. To keep you in a loop of wanting things you didn’t know you wanted until the algorithm showed you them at exactly the right moment.

That’s The Nothing in 2026. Sophisticated, personalised and wearing a face you trust.

Becoming on purpose

So here’s what’s been bubbling in my brain, and where ikigai meets life design meets a children’s fantasy film from 1984 in a way I hope makes sense.

In The NeverEnding Story, the whole of Fantasia is saved by one act. Bastian, the boy reading the book, has to give the Childlike Empress a new name. He has to want something. He has to name his desire out loud, into the storm, with everything falling apart around him. And he does. He screams his mother’s name into the wind. One clear, human, aching intention.

That’s the antidote. Then and now.

When Bill Burnett talked about life design as “the story of becoming,” he was describing what ikigai practitioners have known for centuries. The Japanese verb form for this... ikigai ni naru means “to come into one’s ikigai.” To become your purpose rather than to find it, language stating that purpose is a process, not a destination.

This is what Evans and Burnett teach at Stanford using design thinking. Curiosity. Bias to action. Reframing. Awareness. Radical collaboration. Five tools as a framework for the practice of becoming... ikigai in a Stanford blazer, same wisdom, different accent. Their latest book is called How to Live a Meaningful Life and Burnett said on the podcast;

..one of my favorite quotes is if you can’t find enlightenment right where you are, where do you expect to find it? Is it over there? Is it over there? It’s right here. And it’s in just little moments.

Right here, right now… in the becoming.

I wrote in my very first manifesto that “happiness is a way to travel, not a destination.” I’ve believed that for years, but I think desire mining threatens the travel itself. If our desires are being shaped and predicted and commodified before we’ve had the chance to feel them properly, we lose access to our own becoming. We become passengers in someone else’s version of our story.

And that... that is the ikigai risk I keep writing about, showing up in a new disguise.

Getting to your want first

We can’t opt out of the world we live in. I’m not going to tell you to delete your apps and move to a commune, as tempting as that is at times... but we can get to our own intentions before the algorithms do. We can practise wanting things on purpose.

This is what my bullet journal has always been for, I think, even before I could articulate it this way. When I sit down with my pen and a blank page and write “what do I want this week?” I am performing an act of resistance. A small, quiet, powerful act of declaring my own intentions in my own handwriting before any system gets to shape them for me.

The Japanese concept of kaizen (改善) fits here too. Continuous small improvement. Each day a fraction better, a fraction clearer, a fraction more you. Not the dramatic reinvention that some feeds try to convince you that you need. The gentle, persistent, compounding becoming that happens when you pay attention to your own life with intention and kindness.

I keep coming back to what Burnett and Evans describe as the design thinking approach. They say you don’t need to spend ten years developing a meditation practice. You need to flip a switch in any given moment from going through the motions to actually being here. The shift is available to all of us, all the time. But we have to choose it, and choosing requires knowing what you want.

The attention economy stole our time. Desire mining wants to steal our direction. But direction is something you can reclaim every single morning with a pen, a question and five minutes of honesty.

Your NeverEnding becoming

So here’s what I think you should really think about… what if the goal was to never arrive?

What if every essay I’ve written, every journal prompt I’ve shared, every framework I’ve sketched out has been circling the same simple truth? That the point of ikigai, the point of life design, the point of all of it... is the becoming. The daily, imperfect, often surprising, always evolving becoming.

Every day we get to design a little more of the story. Every day the scale tilts a fraction upward and to the right. We can’t achieve something monumental every single day, but we can show up and say “today, I want this.” Intentionally and on purpose. Before anyone or anything else can tell us to want something else.

The NeverEnding Story works as a title because Bastian’s adventure didn’t finish when he saved Fantasia. The book itself tells you it goes on forever. That was always the point. The story is the point. The becoming is the point. The wanting is the point.

With the forces in our world increasingly wanting to do your wanting for you, it feels like an important point to make.

What are you becoming, beautiful soul? And are you the one deciding?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS ✍️ Your Intention practice

Try this in your journal this week. Ideally before you pick up your phone and check anything, open to a fresh page and answer three questions.

1. What do I want today?

2. What does the next version of me care about? If you zoomed forward six months, what would you be glad you started paying attention to now?

3. Who am I becoming? Who are you already in the process of becoming, based on the choices you’re making right now?

Date the page, come back to it and notice what changed.

If you want to go deeper, try creating a “Becoming Map” spread. Draw yourself in the centre. Around you, map the forces currently shaping your intentions... the people, the platforms, the habits, the algorithms. Circle the ones you chose. Underline the ones that chose you. That gap is your design space.

PPS 🤖 An AI prompt to try

Lots of prompts we write for AI start with “Can you...” or “Help me with...” This week, try starting every prompt with “I want.” Here’s one to get you started;

“I want to understand what I’m really looking for right now. I’m going to share a few things I’ve been drawn to lately... articles I’ve saved, ideas I keep coming back to, conversations I can’t stop thinking about. Help me find the thread I’m following but haven’t named yet. What am I becoming?”

Then paste in whatever’s been lighting you up recently. Screenshots, quotes, notes, links, voice transcriptions, photos from your journal. Let AI help you see your own patterns, to recognise what you already want and might not have said out loud yet.

Like Bastian in the storm. Name it.

PPPS 🎧 Soundtrack “The NeverEnding Story” by Limahl

Was there ever any other choice? This glorious unashamedly 80s anthem is peak Gen X emotional memory. And listening to those lyrics again as a grown woman in 2026 perhaps explains my rainbow obsession… every time I hear that soaring chorus I want to ride a luck dragon and scream my intentions into the wind. If that’s not ikigai energy, I don’t know what is.

Turn it up and let yourself want something magical today “there upon the rainbow is the answer to a never ending story” 🌈

I’ve been thinking about Star Trek a lot lately.

Maybe it’s because the new series Starfleet Academy just dropped and I’m absolutely loving it, teenage cadets figuring out who they are in a chaotic far future world... Or maybe it’s because I re-read Machines of Loving Grace recently, the essay by Dario Amodei that paints a picture of a utopia I dream about. The Star Trek future, where technology helps us be more compassionate, solve the biggest problems and where money no long matters.

Dario is the CEO of Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, the AI I love and use the most, the one that feels most like a thinking partner. And Anthropic is... well, they’re my kinda people, I think. They publish their concerns alongside their capabilities. They write constitutions for their AI and then share them publicly. They collaborate with Rick Rubin on projects like The Way of Code, 81 Tao-inspired meditations on creative coding that made me cry a little, if I’m honest. The convergence of technology and philosophy and compassion and creativity... I find it hard to express how much I love that.

So when Dario published his new essay this week, The Adolescence of Technology, I eagerly read every word, all 20,000 or so of them… and my brain hasn’t stopped whirring since.

(An aside; I recommend watching Dario and Demis Hassabis at Davos – “The Day After AGI.” Demis, who leads Google DeepMind, is someone I admire hugely too. He comes from a place of science and research and care for humanity. His advice for protecting ourselves in this moment? Get proficient with these tools. Even Dario and Demis themselves don’t have time to explore all the ways they can be used, all the amazing things that can be created. That gap between what’s possible and what’s been discovered? That’s economic opportunity, agency and the opposite of sitting this out.)

The essay wasn’t exactly reassuring, but it is helpful to see people at the forefront of all this thoughtfully name what this moment feels like. Not through a lens of gleaming utopia or apocalyptic doom. Written as something messier and more recognisable… that uncomfortable stage where something is powerful enough to be dangerous but not mature enough to be trusted, where you can see both the potential and the peril.

I know this feeling, I’ve parented a teenager through it.

If AI is the teenager in this scenario... are we really the mature adults? Are we actually ready to be the responsible ones here?

I’m not sure we are.

The both/and of parenting

If you’ve ever loved a teenager, you know the feeling. The same child who makes your heart burst with pride at breakfast can make you want to scream into a pillow by teatime. They’re brilliant and baffling, capable and careless. Testing every boundary while desperately needing to know the boundaries exist.

You hold fierce hope AND genuine terror. Simultaneously, ALL the time.

That’s exactly where I’ve been this week with AI.

I’ve been geekily excited while watching Clawdbot give us a glimpse of the future, fascinated by the AI agents interacting on their own version of Reddit. Then seeing it morph into Moltbot after a polite ask from Anthropic about the name, the crustacean has “molted,” as they put it, and finally (probably) settling on OpenClaw. The emergent weirdness of it all delights me.

And yes, I’ve been testing and probing at the edges of it myself. A little sparkly eyed over the possibilities this all unlocks.

And yet.

If you’ve read my essays or attended any of my training sessions, you might be raising an eyebrow right now. Isn’t this the same Sarah who advocates caution with agentic AI? Who teaches people to take their time deciding what they actually want AI to do for them before handing over that agency? Who warns about the stage where the choice gets removed entirely if we’re not careful?

Yes. Same Sarah.

And I don’t think that’s a contradiction. I think it’s exactly the point.

I can be genuinely excited about carefully testing the possibilities AND deeply worried about people handing over their PayPal access to systems without thinking through what that means. I can geek out over watching an AI agent autonomously solve problems it wasn’t programmed to handle AND advocate strongly for understanding the implications before we get to the stage where these choices are made for us.

Both feelings are true. Both feelings are appropriate. If you only feel the excitement, you’re not paying attention. If you only feel the fear, you’re missing something remarkable.

But when parenting teenagers, it helps if the parents have their own lives sorted out. And collectively? Humanity? I’m not sure we do.

Two teenagers in a room

I’ve mostly believed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice“. Progress. Things getting better. Each generation leaving the world slightly improved for the next.

It’s getting harder to believe in though. Or rather, it’s true for some while becoming less true for too many others.

The inequality gap isn’t just widening, it’s accelerating. Yes, some people have wonderful lives, access to healthcare and education and opportunity and safety. But the number of people who don’t, who are actually going backwards comparatively speaking, is too big for me to ignore.

We haven’t figured out how to distribute the gains from the last technological revolution fairly. We haven’t solved climate change or housing or the loneliness epidemic. We’re handing our kids smartphones with little guidance (or regulation of what’s on them) and watching anxiety rates skyrocket and mostly just... hoping for the best?

This is not mature adult behaviour. It feels like two teenagers in a room, both testing boundaries, neither quite ready for the consequences of what they’re messing around with.

AI is in its adolescence. And so, perhaps, are we.

The cake is a lie (and so is certainty)

If you’ve ever played Portal, you’ve met GLaDOS, the AI who promised cake and delivered chaos. She’s passive-aggressive, manipulative, testing boundaries constantly, capable of both cruelty and strange tenderness. She lies, she guilts… in other words, she’s a teenager.

By Portal 2, she’s grown. She’s still difficult, still sarcastic, but there’s something softer there. Something that’s learned. The relationship between her and Chell (the player) has become something like grudging respect, maybe even care.

Growth happened, not forced but because the relationship kept going. Because someone stayed engaged even when it was hard.

That’s what I think about when I read Dario’s essay. AI right now is in a GLaDOS phase… powerful, unpredictable, sometimes saying things that feel meaningful and sometimes producing absolute nonsense. The cake of easy answers is definitely a lie. But the possibility of genuine growth? That might be real, if we stick around long enough to find out.

The question is whether we can grow up fast enough ourselves to be the kind of presence this moment needs.

The leaders I trust most in this space are the ones who sound least certain. Dario and Demis come across as humble, human, willing to entertain the possibility they might be wrong. They speak in probabilities and concerns and “we’re figuring this out”. That’s not weakness, it’s intellectual honesty about genuinely uncertain territory.

Compare that with the loud certainty of some other tech leaders, the ones who seem more interested in their own mythology than in the rest of us. The billionaires who announce they’re saving humanity while their actions suggest they’re mostly saving themselves. That bravado, that swaggering confidence? It sounds less like mature leadership and more like... well, teenagers who’ve been handed the car keys and are pretending they know exactly where they’re going.

We have to stop glamourising this. Stop rewarding confidence over competence, hot takes over hard thinking. The adults in the room aren’t often the loudest ones.

The algorithm wants you to pick a side

The loudest voices on AI are often ones who’ve picked a side. The doomers predicting civilisation’s end or the boomers insisting everything will be fine. They’re performing certainty they don’t actually feel, and I get it, certainty is comforting. Nuance doesn’t trend.

Social media algorithms reward hot takes. They surface the most extreme positions because outrage drives engagement. “AI will definitely kill us all” gets shared. “AI is definitely going to be awesome” gets shared. “It’s complicated and I’m uncertain but trying to think carefully” gets... a few likes and your bestie commenting “lovely post”.

Teenagers don’t need parents who are certain. They need parents who can tolerate uncertainty while still showing up. Who can say “I don’t know, but I’m paying attention” rather than pretending to have answers they don’t have.

I’ve been told I’m too optimistic about AI. I’ve also been told I’m not optimistic enough when I express concern about prioritising productivity over social benefit. Depending on the room, I’m either a naive cheerleader or a pearl-clutching alarmist. Sometimes in the same week *grin*.

I’ve learned from standing in the uncomfortable middle. Most people performing strong opinions about AI are doing something easier than what this moment requires. They’re picking a side, and I’m starting to think that’s the one thing we absolutely shouldn’t do.

The messy middle is where the thinking happens. Unfortunately it’s also where the algorithms struggle to follow you.

Amae and the art of staying engaged

There’s a Japanese concept called amae (甘え) often translated as comfortable dependence, but it’s richer than that. It’s the trust between parent and child that allows for both closeness and growth. The security of knowing someone cares enough to set limits while also believing in your potential.

Teenagers push against boundaries precisely because they need to know the boundaries will hold. The testing is part of the development. And the worst thing you can do, worse than being strict, worse than being lenient, is to disengage entirely.

I think we need to build something like amae with AI. Not blind trust, that would be absurd. But engaged trust. The kind that says I’m paying attention. I believe you can develop into something good. And I’m going to stay present through the difficult bits.

The alternative approaches worry me. Helicopter parenting AI… over-regulating, fear-based restriction that stifles development and pushes innovation underground. Or neglectful parenting, letting tech companies raise this child unsupervised while we scroll past the consequences.

Neither works. What works is showing up. Setting boundaries that flex with growth. Staying curious when you’re also scared.

Holding the both/and.

And maybe, just maybe, growing up a bit more ourselves in the process.

Still alive, still trying

I love that Dario and Anthropic publish essays like The Adolescence of Technology. I love that they share their successes and their worries and their concerns. That transparency, that willingness to say “we’re figuring this out too”, is what good adulting looks like. Not pretending to have all the answers. Just staying in the conversation.

People moaning about AI’s water usage or that it’s all stolen… and believe me I hugely care about the environment and I absolutely believe artists deserve compensation… but those being the loudest complaints in wider society often feel like convenient shields against harder questions. Questions like… what happens to human purpose when we can delegate meaning? What’s the ikigai risk here? And super importantly… can it help us build something better than the world we currently have?

Do you really think we’re living in the best version of life right now? Is it fair? Is it equal? Is wealth distributed in a way that allows everyone to flourish? We know the answer. And knowing the answer means we have to stay engaged with the tools that might… *might*... help us build something better. Even if those tools are also risky, even if we’re also a little scared.

I can be excited about playing with the possibilities carefully AND worried about people using this in a non-careful way. I can marvel at AI agents forming communities AND question what it means when we hand over our agency to systems that are still figuring themselves out. I can want that advanced future where AI helps sort out inequality and medicine and human flourishing AND insist that we need more focus on the “caring about humans” bit right now.

That’s emotional intelligence for this moment, not cognitive dissonance.

We need to parent two teenagers at once, the AI that’s growing up, and the humanity that also needs to.

The cake may be a lie. But we’re still alive, still trying.

Whose voices do you trust most in the AI conversation, and what is it about how they speak that earns that trust?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS – ✍️ Bullet Journal Prompts

Create a “Both/And” spread this week. Draw a line down the middle of your page. On one side, write what excites you about AI and technology. On the other, what worries you. Then look at which fears and hopes are actually connected? How does it feel to think about them both?

Reflection questions; Where am I picking a side when I could be holding complexity? What boundaries do I need to set, with technology, with others, with myself, that come from engaged trust rather than fear or neglect? And honestly... in what ways might I need to grow up a bit too?

PPS – 🤖 AI Coaching Prompt

“I want to explore my relationship with AI through the lens of ‘engaged trust’ – the idea that the best response to uncertain, powerful technology is neither blind enthusiasm nor fearful avoidance, but staying present, curious, and boundaried.

Please guide me through these stages:

First, help me locate myself. Ask me questions about: how I currently use AI (or don’t), what excites me about it, what worries me, and whether I tend toward the ‘doomer’ or ‘boomer’ end of the spectrum – or if I’m somewhere in the messy middle.

Second, help me build a ‘both/and’ inventory. For each fear I name, help me find the connected hope. For each excitement, help me find the legitimate concern hiding underneath. I want to see my contradictions clearly, not resolve them.

Third, help me examine my boundaries. Where might I be ‘helicopter parenting’ AI – over-controlling, fear-based, refusing to engage? Where might I be ‘neglectful’ – handing things over without thinking, letting convenience override intention? What would healthy, flexible boundaries look like for me specifically?

Fourth, help me identify one area where I’m performing certainty I don’t actually feel – about AI or about anything else in my life. What would it look like to hold that uncertainty honestly?

Finally, help me design one small experiment: something I could try this week that embodies engaged trust with AI. Something that’s neither reckless nor avoidant. Something that helps me grow up a little bit alongside this technology.

Be warm but challenging. I want to think, not just be comforted.”

PPPS – 🎶 Soundtrack for today “Still Alive” by Jonathan Coulton

If you haven’t played Portal, I hugely recommend this gorgeous puzzle game, dark, clever and wickedly funny, with a storyline that creeps up on you. This song plays over the end credits of the first game, sung by our beloved murderous GLaDOS herself.

Don’t let the “murderous AI” bit put you off, it’s a poetic song about resilience, about surviving what tried to destroy you, sung by the thing that tried to destroy you. It’s a TUNE and a half. Deeply, creepily beautiful if you know the game. (Check out Jonathan Coulton performing his own songs acoustically if you want the more stripped-back vibe.)

And no, I’m not suggesting this is what AI will actually do to us in real life. Well... not if you’re polite and kind to yours 😉

I used to have a comfort blanket in French.

“Je parle le français un très petit peu” I learned to pronounce it perfectly, with just the right apologetic smile. A pre-emptive surrender before I’d even tried to communicate.

I got reasonably good at reading and writing French, and could follow conversations if people spoke slowly. But speaking it aloud? That scared me, so I’d lead with my disclaimer and hope nobody expected too much. Not sure where I learnt that imperfect equals useless.

I hear the same thing often with AI. “I’m not technical.” “I don’t really understand this stuff.” “I’ve tried ChatGPT but I’m probably doing it wrong.”

The comfort blanket phrases change, but the underlying fear does not.

While pondering what we really mean by “AI Literacy” and how to tackle teaching it in service of helping my community thrive … I think we should probably stop treating it like a test we might fail, and instead treat it like a language we’re learning to speak… imperfectly, incrementally and with an accent that’s entirely our own but checking in with others to make sure they understand us! My Island home handed me a helpful metaphor.

Ta Blein ny Gaelgey ayn!

It’s the Year of the Manx Language here on the Isle of Man.

Such a special thing to embrace as our language nearly died out, English replacing it for the majority towards the end of the 19th century. My Manx nana was born in 1925 and she didn’t speak it, nor did her parents as far as I know (I was blessed to have known them as a tiny child and Nana Kate and Granddad Frank definitely spoke English to me hehe).

Blein ny Gaelgey is a twelve month celebration of our native tongue, organised by Jeebin, the Manx Language Network. Their aim? To ensure that everyone, wherever they’re from, whatever their knowledge of Manx is, knows that this year of language belongs to us all.

I love the framing and ethos of “Manx language for all.”

I’ve put my money where my mouth is, and attend weekly online Manx lessons. It’s been so long since I tried to learn a new language, decades since those French classes, and I’m finding it challenging. It greatly inspires me though that most of the others on my course aren’t even from the Island. People from elsewhere choosing to learn our language. How lovely and cool is that?!

It’s important for our heritage and cultural vibrancy to nurture our Manx revival and even learning a few words helps in that! Something is better than nothing, starting small beats overthinking.

Sound familiar?

Because that’s also how I think about AI literacy. It doesn’t matter if you’ve only typed a few prompts, if you’re an absolute beginner or if you’re confidently building workflows. This technology is bigger than any single app, in the same way the internet is bigger than any single website.

It belongs to all of us now.

Which means the decisions about how it gets used, what problems it solves, whose voices shape its development... those belong to all of us too. But you can’t have a say in conversations you can’t follow. You can’t spot when something’s gone wrong if you don’t understand a little of how it works in the first place.

On our small Island, we’re aiming for 10% GDP growth through AI by 2030. That’s not just a government target, it’s our collective future being designed right now. If our people feel unable to engage, we’re building that future without our community wisdom, with less questioning or concerns heard. The literacy gap isn’t for me about missing out on productivity, it’s about who gets to shape what comes next.

That path to understanding and using AI well looks remarkably like learning a language… messy, gradual, deeply personal.

The vocabulary of doing

Manx speakers don’t wake up one morning suddenly fluent. They practice. They stumble. They ask for words they’ve forgotten. They speak with accents shaped by their own lives and histories.

What if AI literacy works the same way?

What if “being good at AI” means something closer to conversational fluency than native-speaker perfection? The ability to communicate, to get your meaning across, to learn from the moments when you’re misunderstood… and to keep showing up.

People learn the vocabulary of AI by doing, not by memorising definitions or theory.

Someone might not be able to explain what GenAI means in technical terms, but after they’ve spent twenty minutes crafting instructions for Claude to help them write in their own voice? They understand it in their bones. They’ve used the word in a sentence. They’ve made meaning with it.

This is how languages work. You don’t learn French by studying grammar tables (although, fair play, that helps). You learn it by ordering the wrong thing in a restaurant and vowing never to forget pommes did not mean potatoes again grin

I made a custom GPT to help me with Manx translation, you can find it by searching “Manx AI“ in ChatGPT’s custom GPTs. It helps me understand sentences I see written down and figuring out how to respond. AI helping me learn a language, a language helping me understand how AI learning works. I *love* that, so so much.

Studies show that learning another language boosts brain health, strengthens memory, improves attention and encourages more flexible thinking. It makes us more adaptable and better at problem-solving.

The exact capacities we need to navigate a world where AI is reshaping things ever more rapidly.

Don’t stress about your accent

You are allowed to be imperfect at this.

You are allowed to ask questions that feel basic. You are allowed to use AI for “just” drafting emails or “just” brainstorming ideas. You are allowed to be conversational rather than fluent.

I’m at a very awkward and shy stage with Manx. I know a few people who speak it and I could practise with them. But there’s something about opening your mouth and letting imperfect sounds come out in front of someone who knows what they’re doing... it’s vulnerable in a way that typing into an AI tool isn’t.

The same fear shows up with AI. People who can technically use the tools but won’t experiment in front of colleagues. Who say “I’m probably doing this wrong” as protective armour.

Your AI accent… the particular way you prompt, the kinds of tasks you reach for it to help with, the questions you ask… will be shaped by your work, your life, your curiosities.

Community as classroom

One of the most awesome things about the Year of Manx is its emphasis on community. Jeebin brings together educators, families, organisations and learners at every level. There are weekly classes, taster courses, festivals, concerts and gatherings where people simply practice together.

Learning happens in relationships.

I see this every month at our Isle of Man AI Community of Practice. We meet to share what we’re experimenting with, to ask questions we might feel silly asking elsewhere, to troubleshoot together when something doesn’t work. No one expects anyone to have it all figured out. We’re all learning.

My friend Chris and I talk often about being the change we want to see, usually straight after feeling fired up and inspired by our fab CoP group. Maybe I need to create my own community of practice for shy awkward Manx learners… people like me who know a bit, want to know more, but aren’t quite ready to practise with the fluent or confident speakers yet. A safe space to stumble together.

The research says that language learning combats social isolation and fosters community cohesion. It gives people an enhanced sense of place and belonging. I’ve watched the same thing happen in our AI sessions, people arriving nervous and leaving connected, because they’ve found fellow travellers rather than solely learning a new skill.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by how much you don’t know, find your people. A community of practice. A colleague who’s also curious. A friend who’ll experiment alongside you. The language of AI is easier to learn when you’re not learning it alone.

What literacy really looks like

So what does AI literacy mean in practice, stripped of jargon and urgency?

I think it means developing a working vocabulary… not every word, but enough to communicate. It means being able to ask for what you need and understand most of what comes back. It means recognising when you’re being misunderstood and knowing how to rephrase.

It means having the confidence to try, even when you’re not sure you’re doing it right.

It means understanding that you’ll never be “finished” learning, because the language itself keeps evolving. New words emerge. New expressions become common. What felt cutting-edge last year becomes ordinary.

Importantly, it means knowing that fluency isn’t the goal. Connection is. Getting your meaning across. Doing something useful with this strange new capability that’s suddenly everywhere.

The ability to understand, evaluate and responsibly use artificial intelligence technologies in daily life and work. Having the critical thinking to know when NOT to use AI too.

The Manx language was once considered extinct. Ned Maddrell, the last native speaker, died in 1974. And yet here we are, fifty years later, with thousands of speakers and a whole year dedicated to celebration and growth. The language came back because people chose to learn it imperfectly, together.

The best things about learning Manx through Blein ny Gaelgey is that it isn’t a solo sport. You borrow confidence from other learners. You laugh together at your mistakes and try again because someone else is trying too.

That’s exactly how I want AI learning to feel as well. You don’t need to become an expert, and it’s impossible for anyone to understand everything anyway!

Not competitive. Not performative. Not “who knows the most”. Just humans practising a new language together.

So if you’ve been hovering at the edge, thinking you’re behind… come closer. There’s room. There’s time. There are people who’ll stumble with you. You don’t have to arrive fluent. You can arrive shaky.

Speak in half-sentences if that’s all you’ve got today. Ask the “basic” question. Try the small thing. Keep showing up. Fluency doesn’t arrive like a certificate. It grows the way confidence grows… through practice, and through being met kindly.

The moment you start speaking, the language starts becoming yours.

What’s one small “sentence” you could try this week, in AI or in life, even if it comes out a bit wobbly if getting it wrong was allowed? And who could you practise with, maybe even one fellow traveller, so you’re not doing it alone?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Try this Bullet journal spread idea “The Language Learner’s Journal”

Create a weekly spread with four quadrants;

Conversations had – What did you actually use AI for this week? No judgement, just log it.

Words that clicked – What concept or technique suddenly made sense through doing?

The awkward bit – Where did you feel shy, stuck, or like you were “doing it wrong”? (This is data, not failure.)

Next week’s experiment – One small thing to try. Not master, try.

Journal prompts to try;

• Who could I stumble alongside without needing to perform competence?

• What do people come to me for? Could AI help me do more of that?

• If this technology “belongs to all of us,” what’s my share to claim?

At the month’s end, look back. You’re not tracking progress toward perfection, you’re documenting a language coming alive.

PPS Try this AI coaching prompt with thinking mode on;

“Be my AI “language” or literacy tutor. Start by assessing my current vocabulary, ask me what AI tools I’ve tried, what worked, what didn’t land and how confident I feel on a scale of 1-10. Then uncover my fluency in other areas, what am I already good at? What do people come to me for? What energises me?

Now find the bridge, where do my existing strengths meet AI capabilities I haven’t discovered yet? Teach me one new ‘phrase’ a specific technique or approach, that feels like a natural extension of how I already think and work.

Finally, give me homework… one small way to practise this week, and one question to reflect on. End by asking what I want our next lesson to focus on.”

Let it ask you questions, answer honestly and see what emerges.

PPPS This week’s soundtrack - 🎵 “Talk” by Coldplay

There’s a robot in the video, stumbling through a world it doesn’t quite understand, searching for connection. The synth line is borrowed from Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love.” And the song asks us are you lost or incomplete?

Neither, I think. Still learning to communicate.

The song is called “Talk.” That’s all any of us are trying to do… with AI, with each other, with languages old and new. Find the words. Say them imperfectly. Keep the conversation going.

PPPPS – If you’re on the Isle of Man and want to learn alongside others, our AI Community of Practice meets monthly. Drop me a message if you’d like to know more. No fluency required. Accents welcome. To learn more about the Year of the Manx Language, visit yearofmanx.im. Gura mie eu (thank you) for reading.

I’ve been re-reading my old essays this week. Having a proper ‘please tell me I wasn’t being a complete wanker’ wobble.

When I started all this over two years ago, I think I thought I’d find a universal process that worked, and deliver you an ikigai map. Purpose solved, everyone happier.

Lovely plan.

Except now I’m scrolling through things I wrote with such conviction, and worrying... did I ever accidentally make someone feel small? Did I slip into “do it this way” when what I meant was “here’s an experiment that worked for me in my specific weird life”?

When you find something that helps you feel more alive, more aligned, that gives you an amazing reason to get up in the morning... it’s almost impossible not to want other people to try it.

I love you. I want good things for you. I want you to be happier and to wake up with purpose instead of dread.

It’s so bloody hard not to slip into giving advice when what I really want is to offer companionship. Solidarity even.

So yes, I apologise if I ever stray into preachy.

It’s because I care, and caring makes you want to fix things… wanting to fix things for people is it’s own kind of trap.

Advice is not authority.

No-one else can realistically hand you perfect answers to a life that only you lives.

Not me, even with carefully curated ikigai frameworks and essays full of desire for you to feel less stuck… but when *any* of us are overwhelmed, when tired or scared we feel like we do want someone to just tell us what to do.

The certainty trap

The wanting is real. Your nervous system is literally screaming for certainty.

Certainty feels like being held. Like relief, that you can finally exhale because someone else is driving.

Scripts can be soothing until you realise they encourage performing a life that doesn’t exactly fit.

You still have to live in your body, with your specific constellation of fears and resources and histories and capacities. You still have to wake up tomorrow in your actual life.

It’s understandable given the chaotic nature of our world right now to want an easier life, for an adultier adult to come along and sort it all out for us… but I’ve learned that the slightly more difficult sounding thing ends up being better for us in the long run most of the time.

Certainty calms you. Agency changes you.

You can borrow language.
You can borrow perspective.
You can borrow frameworks and prompts and the occasional life-saving “oh thank god it’s not just me”.

But you can’t borrow the part where you choose.

That part is yours.

Which is annoying, and also liberating, because if advice is not authority... then you’re allowed to stop treating it like it is.

When help becomes another bruise

Here’s where I lose the cynics… because I could write a hot take about predatory self-help and grift and manipulation. I could stir up righteous anger about people selling certainty to the desperate.

And yeah, some of that exists. Because, capitalism baby.

Call me hopelessly optimistic but I genuinely believe that most people offering advice are trying to be useful… or at the very least started out with that intention.

Those that have been through something tough learned something and want their hard thing to mean something for someone else. They’re trying to offer a hand up rather than exploit.

The trouble is that sincerity doesn’t automatically prevent harm.

Sometimes the harm comes from certainty, not malice.

A genuinely kind person can still take what worked for them, turn it into a universal rule… forget that their nervous system, finances, support network, health, timing and capacity are not yours and package it all up in a tone that implies “if you don’t do this, you’re choosing suffering”.

If you’ve felt small enough times, cynicism starts to look like wisdom.

A lot of people who could genuinely use support are also the people most wary of it.

Because they’ve been through the loop of > “This will change everything” (tries the thing) > “It didn’t work? Maybe you didn’t want it enough”

At some point, cynicism becomes self-protection. A way of saying I will not be disappointed again. I will not hand over my power to someone who doesn’t have to live my consequences.

So yes, there are predators. But there are also bruised people on both sides… givers and seekers, helpers and helped, all trying to make sense of pain, all trying to find a way through without getting played.

We need a better culture of help.

One where guidance strengthens agency rather than replacing it… where the goal is to help you become someone who can choose, not someone who follows.

What good help sounds like

I’ve been thinking about this a lot (and look, therapists and psychologists have been saying versions of this forever… Rogers built his entire approach on the idea that people are their own best authorities. Self-determination theory shows us that autonomy is a basic psychological need, not a luxury… so I’m not claiming to have invented anything here).

At its best, help is;

🌸 a mirror that helps you see yourself more clearly

🌸 a lantern that lights up options you didn’t notice

🌸 a handrail while you practise walking your own path

🌸 a space where your truth doesn’t get argued with

Good help sounds like;

• “Here are a few options I can see”

• “Here’s what each one might cost you”

• “Here are questions that will reveal what matters to you”

• “Try a small experiment rather than a forever choice”

• “I can’t choose for you, but I can stand with you while you choose”

Bad help sounds like;

• “This always works”

• “If it didn’t work, it’s your fault”

• “Act now or you’ll miss your chance”

• “Only I understand you”

• “Do exactly what I did”

The key difference is power, you want help that returns power to you rather than the bad kind which you know deep down takes it away from you.

How I cut down on outsourcing my life to gurus

When I catch myself researching (ahem, scrolling for answers) for too long, I try to pause and ask myself what do I actually want here? What’s really in the way of me doing something?

If it keeps happening then I write about that in my journal and think about what a tiny experiment could look like. Not “change my life” scale, or even a commitment. Just something that could lead to some evidence. Evidence is kinder than pressure and lets you learn what’s true for you without demanding you get it right first time.

I track how it feels in my body. Energy. Alignment. Resentment. Ease. What got easier and what got harder.

That’s how you become the authority again, by learning what’s true for you!

I talk about journalling a lot, but AI can also be brilliant at expanding the space of options for you. Clearly it could be even worse than the worst human guru, as it can never live the consequences. So I use it like a thinking partner, not a decision-maker. I want AI to help me see more clearly, ask better questions, hold complexity... but I don’t want it to choose for me.

Choosing (and doing) is the thing that changes you.

Then I usually take the output back to paper. Because paper is where my nervous system can catch up to my brain, where the choosing becomes embodied rather than just conceptual.

The point is I treat self help content like a library, not a parent. To take what’s useful and leave the rest without guilt or pressure.

The journey is the way

Ikigai often gets talked about like a treasure hunt in the Western world. Like there’s one perfect answer hidden somewhere and if you just search hard enough, hire the right coach, read the right book... it will appear.

I’m increasingly convinced it works differently.

Purpose is chosen, then practised into truth.

Not found.
Not bestowed.
Not confirmed by someone on a moodily lit podcast.

Chosen.

Then proved through small acts repeated until they feel like you.

And if that sounds scary... it’s because it is at times, but it’s also the point.

When we stop treating advice as authority, we can find in it the real help we need along the way… support, not orders. Companionship while we choose and a mirror that helps us see our own answers.

For the part of you, me and all of us, that wants someone to just tell us what to do;

- It’s ok to want guidance.
- You’re allowed to need reassurance.
- It’s sensible to watch someone else go first and tell you what happens.

And you’re also allowed to be the chooser.

Even if you choose imperfectly, slowly or in a way that makes no sense to people who aren’t living inside your life.

Even if you have to keep choosing the same thing over and over because you keep forgetting and falling back into old patterns (just me? probably not just me).

Advice is not authority.

But you are.

And I’m here seeking alongside you. Sharing ideas and experiments, not certainty. Offering companionship in the choosing.

The choosing is where the living happens.

What decision are you currently trying to outsource to “more research”? I’d genuinely love to hear in the comments, or just click the heart if you’re feeling shy. Connection matters so very much.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS – ✍️ Bullet journal prompts and spread ideas

The Wish / Obstacle / Choice page

When I’m overwhelmed by advice, this is what I try in my journal:

• Wish: What do I actually want? (not what I should want)

• Obstacle: What’s genuinely in the way? (be honest, be specific, no performing)

• Choice: What’s the smallest action that would generate evidence?

• Evidence: What will I track for 14 days?

Tracking spread: Reality, not performance, track just one or two of these;

• Energy (1–5)

• Sense of alignment (1–5)

• Resentment (1–5)

• Ease (1–5)

• One sentence: “Today I learned...”

At the end, ask: What did reality teach me?

The Advice Audit

• “What advice have I collected but not practised?”

• “What am I hoping it will save me from?”

• “What would ‘good enough’ look like for the next two weeks?”

The Authority Return Ritual

• “What do I already know but keep ignoring?”

• “What would I choose if nobody got an opinion?”

• “What would future me thank me for trying?”

PPS – 🤖 AI prompt to try

“Here’s my situation: [describe it]. Give me 5 options. For each option, list: what it would actually require from me, what I’d be giving up, what the trade-offs are, and one small 14-day experiment to test whether this option is right for me. End with questions that help me decide based on my values, not my fear.”

PPPS – 🎶 Song choice

Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) — Baz Luhrmann

“Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it”... advice given with love and humour and the acknowledgment that you’ll ignore most of it anyway *grin*

I’ve apologised for being sick. For needing the loo during meetings. For having a question. For going to a medical appointment. For not replying to an email immediately. For declining an invitation without a “good enough” reason. For having feelings about things.

GenX women excel at apologies. Pre-emptive contrition for the basic crime of being a human existing in systems that weren’t designed with us in mind.

We’re brilliant at it. We can smile whilst grinding our teeth. We can “circle back” when we mean “absolutely not.” We can be “happy to help” when we’re drowning. We’ve turned the performance of fine into an art form.

Showing up fully human shouldn’t have to be brave… what if it was baseline?

The training we didn’t sign up for

GenX women didn’t grow up learning the language of purpose… we got fluent in the language of coping mind… the curriculum was clear, even if nobody wrote it down;

Don’t be difficult. (Translation: Don’t have needs that inconvenience others)

Don’t take up space. (Translation: Make yourself smaller than your abilities)

Be grateful. (Translation: Whatever you have is more than you deserve)

Keep going. (Translation: Your resilience and pain threshold is your value)

Be the reliable one. (Translation: Your worth is measured in what you give, not what you are)

I learned these lessons watching mothers juggle work and home management. I learned them in school corridors where being clever meant being quiet about it. I learned them in GP surgeries where my pain was dismissed as anxiety. I learned them in workplaces where taking a lunch break was somehow... soft. I learned them every time I was told I was “lucky” to have a voice, a seat, an opportunity… ignoring the tiny voice in my head asking ‘shouldn’t it have been mine by right?’

And to be fair, that training got many of us through. It got us jobs, families, reputations. It got us labelled “strong” and “capable” and “the person we can count on.”

But survival is a terrible long-term strategy for living a joyful life.

By becoming excellent at endurance, you forget what it feels like to not be enduring. You start to think that grinding through is the same as thriving. That powering through is the same as purpose. That being needed is the same as being seen.

It’s not.

The two paths that both feel wrong

When you start to wake up to this, there seem to be two main options being shouted at us;

Option 1: Hustle Culture - “If I just optimise myself hard enough, I’ll earn peace”

This is the one that says you need better morning routines, more productivity hacks, smarter time management, stronger boundaries (but make them empowering, obviously). It promises that if you just work on yourself enough, you’ll finally be worthy.

Except... we’ve been working on ourselves for decades. We’ve read the books, done the courses, implemented the systems. And we’re exhausted. Because optimising yourself to fit broken systems is still just... fitting broken systems.

Option 2: Opt-Out Narratives - “If you don’t like it leave/if I leave, I’ll be free.”

This is the one that says burn it all down, quit your job, move, start your own business, reject everything, live off-grid. It promises that if you just extract yourself from the machinery, you’ll finally breathe.

Except... most of us can’t actually do that. We have mortgages, dependents, responsibilities, communities we care about. And honestly? Some of us still believe systems can be better. We don’t want to abandon them, we want to fix them.

There’s a third way and it starts with a simple premise, rewrite.

Not just personally. Relationally, organisationally, culturally, systemically.

What if instead of optimising ourselves to survive hostile systems or leaving those systems entirely, we started building systems where survival isn’t the entry requirement? Where baseline humanity is the starting point, not the brave exception?

What does a human baseline look like?

I’ve been journaling about this for a while, trying to articulate what “baseline human” means in practice.

Having needs without apologising. Not “I’m so sorry but I need to reschedule because my child is sick” but “I need to reschedule.”

Having boundaries without a TED talk. Not a three-paragraph email explaining why you can’t work this weekend, complete with justifications and promises to make up for it. Merely “I’m not available this weekend.”

Having emotions without being labelled ‘too much’. Not performing calm whilst your insides are screaming. Not prefacing every strong feeling with “I might be being silly but...” Just... having feelings, like humans do.

Existing in a body honestly. Not pretending you don’t menstruate, or need glasses, or have a chronic condition, or get migraines, or need to eat at regular intervals, or need to get up and move more often, or require adjustments. Simply having a body.

When I write it out like that, it seems almost insultingly obvious.

And yet how many of us are doing any of this consistently? How many of us can say we’re showing up as full humans rather than carefully curated, needs-minimised, feelings-compressed versions of ourselves?

(Quick note: I’ve just joined a lovely new team at work who are genuinely supportive humans, so this isn’t about any one specific workplace or relationship. It’s about the water we’re all swimming in. The systems that shape us before we even notice they’re doing it.)

Why this matters more for some than others

Most of our systems aren’t neutral, they’re male by default.

Caroline Criado Perez nails it in Invisible Women “The default human being is a man.” From how cities are designed to how medical research is conducted to how workplace norms were written, the baseline assumption is male bodies, male life patterns, male needs.

Which means when systems claim to be “neutral” or “universal,” what they actually mean is “designed for men and everyone else can adapt or apologise for not fitting.”

Women spend enormous energy pretending to fit defaults that were never designed for us. Pretending we don’t need more frequent toilet breaks…Pretending temperature settings and meeting schedules and career progression timelines work for our bodies and lives.

Add any other marginalised identity on top of being a woman… being disabled, being neurodivergent, being a person of colour, being working class, being queer… and the energy cost can multiply exponentially.

This is why “just be yourself” is such hollow advice. The systems weren’t built for your self. They were built for a very specific self, and you’re not it.

So when I talk about making baseline human actually baseline? I’m not talking about everyone needing to work harder at being authentic. I’m talking about redesigning systems so that a wider range of humans can exist in them without performance, pretence or apology.

Small rewrites, system shifts

So how do we actually do this? How do we move from noticing we’re pretending to showing up human?

I’m a systems thinker, so I needed a framework to make this actionable. Something simple to remember but robust enough to help;

Truth → What’s actually happening (not what you’re pretending is fine)

Need → What a human requires (not what you think you’re allowed to require)

Rewrite → The smallest change that honours both

For example: Truth - I’m reading emails at 10pm and resenting it. Need - I need evenings work-free so I can rest. Rewrite - I turn off notifications after leaving the office. Not “I’ll try to check less” I just turn them off.

Small. Specific. Doable. Not “become a completely different person” who’s magically confident and boundaried but incrementally rewriting the scripts you’re running.

I also recommend a Baseline Audit, four questions you answer in your journal to surface where you’re performing and what needs to change. Then you can use AI as a pattern spotter, because you’re too close to see them clearly. AI can also help translate patterns into words you can use, how to set a boundary without apologising or being aggressive. (Questions and AI prompts in the PS sections below.)

The practice isn’t complicated… journal the truth, let AI show you the patterns, pick a tiny experiment to try this week. Notice what happens. Keep a log. Your bullet journal holds the truth. AI helps you see it. You decide what to do about it. Purpose + Paper + Pixels working together.

The world doesn’t end when you show up as human. Often people respect you more. Often they’re relieved because now they have permission to be human too.

Rewriting our systems

You can’t find your purpose whilst pretending to be someone else, or contorting to fit into systems that don’t serve humanity well.

Your ikigai doesn’t live in a version of you that’s optimised all the humanity out of herself. It lives in the actual you. The one with needs and boundaries and feelings and a body that does body things.

Growing our sense of meaning requires tools that help us stop performing;

Journal for truth - paper doesn’t judge, and handwriting slows you down enough to feel what you’re thinking

AI for translation - a mirror to help you see patterns

Regular practice for rewrites - because one conversation with yourself won’t undo decades of conditioning

This is the work. Not hustling harder or opting out. Rewriting. One baseline audit, one boundary script, one micro-experiment at a time.

When enough of us do this, we don’t just change our own lives. We change what’s normal and expected. We change what’s baseline.

We build systems where showing up fully human isn’t brave. It’s just... what we do.

GenX women were trained to survive systems not built for us and now we’re rewriting them.

We seek ikigai not as luxury. As birthright.

I’d love to hear your thoughts beautiful souls, what costs you the most energy to pretend? Drop a comment or just sit with the question yourself. Sometimes naming it is the first step to stopping it, knowing we’re not alone makes it easier.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS: Here’s your Baseline Audit journal prompts to try;

• What costs me energy to pretend?

• Where am I performing apology or gratitude instead of expressing needs?

• What do I keep ‘powering through’ that should be redesigned?

• What would ‘fully human’ look like here?

Take a photo. Have a conversation with AI about what you notice and see what patterns emerge.

PPS: If you want to use AI to help here are some prompt ideas (copy and paste, adjust to your situation);

Pattern Finder: Here are my journal notes from a Baseline Audit. Identify the repeating pressures, the hidden assumptions I’m living under and the need underneath them. Then summarise in 5 bullet points in plain English.

Boundary Script: Write 5 versions of a message that sets this boundary: [insert your specific situation]. Constraints: kind, direct, no over-explaining, British English and it must sound human.

Micro-Experiment Designer: Suggest 5 tiny experiments I can run this week to move from ‘surviving’ to ‘baseline human, feeling able to bring my whole self’. Keep each experiment under 15 minutes and applicable to my life context: [describe your situation].

PPPS: The song that’s been playing on repeat whilst I write this is Alanis Morissette’s Hand In My Pocket. “I’m brave but I’m chickenshit, I’m sick but I’m pretty baby”, she captures the whole messy contradiction of being human. Of containing multitudes. Of not having to choose between strong and vulnerable, capable and needing support. We can be both. We ARE both. And that’s baseline human.

My new 2026 bullet journal has a blank space where my word of the year should be.

Last year I chose “easy”, thinking if I declared it the universe would comply. It did not. Life delivered a whole heap of things that were decidedly not easy. Which left me wondering if I’d accidentally manifested the opposite, or if I hadn’t taken the process seriously enough.

So this year I’m approaching it differently. Taking my time. Listening to other voices. Paying attention to feelings rather than just word meanings.

I love Florence Given talking about audacity and giving permission to be too much, to piss off insecure people by simply existing unapologetically. I felt a visceral recognition but something about claiming “audacity” as my word felt incomplete, like I’d be performing boldness rather than living it.

I do want that feeling of pushing through discomfort to move towards audacity though. Not avoiding the discomfort or pretending it’s not there but recognising it as directional, as information about where growth lives.

I want to take up space unapologetically and spread positivity whilst doing so. Given that I fully agree with Rutger Bregman that we need a moral revolution, as a minimum I need to always push through fear to SPEAK UP. I want to acknowledge that it’s bloody uncomfortable sometimes. That my body still wants to do the nervous laugh and disappear. That courage isn’t the absence of that feeling, it’s what you do alongside it.

“Audacity” alone felt like it skipped over all of that. Like I was supposed to arrive fully formed, confident and bold, without acknowledging the reality of me and my wobbles.

Then I read a gorgeous post by Dr Miki from Japan on kakizome, the Japanese ritual of writing your first calligraphy of the year, words that represent your aspirations. When I shared what I was circling around, pushing through discomfort to take up more space unapologetically, speaking up whilst spreading positivity, she said to me “I think it’s a wonderful and powerful theme! For that feeling, I would recommend 勇気凛然. It describes standing with courage and a calm, dignified strength. It’s close to the idea of having the courage to speak up and carrying yourself with a strong, grounded presence.”

Google Gemini expanded on this for me;

勇気凛然 (yūki rinzen) is a Japanese four-character idiom (yojijukugo) that describes a specific type of attitude. It generally translates to “overflowing with courage and dignity” or “dauntless and awe-inspiring.”

• 勇気 (Yūki): This is the word for courage or bravery.

• 凛然 (Rinzen): This describes an atmosphere that is awe-inspiring, commanding, or dignified. The character Rin (凛) implies a sharpness or coldness (like a bracing cold wind) that creates a sense of tension and respect.

When you put them together, it doesn’t just mean someone is not afraid. It means they face adversity with a commanding presence.

Not perfect, but definitely something spoke to me in ‘dauntless’ and ‘commanding’... in coupling courage with dignity… and it made me reflect on the different dimensions of definition and why some words feel so close to right… that perhaps we ask too much of single words alone, certainly English ones.

So yes, I’m visualising and feeling a sense of pushing through a discomfort barrier, of not shrinking back when something matters, of taking up space without apologising for existing. I’ve spent too much of my life unconsciously adhering to societal rules that don’t really serve me.

When something feels uncomfortable in a clean way, not danger, but growth, that’s information about where I need to go.

So when I sit with “audacity,” it does feel uncomfortable. But is it the right kind of uncomfortable?

Audacity alone feels like it could tip into performance. Like I’d be proving something. Taking up space to show I can, rather than because there’s something there worth expressing. It has an edge of reaction to it, a response to all the times I’ve been told to be quieter, smaller, less.

勇気凛然 holds something else. It has the pushing-through-discomfort piece I need. The not-shrinking and the speaking-up piece. But it also has groundedness. Composure. A kind of strength that doesn’t need to shout.

I’m learning to trust the feeling underneath the word. To let language follow sensation, not force sensation into language.

Word-of-the-year practices can leave us choosing words that fracture us instead of ones that integrate us if we aren’t careful, this new to me Japanese ritual gave a sense of coherence I didn’t know I was looking for.

Your word or phrase could help you be more coherent

We choose aspirational words like confident, bold, authentic, present… and then we try to perform them, but perhaps we only needed to be more “confident” in a work context and striving to make changes in your home life exhausts you. Different versions of ourselves trying to live up to a slightly different interpretation of the same word.

The theme didn’t integrate us, it fractured us further.

Treating it like a resolution, something to become… rather than what it could be, a return to coherence.

Reintegration might be the most important thing I’ve learned about ikigai.

You don’t need to wear different masks. Work-you doesn’t have to be substantially different from home-you or friend-you or creative-you. You’re not code-switching your personality based on context, not putting on ill-fitting clothes depending on which room you’re entering.

When survival needs are met, becoming the youest you possible becomes the top priority. The energy you waste maintaining multiple versions of yourself is energy you could be using to actually live.

To feel joy. To help others. To be a positive force in this world.

If you follow this process then it should help with that integration, not hinder it.

Choose by feeling and test before you commit

When you’re considering words, don’t think about how impressive it sounds. Think about how your body responds to the idea of it. Does it feel like permission? Like coming home?

There’s this particular sensation when something is right. Not excitement exactly, though there might be some of that. It’s more like recognition. Oh yes, that.

Look out for discomfort that feels directional. The good kind of scary, that’s how you know it’s yours and not just borrowed confidence.

The words that almost fit for me sparked recognition but also performance anxiety. They made me think about how I’d look embodying them, which could be a fragmentation trap.

The words that I am trying on for size feel different. When I imagine practising them, I can also feel the discomfort of the growth asked of me… but looking for those that underneath discomfort have something solid. Something that doesn’t require an audience to validate it.

That’s the feeling to follow.

Once you have words that feel right, run them through these filters;

The Integration Test: Does this word ask me to become someone new, or does it invite me to stop fragmenting who I already am?

If your word means different things depending on your audience, it’s fractured. If it could show up the same way in the supermarket, in a difficult meeting, putting your child to bed, writing an essay, having a hard conversation, then you might be onto something.

Your word should feel uncomfortable in a directional way. If your word makes you anxious about performance, that’s fragmentation. If it makes you nervous because it matters and you’ll need to be brave, that’s integration. Learn to tell the difference.

The Purpose Triangle: Is this actually my word?

I wrote about this framework recently and three questions:

• AGENCY - What can I actually influence? If your word requires other people to change first, it’s not yours.

• ACCEPTANCE - What can I not change? If your word fights your actual reality… your energy, personality, circumstances… you’re choosing from where you wish you were, not where you are.

• ALIGNMENT - What do I choose because it’s me? Borrowed words feel like relief when you’re done. Chosen words feel like energy that returns. After you practise this quality, do you feel more like yourself, or less?

If your word passes both tests, you’re probably onto something.

How to live it, not just declare it

The Japanese kakizome practice offers wisdom. You may write it once, at the beginning of the year, with intention. Deliberate. Grounded. Focused. But then that calligraphy should travel with you through the year, which is where regular reflective practice in a bullet journal can help *grin*

1. Leave space for not-knowing

The blank page in my journal? That’s the most honest thing I could do right now. Your word might emerge in February after you’ve lived into the year a bit. Maybe March. Not-yet-knowing is honest and braver than forcing it.

2. Choose for integration, not aspiration

Does this word ask me to perform or to cohere? Split me or unify me? Can I practise this the same way in every role I have?

3. Install it as infrastructure, not inspiration

A word fails when it’s just a vibe. It needs to become your operating system, defaults that protect meaning when you’re busy.

Create Integration Defaults. Simple if-then statements: If I feel the urge to do a nervous “hehe” and disappear, then I notice it, breathe, and say the true thing kindly instead.

4. Track fragmentation, not progress

Don’t track whether you’re “being more X.” Track where you catch yourself code-switching, performing different versions of yourself. Those moments are data about where integration is still needed.

5. Course-correct toward coherence

If your word starts feeling like costume, return to the integration question. Not “am I doing this enough?” but “am I doing this the same way everywhere?”

The blank space is actually fine

I still don’t have my final word.

I’m circling 勇気凛然, drawn to its strength and the serendipity of how it came to me. I’m playing with simpler English translations. I’m sitting with the feeling underneath all the words.

I know I’m looking for something that brings me back to myself rather than splitting me further apart. Something with both roots (infrastructure) and direction (purpose).

And maybe that’s what your theme of the year should be too, beautiful soul.

Not another aspirational mask to wear. Not another version of yourself to perform.

But a return to coherence. A practice of integration and calm, dignified strength that doesn’t change based on who’s watching.

After decades of fragmenting ourselves to fit different contexts, perhaps the most radical thing we could do in 2026 is just... be the same person everywhere. Become the YOUEST you, you can be.

Not perfect or without wobbles.

But coherent, honest and integrated.

I’d so love to hear your thoughts, what’s your theme or word of the year for 2026? Or if you’re still circling like me, what are the contenders?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - ✍️ Bullet Journal Spread: The Integration Audit

If you want to test whether a word-of-the-year practice would actually help you, try this:

Create a page titled “Where I Fragment” and draw a simple grid of your main life contexts (work, home, creative practice, friendships, public/social, etc).

Then honestly reflect;

• Where do I perform confidence vs actually feel it?

• Where do I code-switch my opinions, energy or personality?

• Where am I still wearing masks even with people I trust?

• What would it feel like to show up the same way everywhere?

Don’t judge what emerges. Just notice. The gaps between your different selves are where a good word-of-the-year could actually help.

PPS - 🤖 AI Exercise: Is This Actually Your Word?

If you have words in mind, test them with Claude or ChatGPT;

“I’m testing potential words for my year ahead. I need you to help me figure out if these are truly integrating words or if I’m accidentally choosing something that will fragment me.

The words I’m considering are: [list 2-5 words]

Here’s my context;

• These are the main areas of my life where I sometimes show up differently: [work, home, creative practice, relationships etc & describe specific ways you fragment]

• Here’s what I genuinely value: [core values]

• Here’s what I’m actually good at that helps others: [your strengths]

For each word, I need you to:

1. Play devil’s advocate - where might this word ask me to perform rather than integrate? Where could it fracture me?

2. Test it against reality - does this work with who I am or does it require me to be someone I’m not? Where would this quality land in the real world? What would it actually do beyond making me feel differently about myself?

3. Make it practical - what’s one simple if-then default that would help me install this as infrastructure?

After each analysis, tell me honestly: does this word integrate or fragment me?”

PPPS - 🎶 Soundtrack for Finding Your Word

“This Year’s Love” by David Gray, that opening line “This year’s love had better last, heaven knows it’s high time” captures exactly what we’re after here. Tired of words that don’t stick, resolutions that fade by February, themes that fragment rather than integrate. This time, we want something that actually lasts. And when he sings “when you hold me like you do, it feels so right” that’s the recognition feeling. When your word fits, when it asks you to cohere rather than perform, when it feels like coming home instead of trying on someone else’s costume. That’s how you know you’ve got it.

I’m a huge bullet journal geek, so this is one of my absolute favourite times of the year *SO excited* for new journal setup time in betwixtmas!

I’ve peeled off the plastic from my shiny new turquoise Leuchtturm Bullet Journal, attached the pen loop and picked out the Tombow I feel matches the cover just right (452 if you were wondering).

Now comes the ritual I’ve performed for many years… writing my name on the first page, setting up the future log, indexing pages that will hold half a year I haven’t lived yet.

I’m writing my future, one dot grid page at a time.

But first, I flip backwards. Through 2025 and 2024 in particular, watching myself change on paper. There’s a page called “Labels n Loves” with many identities scribbled in clouds; wife, mother, daughter, feminist, ikigai seeker, AI enthusiast, bullet journaler. Some I’d forgotten I’d claimed. Some I should perhaps abandon. Pages like that sat there, patiently waiting as a backdrop to the conversations I have with Claude about ensuring AI doesn’t hollow out human purpose itself.

It occurs to me that AI has the potential for perfect recall but no actual memory, or any notion of a felt sense of our lives.

It can retrieve everything yet remembers nothing.

AI = You must KNOW what you’re looking for to retrieve it

Journal = You DISCOVER what you needed by accidentally stumbling on it

This is the difference between search and serendipity… between “I need to find that thing about...” and “Oh! I’d completely forgotten I was thinking about this!”

A journal lets you flip and find things you didn’t know you’d lost. AI requires you to already remember enough to search for it. That’s the real paradox.

How do we capture and integrate “You can only find what you remember to look for” vs “You find what you forgot you needed”?

The archaeology of becoming

Yesterday, I asked Claude for help thinking through my 2026 ikigai spread. I uploaded pictures of two previous versions and shared my thinking and my questions. Should I evolve it? How? What would make it world-class? We brainstormed five different directions. Analysed them against a rubric and chose a new direction that felt right together.

That entire conversation will vanish from Claude’s awareness the moment the chat window closes. Oh, the data exists and Anthropic’s servers hold the transcript. But my Claude won’t really remember our thinking. It won’t recall the moment we realised combining Option 2’s framework with Option 4’s radical transparency might be genuinely new territory.

I’ll remember it when I look at my H1 2026 page 14 and 15 spread forever.

I can also flip to page 18 of my H2 2024 journal and see my values spread. Pink background, Van Gogh almond blossom wash tape. “In order for it to be EASY” written across the top in my handwriting. Kindness. Optimism. Calm. LOVE in capitals.

A small note added at a later point at the bottom… “learn how to let go and protect your energy for those who matter.” I wrote when I was struggling with life being decidedly NOT easy earlier this year. Today though I smile at past-me leaving gorgeous messages for future-me, they wait there, coffee-stained and patient, until a day I need reminding that protecting my energy isn’t selfish.

That’s real memory, heartfelt and learned in our bones. That’s a thing AI can’t easily do.

Which makes me wonder what else we’re losing in the shift from pages to prompts.

What gets lost in perfect retrieval

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I do use Claude for lots of things now. Honing my philosophical thinking. Testing new approaches. Drafting essay structures and ideas. Strategic thinking. Debugging ideas. Every single one of these interactions adds to a vast corpus that could theoretically be searched, indexed, retrieved. But retrieval isn’t memory.

Last week I spent twenty minutes searching my Claude chats for ‘that thing about agency and AI’ before giving up, because I couldn’t remember if I’d called it autonomy, or control, or something else entirely. Meanwhile, I found it in three seconds flipping through my journal because I’d drawn a little doodly diagram in my notes for that day.

Memory is the archaeology. The layers. The you-shaped sediment that builds up over years of returning to the same questions in slightly different ways.

When I draw my ikigai diagrams for the umpteenth time, and I will draw them again in this turquoise journal, probably slightly differently than the last two times, I’m not necessarily optimising. I’m not iterating towards some perfect final version. I’m attending. Like you return to visit a park or garden, not a summit you conquer once.

The repetition is the point.

AI doesn’t have repetition in this way. Every chat is new, even when it’s the same question you asked six months ago. There’s no easy “oh, we’re back here again” recognition unless you actively try to build for that within one chat thread, which then risks forgetting the earlier parts the longer you go on. No pattern that emerges from circling the same territory for years. No coffee stain that reminds you how certain problems follow you around.

I can ask Claude the same question I asked in March and get a completely different answer, uninfluenced by the shape my thinking had taken back then or the things that have happened since. Sometimes that’s brilliant, beginner’s mind on demand. But sometimes I lose the thread of my own becoming.

Write the future, record the present, learn from the past

My desk has a stack of bullet journals strewn across it at present, open to various pages as I contemplate what I want to do differently next year. Red, orange, yellow, green, teal, burgundy and more going back to 2017. Each one a different chunk of my life. Some thick with washi tape and pages stuck in. Some sparse, abandoned during difficult periods. All of them holding the messy, non-linear story of who I’ve been.

I can see when “AI” first appeared in my labels cloud. I can trace when “kindness” moved from a nice-to-have value to a core principle. I can find where I first drew that hatarakigai diagram that’s become my process for testing whether work is worth doing.

This is a control group. The before, a record of what human intention looked like pre-AGI.

I’m maintaining it deliberately, building evidence while others seem quick to hand over so much to AI. I know what thought feels like when it flows through a hand holding a pen, reflection can’t be delegated. I don’t want a planning system to optimise me without consent.

So here’s one of the things I’m doing differently with 2026.

I’m keeping an ikigai spread with the definitions, Ken Mogi’s five pillars, my BLOOM mnemonic that grounds me. But I’m adding something new. A section on ikigai risk. What happens when technology threatens our reason for being. Loss of agency when AI does instead of amplifies. Voice replacement when systems speak for us. Purpose displacement when work that gave meaning becomes obsolete.

I’m documenting the threat in the same place I document the meaning.

Because here’s what I’ve realised through conversations with Claude, through flipping backwards through years of ink… every time I draw something by hand, I’m making choices AI can’t make for me, intentions more than optimisations.

And intention leaves traces. Coffee stains. Crossed-out goals. Pages you forgot about until you flip past them and remember… oh yes, I was thinking about that. I was becoming something there.

AI can store some of the pre thinking. But it can’t work on the process for you, and it definitely can’t hold it. Can’t return to it with the weight of accumulated visits. Or feel the difference between information retrieved and wisdom revisited.

The thing you feel

Mieko Kamiya, the mother of ikigai psychology, said something I copied into my 2025 journal: “The most genuine aspect about ikigai is that it involves your feelings. Ikigai is something you feel.”

You feel it. Not retrieve it. Not query it. Not process it.

And feelings need somewhere to land. Somewhere that holds them across time. Somewhere you can flip backwards through and see your own patterns emerging, your own changes happening, your own voice getting clearer or cloudier or stronger or more scared.

I use AI to expand my thinking. To brainstorm directions I wouldn’t have found alone and to refine my ideas.

But then I often take what we’ve created together and I write it out by hand. In 2026 that will happen in this turquoise journal, on the next blank page, with the Tombow 452. Something happens in that transfer. The ideas change shape. Get warmer. More mine. The skeleton Claude helped me build gets wrapped in muscle and breath.

That’s the practice and a thing I’m protecting.

Usage is curriculum

I’ve written before about how every AI interaction teaches these systems what humans value. Usage is curriculum. Every prompt says this is what matters to us. This is what we’ll delegate. This is what we consider not worth our attention.

So what am I teaching when I maintain this stack of journals? When I draw the same ikigai diagram three times instead of asking AI to generate a perfect version once? When I choose the turquoise pen that matches the turquoise cover even though any pen would do?

I’m teaching that intention matters. That repetition isn’t failure. That the archaeology of your becoming is more valuable than the efficiency of your arrival.

I’m teaching myself, mostly. But maybe I’m also teaching future-me what past-me valued. And when I flip backwards through these pages in 2030, when AI can probably write better than I can, when automation has hollowed out some of the work that currently gives my life meaning, I’ll have the evidence.

I’ll be able to see what thinking felt like. This is what intention looked like. This is what I chose to attend to when I could have delegated it.

The pages will remember, even if I don’t.

I’d love to hear your thoughts beautiful souls… Have you ever searched your AI chat history looking for something you knew you’d discussed... and given up because you couldn’t remember the exact words to find it? What’s something you stumbled on flipping through old notes that you’d completely forgotten but absolutely needed?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS ✍️ Your journal archaeology practice

If this essay sparked something, here’s a mini-process to try;

Step 1: The Backward Flip (5 minutes)
Look through anything you’ve written or created in the past year; notes app, old journals, voice memos, photos. Find one thing that surprises you, something you’d forgotten you cared about or noticed.

Step 2: The Pattern Hunt (10 minutes)
Ask yourself: Have I returned to this theme before? Has this question followed me? Write down where else you’ve seen it show up.

Step 3: The 2026 Container (15 minutes)
Design a simple structure to hold this pattern as you continue exploring it, could be;

• A single page in a journal where you return monthly

• A voice note series with the same opening question

• A photo collection of moments when the theme appears

• A document where you paste quotes/ideas as you find them

The structure doesn’t need to be elaborate. It needs to be yours, something you’ll recognise when you flip backwards a year from now.

Step 4: The First Entry
Make the first mark. Write the first sentence. Take the first photo. Date it. This is your stake in the ground “I was here. I was noticing. This mattered.”

PPS 🤖 An AI prompt to try

Most of us use AI to help us move forward, brainstorm, draft, create… try this instead;

“I’m going to share [3-5 things I’ve created/written/worked on over the past year]. Please analyse them for patterns I might not see in my own thinking. What themes keep appearing? What questions am I circling? What’s the through-line I’m following but haven’t named yet? Don’t tell me what to do next, tell me what I’ve already been doing that I haven’t noticed.”

Then paste in; old emails you’re proud of, social media posts that got strong reactions, journal entries, project outlines… anything that felt important when you made it.

What AI gives you back is a mirror. The archaeology of your own attention, reflected back so you can see the shape you’ve been making all along.

PPPS 🎶 Soundtrack for this moment

Hazy Shade of Winter, specifically The Bangles version (don’t come at me, I’m a huge S&G fan, but this is an AWESOME cover!) …. Bells in honour of Christmas time, and of course those lines about time and “see what’s become of me” land differently when you’re holding years of your own handwriting. The urgency in it. The recognition that we’re always becoming something, whether we’re paying attention or not. Better to notice whilst there is still time to write new stories!

“Go on, just one to celebrate!”

It’s December, again. Two years since I last had an alcoholic drink. One year since I wrote about how never is easier than sometimes. And here I am, at another Christmas party, watching someone with a tray of shots assume we will all partake because celebration apparently requires alcohol.

I smile. I decline. I add a little hehe to soften the edges of my choice because sobriety has a tendency to make others uncomfortable.

As I enter year three, this topic is definitely not about me anymore.

Year one was me and my discovery. The clarity. The sleep. The mornings that felt like gifts. The money saved. The more balanced emotional state (even with the chaos you get with being a woman of a certain age *ahem*). The genuine wellbeing that crept into every corner of my life. And yes, the mental sharpness I need for the impact I want to have on helping others think about their lives and AI’s impact on them.

Year two has been about everyone else’s relationship with my relationship with alcohol.

The architecture problem

We’ve built SO many of our social structures around a substance I’ve realised doesn’t serve me. Something undeniably bad for us. And I do mean around. We don’t go out to socialise and perhaps have a drink or two. We go out to drink, and as a side effect we hope to spend relaxed time with people we care about. The substance comes first. The connection may come later.

Someone buys a round without asking. You’re included by default because excluding you would require acknowledging you’re different, and acknowledging you’re different might prompt questions nobody wants to examine on a Friday night. So the glass appears. You decline. You stick out. Every. Single. Round.

“Are you sure? Not even one?”

Hehe. Yes, I’m sure.

I can have a brilliant time without alcohol. I do, regularly. The absence of booze hasn’t diminished my capacity for joy or silliness or deep conversation. But I stick out anyway, because the rounds keep coming and each one asks me to perform my difference again. To reassure everyone that I’m still fun, still relaxed, still one of you...

It’s tiresome in a way hangovers never were.

No matter how carefully you talk about this (and it’s rare that I do) you sound like a grinch. I’m really not trying to be. I’m genuinely happy for people who enjoy drinking and make the health trade offs with open eyes. I’m just... happier for me when I get to drive home clear-headed and comfy in my car instead of having to battle the last bus numpties. When I wake up Saturday morning without fuzzy dread.

Smug face.

Followed immediately by another hehe to soften it, because I’ve learnt that feeling really good makes other people uncomfortable when the choice that got you there holds up a mirror they’re not ready to look into.

The fantasy audit

Very occasionally I think it might be nice to have a Baileys or three whilst wrapping Christmas presents. Or a really lovely bottle of red or two on a date night with Andrew. These thoughts arrive like old friends, familiar and appealing.

Then I pause. I journal. I try to untangle whether I actually want these things or whether I’m just performing what wanting is supposed to look like. Baileys and Christmas wrapping, that’s a magazine spread, isn’t it? Date night wine, romance by cultural prescription.

The longer I go without drinking, the clearer I can see how much of what we think we want is simply what we’ve been told wanting looks like.

When I strip away the societal weirdness and ask myself if it’s worth hurting my body for a brief buzz?

719 days in, and the answer keeps being no so far.

My bullet journal practice earns its keep here… creating space to interrogate these automated thoughts, to trace the difference between genuine desire and cultural programming. The daily practice of writing thoughts or feelings out, seeing it on paper, asking “but is this true?” without the noise of everyone else’s expectations.

Why I hedge

People ask if I’m done forever. If I’ll never drink again.

Last year when I was unsure, I asked myself “when will I be most tempted to drink after this year is up? What needs would I be trying to meet in those moments?”

Hand on heart, there hasn’t been a single moment I’ve been tempted this year. Not one.

I still don’t say never again. I hedge. I say “for now” or “we’ll see” or “I’m not making pronouncements about forever”.

I’ve been journalling about why I do this. I have 719 days of evidence that this choice makes me feel brilliant. Zero moments of temptation. Tangible, measurable, daily proof. Health. Mental clarity. Good sleep. Money saved. Genuine wellbeing radiating into every corner of my life.

So why don’t I claim it fully?

Because I’ve learnt that certainty about not drinking reads as judgement of those who do. The hedge is social lubrication in a world structured around actual lubrication. It’s the softener I add so my clarity doesn’t disrupt your evening. It’s kindness, maybe. Or self-protection. Probably both.

When I don’t hedge… when I say brightly that I feel amazing, that I’ve never slept better or felt more grounded and emotionally sorted… I can see discomfort ripple across faces. Guilt, maybe. Or worry they don’t let themselves admit. Either way, it triggers something. So I’ve learnt to make myself smaller about it. To laugh it off. To add the hehe.

To keep offering wine to other people even though I’ve not touched it in two years, because that cultural programming runs deep enough that I too still perform it on autopilot.

The clarity question

Purpose requires clear thinking.

Not just “not drunk” clear. Actually clear. The kind of clear where you can hold contradictions, see nuances, question your own assumptions, notice the architecture around you rather than just living inside it.

This matters for the impact I want to have and the thinking I still have to do about responsible AI adoption, or trying to articulate the ikigai risk of AI, letting tools do the type of work that used to give us our meaning... I need my brain working properly. I need to be able to see what’s cultural programming and what’s genuine need. To distinguish between what serves human purpose and what just serves convenience.

I can’t afford the fog. Not even the subtle, socially-acceptable fog we’ve normalised.

Our social structures assume that fog. Celebrations demand it. Commiserations require it. Ordinary Fridays revolve around it. When you opt out, you become visible in a way that’s uncomfortable for everyone.

You’re the sore thumb. The exception that proves the rule. The person everyone has to navigate around.

You can’t shout about feeling good because feeling good came from choosing differently, and choosing differently implies everyone else could choose differently too, and that’s a thought nobody ordered with their Merlot.

So you hedge. You soften. You add the laugh.

You make your radical self-care palatable.

What I know now

Two years on and the choice still feels like a choice, but it’s become a really obvious one to make over and over again. It’s genuinely hard to remember why I was ever so intent on consuming something that clearly harms even as it gives us a buzz we crave.

I know that the kind, caring people who assume alcohol is central to gathering aren’t failing. They’re just living inside the same cultural architecture I used to inhabit. I don’t blame them. But I see the architecture now in ways I couldn’t before.

I know that I’m happier. Healthier. Clearer. More myself.

And I know that shouting that from the rooftops upsets people, so I don’t do it too often *grin*

Except here I am, two years in, writing it down anyway. Because maybe year three is about claiming what I know without the softeners. About trusting that my clarity doesn’t have to be lonely, even if it feels that way at this time of year… recognising that feeling really, really good is worth the current social cost of being *that* person and hope that the balance tips one day, because I genuinely wish for others to have this feeling of peace and joy too.

What's a choice you've made that makes you feel brilliant but you've learnt to stay quiet about?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Some bullet journal prompts for this week, especially as we enter year end reflection and 2026 bullet journal setup time (yay my favourite hehe)

• What choices make you feel genuinely good that you can’t fully claim? Why?

• Where are you hedging to protect other people from your certainty?

• List three things you think you want. Now ask; do I actually want these, or have I been told this is what wanting looks like?

PPS - AI coaching exercise

Try this prompt: “I’ve made a choice that measurably improves my life but makes other people uncomfortable. How do I hold this boundary without performing endless reassurance that I’m not judging them?“

Then push back on any advice that asks you to make yourself smaller. See what emerges when you refuse to hedge.

PPPS - This week’s music choice

“Sober” by P!nk – “How do I feel this good sober?”

That one line captures why I’m passionate about this, the question probably wasn’t rhetorical for P!nk… genuinely asking how it’s possible. And that’s exactly where I am, feeling really, really good... but somehow that clarity itself feels almost transgressive. The question contains both wonder and the social weirdness of having to justify feeling brilliant without the thing everyone assumes you need to feel that way.