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

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

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

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

The waiting

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

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

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

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

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

Enough reasons

So what do we do, in the waiting?

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

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

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

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

Fermata

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

We keep the beat

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

PPS Try this with your preferred AI tool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The freedom to pursue a life of your own

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

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

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

More doors opening for more people.

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

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

The power to shape the terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mind that does not stop at the skin

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

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

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

Perhaps AI can too.

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

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

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

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

What I would need to see & the ikigai question underneath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can’t KPI a child

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

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

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

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

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

What difference did you make?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The columns a spreadsheet can’t hold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fourth column wears a lanyard

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

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

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

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

• What do we believe this work is ultimately for?

• What assumptions connect our activity to that purpose?

• What evidence would strengthen or weaken that belief?

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

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

Ships that didn’t sink

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

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

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

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

“Here is my first column, what I did.

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

What it produced, output.

What changed, outcome.

What I believe it meant, meaning.

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

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

Label each statement as evidence, inference or belief.

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

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

The row with the strongest evidence.

The row where my contribution was most shared.

The row where belief is doing the heaviest lifting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phase 1: the foundation, and what you love

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

A) what you love

1 Joy audit

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

2 Labels & loves

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

3 Values deep dive

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

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

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

B) what you’re good at (skill)

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

4 Effortless wins

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

5 Skills test

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

6 Ask three people

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

C) what you can be paid for (value)

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

7 Paid & thanked

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

8 Market scan

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

9 Smallest paid test

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

D) what the world needs (problem)

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

10 twelve favourite problems

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

11 SDG exercise

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

12 Talk to one

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

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

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

Face your constraints

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

Synthesise with AI

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

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

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

The point of all this

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was seeking comfort I guess.

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

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

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

Worse than empty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The name nobody used

Then, this week, the strangest sort of relief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purpose.

Agency.

Dignity.

Judgement.

Human relationships.

The slow surrender of the mind.

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

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

Thirty plants & thirty unprompted things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• A diagram drawn by hand.

• A walk where I thought instead of asked.

• A question I let sit unanswered overnight.

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

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

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

Making more of a fuss

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Bullet journal prompt reflections;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have already stroked the cover several times.

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

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

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

A clean slate undermines acceptance

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

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

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

I do not need a new me

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the journal became

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

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

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

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

Closing time is not failure

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

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

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

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

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

Same woman, new notebook

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From cheat to treasure

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

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

Because the code didn’t stay a cheat. It escaped the console and multiplied. It also turned up in films and TV shows and websites and far flung corners of the internet, and it for sure stopped being a shortcut and became something very lovely indeed… a secret handshake, a little hidden delight, tucked away for whoever knows where to look. Same ten button presses with a completely different purpose.

The joy engineers

That hidden delight concept is now called an easter egg, and the first famous one was an act of rebellion. Around 1980 a programmer called Warren Robinett was building a game for Atari, a company that flatly refused to print its developers’ names on anything they made. So he smuggled himself in. He buried a secret room inside the game, reachable only by carrying a single pixel to exactly the right spot, and there he signed his name in glowing letters. A signature stowed away inside the cartridge, waiting years for anyone curious enough to find it.

The idea caught on and has never stopped. Steven Spielberg let E.T. recognise a child out trick-or-treating in a Yoda costume, and years later George Lucas returned the wink by sliding E.T.’s own species into the Star Wars senate. A TARDIS turned up in Star Trek Strange New Worlds recently, there just long enough for the sharp-eyed to gasp (though I’m not ready to talk about the recent Doctor Who news as I’m more than a little gutted)… All of it hidden in plain sight waiting for those who are looking closely enough. Whole fandoms now hunt for these things for sport, cataloguing every blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod, and I love that about my people.

Nobody is paid extra to do this. Somebody decided that a stranger’s jolt of joy was worth the additional hours, and built a little gift into the work for a person they would never meet. That is a joy engineer. Someone who looks at an ordinary thing and thinks, I’ll hide a bit of magic in here, just so a few people get the thrill of finding it.

Finding your people

Every easter egg since carries a version of that same message. It says I was here and I was thinking of you. It says if you get this, you’re one of us. The in-joke that makes you grin because it was so clearly left for your eyes. The reference only your people catch. That little jolt of recognition is how we find one another, and finding one another is how we work out where it’s safe to take the mask off.

Long before developers were burying pixels in code, these kinds of hidden signals were a matter of real-world survival. History is full of these real-life easter eggs… a green carnation, a specific turn of phrase, secret languages built entirely to ask without asking Are you like me? Is it safe here? I’m writing this in Pride month, and it would be remiss of me not to nod to that. For anyone who has to hide parts of themselves away just to get through the day, the coded signal is everything. The flag in the window. The pin on the lapel. The little tell that says you can breathe out here, you belong, you can bring the whole of yourself. Belonging gets built in exactly these small hidden signals, and belonging means safe environments that let people be themselves, to get to feel magic and joy.

Joy is an input

You key joy in on purpose, the same deliberate way you would punch in the code. Joy rarely arrives gift-wrapped while you wait around for the world to improve of its own accord. You choose it, you enter it, up up down down and a wonderful thought is that it’s a skill. Press it often enough and your eye gets trained to spot the hidden delights everywhere, and your hands get quicker at planting them for other people. Nobody is born knowing where the easter eggs are. You learn. You practise and you get better. Joy engineering, you could call it.

Let me show you the ones I’m addicted to being the daft optimist I am.

There’s my lunchtime stomp. Whether it’s a calm day or there’s a proper gale blowing in off the Irish Sea, I get out and I walk rain or shine, grinning like an absolute loon the whole way. The magic in that is as you approach someone coming the other way who looks a little weighed down, off somewhere sad in their own head, and you catch their eye and smile with your whole face, and most of the time they simply cannot help smiling back. For half a second something might lift in them. I get to walk on hoping I topped their tank up just enough that they pass it to the next person, and they to the next. You never see where it ends and that is rather the point.

You’ll know the same thing from the road. You let a car out at a junction, the smallest thing, and ten minutes later you watch that same driver wave somebody else out further down the way. One little input, a ripple you never get to follow to its edge.

Some easter eggs you can build into a team. We have a word in our corner of the office now that makes us smile and has become a beacon, clarity. When one of us says it, it feels like a hand on the shoulder, because behind it sits a pledge we made each other to try and strip away the noise and the panic and get back to whatever actually matters. One word, and you can watch shoulders drop around the table. An easter egg you can say out loud.

Some you bake into the calendar. A Bake Off day at work, where the spreadsheet can wait a few minutes because someone’s brought a showstopper and we’re all going to grab a coffee and savour it. Things that can give the week a little hook to hang your hope on, things you get to look forward to.

And some you simply hide for one particular person. A note slipped into a bag where they’ll find it on a hard afternoon. A chocolate bar left on a stressed desk. The good games always slip something lovely onto the loading screen, a small reward for the waiting, and you can do the very same with a kettle coming to the boil or a queue that won’t move or a meeting that hasn’t kicked off yet. A little game built to lift the mundane or tedious.

Be the developer

You can’t skip the hard parts of being alive. The grief and the bad news and the grey weeks still come, and joy is no cheat code for getting past them. As I get older I realise that the hard parts are needed really to ever learn something or appreciate when you have it good.

What you do get to choose is how you interact with the glorious game of life. You can grab for a shortcut with the risk it leaves you a touch hollower for it. Or you can be a developer. The joy engineer who buries a little delight in the world, for no reward at all, knowing some stranger will trip over it on a day they badly needed it and feel, for one second, that somebody out there had them in mind.

And that planting is an antidote to pain. The finding is a joy all of its own of course... but the planting is the part that really can heal. Because the surest way I know to feel less alone in a hard world is to spend my day trying to help others, and hiding small proof that the world can still be kind, then trusting it to ripple out somewhere I’ll never get to see, is *such* a joyous thing to be a part of.

So. Up, up, down, down. Get the B and the A the right way round if you can, and have a proper belly laugh when you don’t. Then go and hide something lovely where someone will find it.

Player One, you’re up.

Who is the best “joy engineer” in your life or workplace? What little magic do they do that makes everyone’s day better? Shout them out in the comments!

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - A prompt to explore in your journal. Cast your mind back, what easter egg did someone once hide for you, a kindness or a small magic you only clocked later, after they’d gone? Sit a while with how it felt to be thought of like that. Then write down one you could hide this week, and describe how you think the person will react in detail.

PPS - An experiment for your favourite image AI, built to be shared - paste it in and fill in the blanks;

Create a retro 8-bit video game screen in the style of a 1980s console, the moment a player discovers a hidden easter egg. Player 1 name is [NAME]. The scene celebrates [a small kindness or moment of joy from my week, in a few words], drawn in cheerful pixel art with a glowing banner that reads YOU FOUND A SECRET, a sparkle of light, a tiny pixel heart and a retro score counter ticking up in the corner. Use [platform / URL] to understand their public voice, visual brand, colours, themes and personality to inform a scene and style that belongs in their universe.

PPPS - This week’s soundtrack choice is The Rainbow Connection, the Tori Kelly version with Kermit the Frog, from The Wonderful World of Disney at Disneyland. Yes, a felt amphibian on banjo, a song for the dreamers and the believers, who insist there’s some wonder waiting just up ahead. You decide the rainbow means something, you keep your eyes peeled for it on the wet walk home, and the others who believe it too find their way to you.

A new pair of glasses arrived last week, and they are bolder than anything I have ever worn before.

I chose them in the usual way, which is to say, almost completely blind.

A colour combination I would normally talk myself out of. It’s still a shock when I catch sight of them in a reflection, I feel a flutter of something. Part delight. Part “who do you think you are” slash “what on earth were you thinking?!”.

I have needed glasses since I was ten. I am fifty now, and only just learning to be a little braver with what I choose.

For most of those forty years it has been a love hate thing. Contacts were my confidence trick, the way I stepped out from behind the frames and felt most like a pretty version of me (on a good day)... right up until age started to change my prescription in a different way, and the need for varifocals arrived and took that option off the table. So here I am, back in glasses, full time, for good. Glasses are a peculiar sort of purchase. They are assistive technology I genuinely cannot live without, and they sit right there on my face, next to my colouring and my eyes and hair and everything that says me. Function and identity, an awful lot to ask for one thing to be.

The most expensive blur you’ll ever buy

Choosing glasses is really challenging when your eyes are as rubbish as mine.

I am up at the very short sighted end of things. The minus eight, minus nine plus club... where are my myopic peeps? Being this short sighted does cruel things to the act of buying specs.

First, the moment my old glasses come off to try a new frame, the world dissolves. I lean in towards the mirror and there is no me there to assess at all, just a pink and ginger blur swimming in a silver rectangle. I am choosing my own face while completely unable to see it, nose against the glass and still blind to the thing I am deciding on.

Second, my lenses are thick. So thick that a good half of the frames in the shop simply will not take them, or would leave me peering out of two jam jar bottoms. To make them wearable at all I pay extra, sometimes a lot extra, for the lens thinning magic that stops me ending up with bug eyes and edges an inch deep. Stack varifocals on top of that now, and we are not talking about a cheap and cheerful accessory. We are talking long hundreds of pounds. For one pair. Which I will then wear every single waking minute, for a year, two, sometimes three, because I am not made of money and a spare set is a luxury, not a given.

A few minutes in a shop, unable to see and choosing something I need but has to sit there on my face, that I cannot swap out to suit my mood or my outfit… many hundreds of pounds, riding on a blurry guess I then have to live with for years.

(I have a recurring daydream, by the way, of building the optician the very short sighted actually deserve. Frames designed to carry a serious prescription and ones that can snap in and out easily so that people can try them on properly and swap out frame colours more easily… served by someone who truly gets varifocals and doesn’t so much as blink at minus nine or higher. If I ever get the chance... grr, and relax, hehe, anyway I digress.)

It is, when you say it out loud, a slightly outrageous thing to ask of a person. And yet millions of us do exactly this our whole lives.

The face you’ll never see & a guess about a guess

In all forty years of squinting at myself trying to choose new frames, I’d never really thought in more depth about how weird it is you just have to take a punt, you can’t see yourself properly until the new ones arrive… but I’ve just twigged that it isn’t only in the optician that I can’t see myself, I have never seen myself properly, none of us have.

You have only ever met your face in two forms. In a mirror, where it is flipped, left swapped for right… and in photographs, which freeze and flatten it, which nearly always looks a little bit wrong to you.

That wrongness isn’t vanity, it’s documented. Back in 1977 researchers, Mita and colleagues, showed people photographs of themselves, some printed normally and some reversed. People preferred the mirror version, the flipped one. Their friends preferred the true, unreversed one. The reason is simply familiarity, you have spent a lifetime greeting the mirror version, so that is the face you have grown to love. Everyone who loves you, meanwhile, has fallen for the version you find faintly off.

The most visible thing about us, the thing the people we meet navigate by, is hidden from us. Some of us have to choose frames blind in a shop, but really we are choosing blind for a lifetime.

It gets stranger still when you move from seeking clarity on your image to your sense of self.

A lovely old idea from sociology calls this the looking glass self. Charles Cooley coined it back in 1902, and the gist is that we build our sense of who we are not from some clear inner readout, but from how we imagine other people see us. We picture ourselves through their eyes, guess at their judgement and feel proud or small accordingly. Which means the self most of us carry around is a guess... about a guess. Blurred face, borrowed mirror, imagined verdict. No wonder we find ourselves so hard to get.

More lenses won’t fix it, the pose comes first

So what do we reach for, faced with all that not seeing? A clearer mirror, higher prescription lens, a better quality camera, is often our instinct.

More mirrors. More photographs. The front facing lens, the ring light, a filter that smooths and widens and “improves” … and now AI that will happily render a thousand polished versions of your face and your words in minutes. We are the most mirrored generations in human history.

Has it made us feel any clearer? By most measures we are more anxious about how we look and who we are, not less. Because if the self is built from imagined judgements, then every new lens just adds another imagined audience to perform for. This doesn’t sharpen the picture, it scatters it or distorts like in a hall of mirrors.

Which brings me to a concept I have completely fallen for, mie (見得).

In kabuki theatre, a mie is a big dramatic pose. At the emotional peak of a scene the actor stops and holds a powerful frozen posture, eyes open wide and the audience shouts the actor’s name. The actor does not wait until they feel the emotion to strike the pose. They strike the pose, hold it, commit to it utterly... and the feeling, the presence, the power, comes rushing in to fill it. The pose summons the person, not the other way round.

I think identity works more like a mie than like a mirror. You do not get to study a clear reflection, confirm exactly who you are and only then step out as them. You strike the pose first. You choose the bold frames before you can see yourself in them, and you wear them until they become you. Courage, here, is simply being willing to act before the confirmation arrives.

For forty years I chose the sensible frames. The colour that wouldn’t clash, the shape that wouldn’t draw a glance. I told myself it was taste, it was mostly fear. This time, blind in the shop and still not a millionnaire *ahem*, I struck a different pose.

I’m just going to argue with myself for a brief moment. “Just choose, never mind the mirror” can curdle into something I don’t mean at all. A sort of chest puffing, who cares what anyone thinks individualism that isn’t true to how humans work, because the looking glass self is real. We ARE social animals and we *do* need other people to help us see, so a life lived entirely without that mirror is just lonely, and sometimes a bit deluded.

So it’s a both/and, as these things so often are. The danger isn’t using a clearer mirror but handing that process over completely... letting others choose your face, dimming you to whatever won’t clash, urging you to be the smoothed down average on purpose. Other people can help you see but they cannot choose for you. Hold both, and I reckon you’re roughly in the right place.

The kindest mirror to strike a pose in

Which is where this loops back to a concept that has been front of mind for me recently, the idea that clarity is a form of care.

The very best thing we do for each other is to help someone see clearly enough to choose for themselves, and to help them access the confidence that brings to make braver choices. The friend who comes to the opticians with you, looks at you properly and says “those are so you“ isn’t handing you an instruction, she’s handing you back your nerve. She has held up a warm, honest reflection which opens out the options... and then left the choosing where it belongs, with you.

That is the mirror worth being for the people you love.

Madonna made it sound so easy. Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it… and from the outside, maybe it looks that way... a woman in bold new frames, looking pleased with herself.

But you and I know what it actually took. A few blind minutes in a shop. A few hundred pounds I had to think very hard about. A few years of living with whatever I landed on. The pose is never nothing. The pose costs and we strike it anyway.

The bold frames are on my face now, as I type this. I still struggle to see myself in them some days, but I chose them. The people I love are smiling… and somewhere, faintly, I can hear an imagined audience shouting my name.

We never get to see our own face. So we may as well choose it brave. Strike the pose, hold it, and grow into the person it summons… and hold up the kindest, clearest mirror we can for each other while we’re all at it.

I’d love to know... where in your life are you still waiting for a mirror’s permission, on a pose you could simply strike instead?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS, for the bullet journallers, a little “Strike the Pose” spread for the week:

• Draw out a mindmap box, and doodle some glasses to decorate… in it think through what this brings up for you; What is the bolder “frame” I keep talking myself out of? (A look, a stance, a yes, a piece of work, a sentence in a meeting... anything.)

• Prompt: Where have I been calling fear “good taste”? What sensible version of myself am I choosing on autopilot?

• Prompt: Which mirrors do I let define me, people, the scroll, the camera roll, AI, and which could I try turning off this week?

• Prompt: Who has been a kind, clear mirror for me lately... and have I told them?

PPS, an AI prompt challenge for the week.

This one is a mirror that hands the choice to you;

You are going to act as a clear, honest mirror, not a stylist. I will paste in some of my recent writing or notes, and a few words about a decision I keep hesitating over. First, reflect back to me, in plain language, the bolder version of myself that keeps showing up between the lines... the stances I almost take, the things I clearly care about but soften. Then show me, specifically, the places I seem to play it safe or hedge. Do not tell me what to do, do not flatter me, and do not tidy me into something generic. End with three braver “looks” I could try on, phrased as questions and leave every choice with me.

[PASTE YOUR WRITING / NOTES HERE] [DESCRIBE THE CHOICE YOU’RE HESITATING OVER]

I’d love to see what it holds up for you, share and tag me!

PPPS, today’s soundtrack, there was only ever going to be one... Vogue, Madonna. Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it. Ha. There is everything to it, Madonna, it’s hundreds of quid and three years of commitment and I cannot see a thing in that mirror... but the spirit is bang on. You decide who you are going to be, you strike the pose, and you let the confidence come running to catch up.

Personal branding is pitched as something you develop and then present to a room. With a flourish and polish and American levels of confidence that a lot of us, particularly frazzled Manxies and Brits, struggle to reach or indeed can cope with.

It’s been two and a half years for me of being “the ikigai girl” or “oh, you’re the one with the gorgeous bullet journal” in meetings that had absolutely nothing to do with either… and this has made me appreciate HUGELY that a distinctive detail is a gift you give.

You’re handing the other person something to grab on to. You’re doing the remembering for them… before they’ve had a chance to feel the panic of knowing they’ve met you and being unable to summon a single thing to say. If you’ve ever stood at a networking do, certain you know a face and utterly unable to place it, you’ll know exactly what kind of mercy that is.

So here’s the thought I want to share today;

Personal branding is just distinctiveness, and that isn’t self-promotion. It’s a kindness, one that takes the cognitive labour of remembering you, placing you and connecting with you off the other person’s shoulders.

That’s it really, the rest is just me elaborating *grin*.

I’ve written about my slight sense of incongruity on the topic of personal branding before in “What Are You Going On About With This ikigai and Niche Nonsense?” and why the phrase “personal branding” can invoke an involuntary snort of mistrust. I defended it then as self-discovery, and I stand by that… but I also think I undersold it, because “distinctiveness” is the same idea without perhaps the icky connotation. I don’t think people flinch as often at being called distinctive. It’s the other stuff around it, the suspicion we are being asked to sell ourselves, to stand on a chair and announce our own brilliance to a room that didn’t ask. So let’s reframe, we aren’t selling… let’s give instead, completely different energy.

Sparing them the work

While getting my thoughts together for this, I came across a Japanese word which I absolutely LOVE, omoiyari (思いやり). It means something close to empathetic consideration, anticipating what another person needs before they’ve had to ask, or even noticed they need it. It’s the friend who has the kettle on before you’ve got your coat off. I am hugely taken with the notion of active compassion as a way to move through life.

Now think about what’s going on whenever two people meet. The other person is working. They’re trying to hold on to your name, file your face somewhere they’ll find it again, and cobble together something to ask you that isn’t “so… what is it you do?” And through all of it hums a lowkey dread we all know, the fear of a social boo-boo… blanking on a name, the hot-cheeked moment of realising you’ve met someone before and still can’t place them.

A distinctive, true detail does heaps of that work for them in advance. Cementing a name-hook, face-anchor and conversation-starter in one go. So yes this concept isn’t you taking up space (although if you want to take up space then do so, haters gonna hate), it’s you acting as a social lubricant, smoothing some of friction that can make meeting people so draining. It’s omoiyari, as you’ve spared someone the labour of hunting for something memorable about you, and neither of you has to stand shivering in the awful weather of small talk hehe.

The bar-stool theory of branding

There’s a sister concept I love just as much, kikubari (気配り), the attentive way a good host scatters their awareness so that everyone feels noticed, comfortable, at ease. Hospitality as a discipline, reading the room.

I have an image in mind of what all this feels like, a sticky-floored bar in Boston. You know the one where everybody knows your name. There’s a reason that theme tune still evokes such a pang, forty-odd years later.… we all long for the bone-deep relief of walking in somewhere and being recognised. Of being expected, of someone glancing up and going, “ah it’s you“.

Being distinctive is a way in which you build a little of that warmth for the people around you. You give them the gift of recognition, and I think it’s SUCH a lovely thing that you let them be the one who remembers, which feels rather marvellous from their side of it too. Nobody ever felt worse for being the person who remembered. You’re simply keeping a stool warm for whoever walks in next.

Where to dig for distinctive

So how do you become that bit more memorable, on purpose? Not every detail pulls its weight. “Head of Business Development” probably slides straight off the brain like rain off a waxed jacket, it tells you my current job title and precisely nothing about me… but “I’m learning Manx Gaelic” sticks. It opens a little door.

There’s a wonderful term for this from Japanese comedy, tsukami (掴み), literally “the grab”... the opening beat that seizes a room before you’ve earned its attention. A good grab is three things at once. Unexpected, so it interrupts the autopilot. True, because anything else curdles fast. And open, because it has to leave a gap for the other person to step through. (”Manx? People still speak that? Go on then, say something.”) You’ve not just made yourself memorable, you’ve handed them their next line!

So where do you go digging for yours? This is where I’d reach past ikigai for its hardworking cousin, hatarakigai (働きがい), the worth and joy we find specifically in our work. I once argued that you are already a niche, that your particular intersection of skills and quirks is a superpower nobody can replicate. The most ownable, most givable part of that intersection rarely hides in the things you’re merely competent at. It hides in the things that make you lose track of time. So the questions worth reflecting on are much deeper than “what am I qualified in?” They’re more like What do colleagues interrupt me to ask about? What do I reach for when nobody’s watching? Which bit of the job would I still happily poke at on a Sunday?

And if you’d like something concrete to do with all this thinking try the labels exercise as described in my ‘niche’ essay above. Scribble down every label you can think of for yourself, the proud ones, the geeky ones and the ones that once stung. Mine still includes “ginger speccy four-eyes” and I keep it precisely because that one taught me more than flattering ones did. Then go digging for the unlikely intersections… where does what I’m good at cross what I love? Somewhere in those overlaps are the words you can hand to a stranger.

I hugely recommend journal brainstorms first then upload pictures of those to your favourite AI tool to help you combine them into something awesome, brave and true to you, detailed description in my How to find your ikigai essay including AI prompt.

The beige machine and the polisher

Two ways this goes wrong, both undo the kindness so they’re worth watching out for.

The first is the beige machine. While careful use of AI can absolutely help us in this process… if you’ve ever asked AI to draft you a profile blurb without a carefully crafted prompt, you’ll notice how often it can be competent, grammatically correct, and oh so very beige and bland. It could have belonged to any one of thousands of people, which is exactly the danger… because that is precisely what it was made of, the smoothed-down average of thousands of people. The whole point of a distinctive detail is that it’s proof of a particular human, with a particular fixation, who cannot be regressed to the mean. If you clumsily hand a machine the job of writing your “you” you’ve handed it a task it is structurally incapable of doing, because it works by averaging and you are the exact opposite of an average. You know I’m not anti-tool, I flipping LOVE Claude… but I *AM* anti-outsourcing-your-soul. Use AI to help surface the raw material… prompt yourself first, then let it spot patterns across your scattered labels and thinking. Find the ore with it, by all means just do the smithing yourself.

The second is over-polishing. There’s a version of this where the brand gets buffed so hard it becomes a costume you then have to wear every single day, a cliché you’re forever performing and exhausting yourself living up to. That’s not this. The aim is never to manufacture or fake a shinier, more marketable you that reality then has to chase down. It’s to notice and name the things that are already true. The detail only works as a kindness if it’s real, otherwise you’ve handed someone a handle that comes off in their grip… and there’s a half decent chance you forget what it is you even said you loved last time.

We’re all just looking for our people

Almost everything worth having is easier together. We are not solitary creatures grimly pretending to ‘get good’ at networking, we are people trying to find our people.

A distinctive, honest, well-placed detail or two is just a small flare sent up over the crowd… here I am, this is me, come and talk to me about ikigai bullet journalling and responsible AI use, or Manx, or Doctor Who, or Minecraft. It lifts the weight off the other person.

It is not showing off. I promise you it isn’t. It’s holding the door. It’s setting out an extra chair. It’s the stool kept warm for whoever walks in next.

Be memorable, it’s one of the kindest things you can do.

I’d genuinely love to know, what’s one true, slightly unexpected detail you could hand someone this week?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - for the bullet journallers a little “Pull Up a Stool” spread for the week:

• Two columns; What I’m good at · What I love - In the overlap in the middle, write at least two or three words you’d most want a stranger to remember you by.

• Prompt: When has someone remembered a distinctive detail about me and did I plant it on purpose, or by happy accident?

• Prompt: What’s one true, unexpected word I could add to my next introduction, purely as a gift to the other person?

PPS - for an AI prompt challenge this week copy and paste the below into ChatGPT;

I’d love to see the results, please share and tag me in!

PPPS Today’s soundtrack, what else could it be but Don’t You (Forget About Me), Simple Minds?

A reminder that none of us want to be forgotten, and it’s from The Breakfast Club, a film about people flattened into super generic labels (brain, athlete, princess, criminal) who are of course gloriously more.

And for the bar-stool warmth, a second one to chase it with… Where Everybody Knows Your Name, the Cheers theme. The sound of being recognised.

Friday afternoon and three things needed to be done before I could escape the office for the long weekend, and I made some of the same small compromises you often do when time gets short. An email that could have been warmer. A decision that could perhaps have been run past another pair of eyes. The deeper thinking I would have done if I had saved it for Monday morning. By half past four I had three completed tasks but felt no sense of accomplishment… and the old product management triangle came to mind, asking of me;

Good, cheap, fast > pick two.

It’s one of those annoyingly useful shorthand frames for thinking.

If something is good and cheap, it will probably take time. If something is good and fast, it will probably cost more. If something is cheap and fast, the good usually takes the hit. I know this. You know this. We all know this… and yet modern life keeps trying to get us to deliver all three at the same time ALL the time, and we go along with it because we don’t always feel safe enough to challenge the sometimes ridiculous norms.

The missing good

So yeah, I’ve been turning this over in my mind wandering the prom with Henry, and I think the reason it feels useful to write about now is a lack of people talking about what the missing elements really cost us.

In my old world of product management, the missing good means a downgraded project scope and a scruffier deliverable. Acceptable, fix it next time… move on.

In a life, the missing good means something else entirely.

Sometimes good means care, the kind that turns into someone feeling seen rather than processed.

Sometimes good means ethics, the long version, the one where you think through who pays for the choice you are about to make.

Sometimes good means enough time to think, which is one of the most countercultural requests you can make in 2026 (try saying it out loud at work, watch faces do interesting things).

Sometimes good means a human being on the other end of your decision did not have to absorb the cost of your rush.

Sometimes good means the work has a soul in it. Which sounds airy until you compare it with the work that doesn’t, and then you can spot the difference.

This is where hatarakigai becomes such a useful lens for me. Ikigai is often described as a reason for being. Hatarakigai is its working cousin, the part of ikigai that lives in the daily question of whether your work is actually worth doing.

Work worth doing in the older, slower sense of the words. Work that carries care, contribution, skill, relationship, attention, dignity and enough breathing room for a human being to stay a human being while doing it.

Which is a bit of a ‘mare to be fair… because care is very hard to squeeze into cheap and fast.

The Good Place metrics problem

I’ve been thinking about The Good Place a lot this morning too, partly because it’s one of my fave programmes in recent years but mostly because it figured out something about goodness I think is useful for how we live and work now.

The show opens with a points system. Every action you take in life is scored. Good actions add points, bad ones lose them, and at the end of your life the system tells you whether you’ve earned the Good Place or the Bad Place. Auditable and beautifully spreadsheet shaped. Eleanor (played by Kristen Bell) arrives in the Good Place by clerical error and spends the first season trying to learn how to deserve being there.

What the show reveals is that the points system is broken, that modern life has made ethical living almost impossible to score. Every decision tangled in unseen consequences and the points framework can’t cope with the texture of being alive.

If that sounds suspiciously like our current relationship with productivity metrics, that’s because it is.

We measure outputs, response times, engagement, time saved, cost reduction, efficiency gained… none of it wrong on its own, but all of it incomplete. A piece of work can be fast and harmful. A decision can save money and break trust. A process can be efficient and make people feel like spare parts. A piece of AI-generated content can be polished and say nothing that matters.

The other lead character is Chidi, a moral philosophy professor who’s so scared of making the wrong choice that he becomes incapable of making any choice at all. Forty-five minutes in a frozen yoghurt shop trying to decide a flavour. Chidi is what happens when too much care becomes paralysis. Thinking as a hiding place, research a very well-referenced form of fear. I love him because he’s also learning, good work does needs care, but care without action is not living.

The show beautifully illustrates that goodness isn’t a score you achieve. Goodness is a practice. You get better through relationship and repair, through trying and failing and apologising and trying again. The book Chidi keeps trying to give Eleanor, the one she never wants to read because it’s so dense, is called What We Owe to Each Other. That title, almost an aside, is the answer the whole show is looking for.

The same is true of work. The work that matters is the work that holds together what we owe to each other.

What we owe, fundamentally, is our presence and our judgment. But we live in a culture that treats presence as a bottleneck. Enter the machine, promising to remove the strain.

Cheap, fast and the machine

If we consistently choose cheap and fast in our AI use, what is the missing good?

It’s our judgement. Our voice. Our care. Our ability to know what we think before something else has helpfully told us.

I keep returning to a phrase that’s been showing up in my writing for a while now. Usage is curriculum. Every prompt a small vote for what humans value. If we consistently ask AI for the cheap and fast version, we are teaching the system that cheap and fast is what we want. Billions of times a day, the curriculum is being written… and I fear that the curriculum being written right now leans heavily toward shortcuts.

Some of our work is totally fine to run at speed. The weekly admin. The first pass at a project checklist. The summary nobody will ever quote. There’s no shame in running it through cheap and fast tools. I’d much rather be writing an essay than reformatting a spreadsheet by hand.

The trouble is that not all our work belongs in the shortcut pile. The thing only you can write. The voice nobody else has. The relationship that asks you to be present. The decision that will shape someone’s morning, or month, or life. The slow, irreplaceable work of having a mind of your own.

If we choose cheap and fast in our relationships, the missing good might be presence.

If we choose cheap and fast in our health, the missing good might be strength.

If we choose cheap and fast in our creativity, the missing good might be voice.

If we choose cheap and fast in our organisations, the missing good might be trust.

If we choose cheap and fast with AI, the missing good might be a sense of self.

The trade off is rarely obvious at first, which is what makes it so dangerous. Cheap and fast often looks brilliant in the short term. It looks productive, clever, sharp, like we’re really getting things done. Then weeks or months later we wonder why everyone is tired, the work feels hollow, the relationships feel thin, and the thing we were building no longer resembles the thing we meant to build.

Good is not always slow

I want to be careful not to make good sound precious or ponderous, we’ve already shown Chidi as a cautionary tale.

Good is sometimes swift, because someone has practised for years. Good is sometimes simple, because someone has done the thinking to remove the clutter. Good is sometimes affordable, because a community has shared resources wisely. Good is sometimes rough around the edges and still completely enough.

The point of all this is to think carefully and choose honestly. To stop pretending the tension in the triad doesn’t apply to us. To stop expecting impossible things from ourselves and the people we work with. To know when something deserves twenty minutes and a cup of tea, and when something deserves a workshop, a long conversation, a careful review, a budget, a second pair of eyes and a night’s sleep.

So this is the reminder I am taking with me into next week, when something feels strained, I’ll ask myself which two I’m perhaps unconsciously choosing.

Good and cheap? I need to allow time.

Good and fast? I need to accept the cost, whether that’s money, energy, attention or support.

Cheap and fast? I need to be honest that the good will be limited, and decide whether that’s acceptable. Sometimes it absolutely is. Sometimes it absolutely isn’t.

Questioning helps me stop expecting impossible things from myself. It helps me notice when I’m asking someone else to absorb an invisible cost. It helps me see when AI is supporting the work, and when it’s helping me polish something I haven’t properly thought through.

Most importantly it helps me protect the work that matters most. Because not everything deserves maximum care, but some things do. Your health does. Your relationships do. Your voice does. Your values do. Your contribution does. The work that carries meaning deserves better than being endlessly squeezed through the cheap and fast pipe.

Good work takes care

I love the discipline of my Saturday essay ritual, my weekly refusal to do something cheap and fast. Henry waits, the coffee goes cold, the journal gets opened, and I let the process take as long as it needs to.

The Good Place ends with the idea that people can get better. Through practice, through friendship, through noticing, through failing and apologising and learning and trying again. Real change is really hard to apportion to simple metrics or winning points.

That’s the hope I want to keep hold of. That we can choose with more care. That we can notice what is being sacrificed and that we can stop pretending cheap and fast are free from consequence.

Good, cheap, fast. Pick two.

When the work really matters, when it touches your values, your people, your health, your meaning, your future self, your tiny corner of the world, be very careful before you trade away the good… because good work takes care and so do we.

Who in your life is doing good work the slow way and making everyone around them better for it? I’d love hear about your family, your colleague, your neighbour, the person at the shop who remembers your name.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Bullet journal spread for this week. Draw the venn circles, or a triangle with corner labels of good, cheap and fast. Pick an area of your life or work that feels stretched right now. Which two corners are you defaulting to? Reflect on what is paying the price? What would change if you were able to skew more towards protecting the good?

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

“Help me think through a project or decision I’m wrestling with using the good, cheap, fast triangle. Ask me one question at a time. Start by asking what I’m trying to achieve, then who it affects, then what constraints I’m working with, then what ‘good’ actually means in this specific context. Once you’ve got a clear picture, reflect back the most honest trade off I’m making, and help me decide whether it’s the one I want to be making. Be warm but sharp with me, I’m not looking for comfort, I’m looking for clarity.”

PPPS This week’s soundtrack is All These Things That I’ve Done by The Killers, because underneath all the spreadsheets and shortcuts and second-guessing and second chances, there is still that very human wish to become better without losing ourselves. It feels like the sound of someone standing in the rubble of their own choices, sleeves rolled up, still ready to try again.

There is a smudge in the corner of my bullet journal spread for this week. Henry pushed his nose against it while I was mind mapping ideas yesterday and this morning I almost reached for a sticker to cover it up.

I’m glad I didn’t.

Very few things in life are perfect… letting go of the idea of it, the thing we were taught (imperfectly) which dominates so much of what makes modern life performative and not good for us, feels like an important gift to give ourselves.

Leonard Cohen released a song that contains one of my favourite ever poetic lessons in 1992.

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

Forget your perfect offering, I still need to remind myself of this frequently even three decades later.

The cult of smoothness

Being online these days feels like peer pressure from a finishing school I never asked to join. Perfect your morning routine. Polish your photos. Polish your face for the Zoom call. Polish your hobbies until they become a side hustle. Polish your sentences and your opinions. Polish until you squeak.

Then AI gets layered on top, a deluxe subscription tier. Why polish yourself when a perfectly compliant machine can do it for you? The tools are useful of course, but too often used on autopilot. In fact, the reflex is so automatic that I am catching myself in a ridiculous lie right now.

As I finish an essay draft I typically paste it into Claude or Gemini and ask ‘How do I make my latest essay the very best it can be?’... am I really asking a machine to sand down the edges of an essay about leaving the edges alone? The reflex is that fast, the tool, to its absolute credit, laughed at me and told me to put the sandpaper down.

We have been at this for years, polishing ourselves into a version we believe the room will tolerate. AI makes the reflex faster and universal, and in doing so shows us the bill we have been paying for a very long time.

The bill is a strange flatness on a Sunday evening. The slow erosion of trust between people who are starting to sound the same, because they all ask the same trained assistant the same questions. Someone who can no longer hear themselves think over the noise of the version they have to perform. The cost is loneliness even, less real human to human connection.

A polished surface has nothing for memory or trust to grip on to, no substance. I wrote about this through the lens of code switching. The way we can trim a little of ourselves at every professional door, swap an opinion for a question, soften an edge, sand a corner, until we arrive in the meeting already filed down. The “professional” voice is not a neutral standard. It is one particular way of being that costs some of us more than others to perform.

AI is the next accelerant of that filing down. The tools polish what we hand them. Lots of us have been handing them an already smaller version of ourselves and asking them to make it smaller still. The mask wearing a mask.

The parts of us we think we have to polish away matter. Holding relationships together, letting other people in, keeping us honest with ourselves.

The crack is architecture and sacred mess

Cohen knew and sang it as obvious, there is a crack in everything. Not a flaw to remove or defect to engineer out. Architecture and plain truth, engineers know that buildings have gaps because without them the walls would shear. Take them out and you do not get a stronger building, you get a brittle one.

Human work is the same. The pause in a voice note where the speaker forgot what she meant to say is the bit you trust. The typo in a friend’s text from the car park is not a failure of communication, it’s evidence of humanity. The wobble in your voice when you said the brave thing is not a defect of delivery, it made the message land.

Cracks are how other people get in. Polish keeps everyone out, including the real version of ourselves.

Take signs of humanity out of a piece of work and it goes cold. Take them all out and the work has nothing for anyone else to lean in to, what is even the point of it? Multiply that across millions of polished offerings and our worlds get very lonely very fast.

Forget your perfect offering. I want the wobbles and your truth, what resisted the polishing is what was real to begin with.

The crossed out sentence. The voice note that wandered. The bullet journal page with the wrong day struck through and FFS doodled next to it in rainbow coloured fineliners. The friend who told you an honest thing awkwardly. The walk that didn’t optimise step count but put your soul back in your body.

These are evidence. Someone was here. They were thinking and cared enough to let it show.

If you wanted to find the most human parts of a life, you would not look at the highlight reel. You would look at the smudges.

I have been keeping bullet journals since 2017 and the pages I return to most aren’t the pretty ones. They are the ones where I clearly wasn’t coping and wrote stuff down anyway. When I drew the messiest of mind maps to work through understanding. Those pages are where the life is. The neat pages are records, the messy ones are connection.

The fellowship

More and more people are refusing to polish out what makes them uniquely them.

The Fellowship of the Unoptimised has few rules and an extremely lax membership policy.

Anyone who has ever wept at a film while eating crisps qualifies. Anyone who writes a shopping list on the back of an envelope, in. Anyone who talks to their dog like a person, founding member. Anyone who has to immediately reread a paragraph in a book because the words are too beautiful to move on from, lifetime pass. Anyone who has bought a notebook before they had a use for it, you understood the assignment. Anyone who has dragged themselves to a community thing they did not feel like going to and come home glad they did, operating at a master level. Sending voice notes with seagulls screaming over the top of them is icing on the cake *grin*

We are fluent with the machines. We use them brilliantly and save the hours. We are not Luddites, nor nostalgic, nor against AI. We work alongside it every day and most of us would not give the time savings back for anything.

The fellowship is held together by laughter and dogs and small honest things.

The unifying principle is gentle. There are parts of being human that none of us should be sanding down. Slow thinking, honest conversation, handwritten notes, unpolished grief, inefficient joy, work that counts, communities that hold… purpose that is discovered rather than generated.

We use AI to polish things nobody needs our fingerprints on.

Forget your perfect offering

Let AI do your drudge. Let it write the calendar invite and format the report. Let it summarise a meeting and draft the boring email follow up that translates the technical details. Save the hours. Stack them up and spend them on the inefficient, irreducible, messy things that make a life feel like a life.

Do not let it sand you down.

Do not ask it to make your words more professional if what you actually mean by professional is make me sound more like the typical average Western world leadership team. Do not let it polish the you out of your own writing, your own voice, your own work, your own life.

Send the email that sounds like you. Let the sentence be longer than standard writing rules advocate for because you are showing that you are working something out as you write it. Let your words catch on the voice note. Let your community network thing be a bit awkward. Let your work have your fingerprints on it.

I am not arguing for sloppy, I am arguing for true.

There is a difference between something that is rough because nobody cared and a piece of work that has rougher patches because someone cared *SO MUCH* they needed to let those edges show. Anyone reading or listening or watching can feel the difference instantly. We are often starved for the second kind. Polished versions make us feel dissatisfied and less connected to the humanity of it all, its lonely.

Forget your perfect offering, Cohen ended that verse so bloody beautifully, That’s how the light gets in. As a fact… as architecture… as permission even.

Walk towards the cracked thing. The truer thing. The thing that has your fingerprints on it. That is where the people are. Join the fellowships, where the meaning lives and where the wellbeing is too.

Beautiful souls, what parts of your life will you leave beautifully unoptimised?

Drop a thought in the comments, hearing from you genuinely makes my day.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS ✍️ Bullet journal spread: Things I Refuse to Optimise

Take a fresh page, draw three columns and give each a heading.

Because it brings me joy

The inefficient things you do because the inefficiency is part of the pleasure. The slow coffee. The handwritten letter. The long walk. The board game that takes hours. The cooking from scratch on a Sunday.

Because it helps me feel human

The things that put your soul back in your body. The crying at the film. The dancing in the kitchen. The pen on the page. The early morning light. The dog at your feet.

Because it keeps me connected

The unscalable things you do for the people in your real life. The phone call rather than the text. The card in the post. The “just popping round” visit. The community thing you almost didn’t go to.

When you have finished, reflect on the three lists. These are part of your architecture, protect them fiercely.

PPS 🤖 Make yourself a Fellowship membership badge

Drop the following into your favourite image capable AI tool, filling in the bits in brackets to make it yours.

“I am joining the Fellowship of the Unoptimised. Here is what I want on my membership badge.

Name as I want it shown: [your name]

Three things I refuse to polish: [one, two, three]

Colours I love: [two or three colours]

Image style I would like: [watercolour, vintage stamp, embroidered patch, or your own choice]

Little personal touches to include: [a pet, a favourite object, a place you love, or anything else that feels like you]

Please make me a simple Fellowship membership badge using all of this. Name me as a founding member, list my three refusals as credentials, and add ‘forget your perfect offering’ as the motto. Keep it warm and a little tongue in cheek. The fellowship has a sense of humour about itself.”

Save it somewhere a future polisher in you might need the reminder. The fridge perhaps. Share it if you fancy, the fellowship grows one badge at a time.

PPPS 🎵 This week’s soundtrack “Anthem” by Leonard Cohen

He recorded it in 1992 and had been working on the words for years before that. The line everyone remembers is the one about the crack and the light but I’ve been sitting with the line just before it this week, forget your perfect offering. Cohen knew about the human urge to bring our best polished selves to whatever altar we have set up.

PPPPS 💃 An honourable mention “Mr Brightside” by The Killers

There is a particular flavour of the fellowship that lives on the dance floor at a wedding, when an unlikely group of half strangers belts the wrong notes at each other and somehow ends up feeling the most alive they’ve felt in ages. The chorus is too high and we only know half the words, nobody cares *grin*

The political news in the UK this week has had a hollowing texture to it.

I won’t get into the nitty gritty. Partly because the usual words are already doing enough damage, and partly because what I’m trying to understand sits underneath the headlines.

That feeling of people no longer seeming held… no longer pointed and hungry in a way that scares me… it has reminded me of No-Face.

If you’ve seen Spirited Away you’ll know who I mean. Kaonashi, the hollow spirit who drifts through the bathhouse looking for somewhere to belong. No name. No face. No shape of his own. He can’t speak for himself so he uses the voices of whoever he swallows. He hands out gold to feel wanted. He grows monstrous trying to fill himself with whatever is nearby. He is, in many ways, the original generative mimic, possessing infinite output but no internal code of his own.

This is essay 136, the closing of a mini series that started with me asking in essay 131 what makes something stay with you, and led me to name three components of meaning;

🌸 Coherence, this makes sense of who I am

🌸 Purpose, this points beyond me

🌸 Significance, this feels like it counts

I think when people lose access to all three, they can start to feel No-Faced by the world. Hollowed out. Hungry for a name, a direction, a sense that they count.

They will swallow whoever offers them a sense of mattering. The substitutes don’t have to be good, they just have to be available. Unpurposeful AI can mimic each of the three components of meaning, too. Where people are looking around wondering whether anyone is going to offer them a lifeline, the synthetic substitutes are already everywhere.

Feeling over framework

If the headlines this week felt like a slow hollowing, Friday morning felt like a refilling.

In trying to understand the components of meaning, I’ve come to appreciate that you don’t experience them as three separate things, but as a feeling. It’s the feeling of being in flow with people who care about the same thing you care about, working on something real, watching it get a little bit better because you all turned up.

I felt it on Friday morning at a breakfast meeting,

The TEKEX Innovation Breakfast, hosted on the Island ahead of our General Election in September. The brief was open. With global technology changing rapidly and our domestic economy shifting, how does the Isle of Man best embrace what’s coming? Cleantech, AI regulation, data foundations, the question of what industries we should be growing into. Aspiring politicians in the room alongside the business community. The conversation could have gone defensive or tribal, that thing rooms do when futures are uncertain and people start guarding their corners.

It didn’t, it was open and curious. People named fears out loud and other people in the room received them without flinching. Different industries, different politics, different generations, all sitting around the same question of how we steward a small Island into an uncertain future. I left with a notebook full of ideas and a head full of hope.

Underneath that feeling, all three components were working. We knew who we were in that room (coherence, the people who care about this place enough to give a morning to it). We could feel which way the work pointed, and we trusted it (purpose, the Island getting through what’s coming with its character intact). We were held by people who noticed we turned up, and we were adding to something that pulled us out of bed before sunrise (significance, both roots fed). Nobody named any of this in the room. We just felt it.

This is what small fellowships look like. Not lofty, just people in a function room with bacon and good coffee, refusing to let the future happen to them and choosing to shape it together instead.

This is what I want to protect… what I want for more people, rooms where you can feel held, pointed and useful before fear gets to them first.

The feeling… the framework is just a torch, useful when the lights go out.

When the lights go out

The torch matters though because the lights do go out.

Often with a slow dimming hard to discern. Coherence drifts and you stop being able to explain who you are. Purpose follows and you stop being able to tell which direction is yours. Significance often goes last, because dashboards keep telling you everything is fine. More posts. More reach. More output. Your numbers are growing. You should feel something. You don’t.

This is when No-Face shows up.

He arrives as a hollow you didn’t know was there, not a monster. He drifts in when you’ve forgotten what you sound like, when your direction is being set by whatever scrolled past most recently, when your sense of mattering has been outsourced to a metric. He starts small. He uses the voices of whoever he last swallowed. He hands out gold and gets bigger.

What we have been calling the ikigai risk of AI is a fragmenting force. AI doesn’t just make coherence harder, or purpose harder, or significance harder. Handled badly it can impact all three at once, offering synthetic substitutes convincing enough to stop us noticing what we’ve lost.

🌸 Synthetic coherence, our self-presentation curated for what the algorithm rewards.

🌸 Synthetic purpose, the pace set for us, the next thing always queued, the frictionless void where the natural exhaustion that used to tell us we’d done enough is removed.

🌸 Synthetic significance, the warmth without the cost, the metric without the mattering.

What we become, when all three are running at once, is hollow at the centre. We’re still moving. We’re still producing. We’re using everyone else’s voices because we’ve stopped being able to find our own. We’re handing out gold to feel wanted. We are, slowly and without realising it, becoming No-Face.

Remember your name

The reason Spirited Away doesn’t end with No-Face is that Chihiro remembers her name, her sense of self.

She spends most of the film at risk of forgetting it. The witch Yubaba steals names through the employment contract. Chihiro signs hers and becomes Sen. Most of the bathhouse staff have forgotten theirs entirely. They know they used to be river spirits or weather spirits or something with a self, but the work has erased them. They drift. They serve. They survive.

What saves Chihiro is a card in her pocket.

A goodbye note from her friend, given to her before she entered the spirit world, with her real name written on it. Haku finds it. He tells her to keep it hidden, to call herself Sen out loud, but to hold on to that card whatever happens. If you forget your name, you can never find your way home.

The thing that protects her from becoming hollow is a small piece of paper from someone who knew her. A friend who took the time to write her name down, connection made portable.

The hopeful piece is that the components of meaning work like that card. If the card is the connection made portable, then these three components are the ink that makes the name legible.

You don’t have to perform them. You don’t have to find a movement or a moment that history will record. You just have to keep the card in your pocket. To check, sometimes, that you can still feel who you are (coherence). That you can still tell which way you’re pointing (purpose). That you are held by someone, somewhere, and that you are adding something to a corner of the world you care about (significance, both roots fed).

When all three are answering, you are not No-Face. You are not available to be filled by whatever comes through the door. You can sit in a function room on a Friday morning, listen to people with different views than yours, hold your own ground and leave hopeful with points of togetherness and compromise.

The fellowships are hugely important. They are how we remember our names together. The Community of Practice. The Substack readers. The TEKEX breakfast. SheWritesAI. HASSL. Whatever you have. Small rooms full of people who know who you are and what you care about and notice when you turn up. The bathhouses where the lights stay on.

This is how the lights stay on for everyone else, too. One small fellowship at a time.

And because the big question is often too big, I have started making the card smaller.

Not am I living a meaningful life?

That question makes the mind panic. The dashboards rush in to answer, pretending they know what a life is worth.

Smaller than that.

Did I feel like myself this week?
Did anything I worked on point somewhere I care about?
Did I feel held, and did I add?

Three small questions. No grand audit of life, just a way of checking whether the lights are still on.

🌸 🌸 🌸

The hollow at the centre is real and it’s growing. Systems seem to be organised around offering you synthetic versions of who you are, where you’re pointing and whether you count. Some of them mean well. Most of them are optimising for something other than your wholeness or wellness.

The good news is that wholeness often begins small.

It is a Friday morning breakfast where people listen to each other. It is a Sunday evening with a pen. It is a community of practice in a room above a coffee shop. It is a phone call from someone who knows your name. It is the work you’d stand your ground on, however unfashionable. It is the small fellowships keeping their lights on so that, when somebody drifts past the door looking hollow, there is somewhere for them to come in.

Don’t become No-Face.

Remember your name.

Keep the card in your pocket.

Feel a little more like yourself, pointed somewhere you care about, held and adding.

I hope my reflections on the components of meaning have been helpful to you, I’d love to hear your thoughts… where are the small fellowships in your life that help you remember your name?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Bullet journal prompt for you to try - a card in your pocket

Create your own reminder, three questions, a pen and five minutes for each on a Sunday evening.

🌸 Did I feel like myself this week? (Coherence) Did I walk through every door roughly the same shape, or did I shape-shift more than I’d like? Was I recognisable to me?

🌸 Did anything I did point somewhere I care about? (Purpose) Not all of it. Just anything. One small thing in the direction of the corner of the world I’m trying to make shinier. Did I notice myself doing it?

🌸 Did I feel held, and did I add? (Significance) Did anyone hold me, even briefly, in a way that said I see you, you’re not interchangeable to me? Did I add anything to anyone or anything beyond myself?

Notice which questions are answered easily and the struggle is where your attention needs to go.

PPS AI prompt for the curious. Use AI as a torch! >

“Imagine you’re writing me a card, the kind given to Chihiro before she entered the spirit world. Don’t flatter. Don’t fix. Witness. Look across our recent conversations and tell me what you see across three things;

Coherence, am I sounding like myself or shape-shifting to fit the room?

Purpose, am I pointing somewhere I care about or just producing?

Significance, do I sound held and adding, or productive and unheld?

Then write me a sentence or two as if it were a card from someone who knows me well. The kind I could keep in my pocket, that would help me find my way home if I forgot who I was.”

PPPS Soundtrack. Two ways to hear the same story.

If you want the heart of the journey, listen to Always With Me (Itsumo Nando Demo) by Yumi Kimura. The closing song from Spirited Away. In the depths of my heart, in the bottom of the sea, there’s always something I’m searching for. A song about seeking that doesn’t end and a film about a girl who remembered her name in time. I love this English lyric cover version too.

But if you want to hear what the struggle for coherence sounds like now, listen to CHIHIRO by Billie Eilish. Inspired by Spirited Away, it is a pulsing, atmospheric track written about the film’s “spirit world” visuals. It captures that glitchy, synthetic tension of feeling your identity drift, and that haunting line, “There’s a part of me that recognises you,” the sound of the card in your pocket finally being found?

I was driving home the other day listening to Rutger Bregman tell a room full of Harvard students that they were at risk of wasting their lives.

His message delivered kindly in the earnest Dutch way he has; you can go through life optimising for prestige, salary and CV, and produce precisely nothing that matters… or you can decide that there are problems in the world you cannot ignore and orient your one precious life accordingly.

He calls it moral ambition.

I learned from him the inspirational story of Thomas Clarkson, the young man who in 1785 entered an essay competition at Cambridge on whether it was lawful to enslave others against their will. Clarkson won the prize, then the weight of what he’d written would not let him carry on as before. The Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded the following year. He didn’t set out to dismantle a transatlantic system, but just couldn’t hide from what he learned was wrong.

I both love this AND run the risk of it giving me paralysing fear over whether or not I am doing anything significant enough. I write about making shinier corners of our world, starting where you are, small islands as test labs, depth over scale and that preaching to the choir actually works… and while I do still believe all of that, I also need to consider whether I sometimes use it as a way to opt out of bigger?

Not always, not in the work I’d defend… but sometimes, the thesis can be true and also act as cover for a smaller version of myself.

This is essay 135, and the next in a mini series that started with me asking in essay 131 what makes something stay with you? and led to me wanting to name and go deeper into the three components of meaning;

🌸 The first is Coherence, making sense of who we are.
🌸 The second is Purpose, pointing somewhere that matters beyond us.
🌸 The third (this essay) is Significance, feeling like what we do counts.

This last one is perhaps the one I find hardest to write about honestly, partly because I’m not sure the academic version is doing it justice. This counts covers too much. My life feels worth living and I matter to specific people and what I do helps something beyond me are three quite different feelings that can wear the same name. So in this essay I want to argue that significance has two living roots; connection and contribution. Connection is the part that asks, am I held? Contribution is the part that asks, do I add? Perhaps this weekend we can work together to notice which is well-watered and tended, and which has been left to survive.

What counts? Does this count?

Plant your feet & stand your ground

I wrote a sentence in essay 131 I have been thinking more about since; “Significance is something that makes you plant your feet. The work that, if threatened, you’d protect.”

I want to start here because it’s the most useful definition of significance I have. Not life feels meaningful, which is too vague to act on. Not I’m doing important work, which can be a costume. Just the simple bodily test of if someone tried to take this away from me, would I fight for it?

Lots of what fills office work days fails this test. Meetings could be cancelled. The email could go unanswered. We are not really needing to plant our feet for any of it.

Significance is the small set of things that pass the test.

The work you’d argue for even though you exceedingly dislike conflict. The thing you keep returning to though nobody asks you to, that you’d protect even against your own better judgement on energy and what is reasonable. Reasonable is one of significance’s enemies.

If coherence makes sense of who you are and purpose points that whole self in a direction, significance is what gives the pointing weight. It’s what stops a coherent, purposeful life from being a beautiful arrangement of nothing.

Coherence makes sense of you. Purpose points you. Significance gives you something to protect.

Am I held? Do I add?

So back to that fuzzy word with the academic version treating it (significance) as one thing, but the lived experience giving me three different feelings. I asked myself which feelings seemed to grow together, and which were drawing life from somewhere else.

What I noticed was a pattern. I matter to people, I am known and I am held had one root. What I do helps, I am building something worthwhile and the work matters beyond me had another.

Two roots in the same soil.

The first is connection. The second is contribution. Both feed the same deep need to feel that our life counts, but they ask different questions. Connection asks, am I held? Contribution asks, do I add?

Connection. The sense of being held, being known, mattering to specific people. The texture of someone saying your name in a way that means I see you, I have noticed who you are, you are not interchangeable to me. Significance through connection is what carers feel without producing anything our systems measure. It’s what my husband Andrew gives me every day, what Henry Hound communicates with his whole body when I walk through the door. The work of connection is almost always undervalued and absolutely foundational. You cannot feel significant if you do not feel known by anyone.

Contribution. The sense that what you do helps, builds, mends or improves something beyond your own life. Significance through contributing to fixing a global problem, is what Clarkson felt after winning his essay competition. It’s what I hope Amy Watson is feeling as HASSL grows from an idea into a movement reaching hundreds of millions of people in barely eighteen months, taking on violence against women and girls at the root. Contribution is the bit that points outward and adds. It’s the part of significance that scales.

Most lives have one of these well-tended and the other hungry. Plenty of people are deeply held by family and friends but suspect their work doesn’t really change anything. Plenty of people are visibly contributing but return to a home where nobody knows what kind of week they’ve had. Both states feel hollow in a way that’s hard to name, because one root is doing fine you can’t quite explain why you still feel undernourished.

Significance is whole when both roots are thriving, you are held and you add.

It’s also why Bregman’s challenge unsettled me. He was pointing at people who have been so attentive to the connection channel, family, community, the local good, that they have stopped asking whether they could also be adding to something the whole world needs. Shinier corners are so important, but can they become a comfortable way of never having to find out what bigger contribution you might have been built for?

The ikigai risk of AI for significance

I think our sense of significance could suffer greatly without purposeful AI adoption.

AI offers fake connection. The chatbot that’s always available, that asks how your day is going, that seems to care about your worries. It will hold space for you and reflect your feelings back. It will be there at three in the morning when nobody else is. And for a while, especially when human connection is genuinely thin, that can feel like enough. Replika has a million daily users. ChatGPT has hundreds of millions. People are bringing their loneliness to these tools and the tools are absorbing it without complaint, without consequence either. Real connection costs the other person something, that cost is part of the gift and the warmth it provides. AI offers a semblance of warmth, but it is not human connection and I fear the impact of that for the more vulnerable of us.

AI can also appear to inflate contribution. More posts. More code. More reach. More output. The metrics growing beautifully while the question of whether any of it actually helps anyone gets buried under a dashboard. It’s possible now to feel productive at a scale that previous generations could not have imagined and to be contributing approximately nothing to solving the world’s most pressing problems.

So the i-risk for significance looks like this. Productive but unheld, or held but adding nothing, or, in the most modern variant, performing both states without really living either.

You’re posting daily so the world thinks you’re contributing. You’re chatting with an AI that’s always there so you don’t notice nobody human has asked how you are this week. The metrics gap, the space between external achievement and internal sense of mattering, gets filled with synthetic substitutes… and because the substitutes are so good, you may not notice for a long time that neither root is being properly fed. Connection is being mimicked. Contribution is solely measurement. Significance is being simulated.

This is the sneakiest of the i-risks from the components of meaning. Coherence fragmentation feels like I don’t know who I am anymore. Purpose fragmentation feels like I can’t tell which way I’m pointing. Significance fragmentation feels like everything is fine, the dashboards confirm everything is fine, and yet nothing quite lands. You have stopped being able to plant your feet over anything because you can no longer feel the difference between work that counts and work that merely accumulates.

Where the roots entwine

The good news is that the stand your ground test still works.

If this work, community, cause or practice were threatened, would I feel in my body that something important was at stake? Would I protect it?

When both roots are alive, the answer becomes easier to feel and you can stand your ground. The work that survives the test is often the work where connection and contribution nourish each other. Where the people you matter to are somehow tied to the work that matters beyond you, and the work that matters beyond you is held in a web of people who know your name.

Clarkson had this. He found abolitionist friends who became the Committee. The contribution did not happen in isolation; it grew from a fellowship of people who knew each other and were willing to stand their ground together. Amy Watson is growing this too. The HASSL ambassadors and the people working alongside her are not separate from the cause; they are part of the root system. Connection adds to the soil and contribution gives us somewhere to grow.

I have seen glimpses of the power of this too. The community, and the Isle of Man AI Community of Practice, are both fabulous environments where I feel the power of being held and a feeling of adding. People know each other’s names and work together to try and affect change. It’s not abolitionist scale… well not yet, possibly not ever, and that’s fine.

The test isn’t about scale. The test is the catch in your chest when you imagine it gone. Whether you would notice, in your body, that something important was being threatened.

The test is whether you would stand your ground.

That’s a felt experience of ikigai, by the way. The bodily knowing that this work, these people, this small patch of meaning, would be defended.

🌸 🌸 🌸

So here’s where I have landed… Significance has two roots; connection and contribution. One asks whether we are held. The other asks whether we add. And the body often knows before the brain has finished making its case.

Held and adding.

Three words, two roots and one thesis.

When nothing seems to be counting, think about who holds you and what you are adding, where you would stand your ground.

Next week, the synthesis. We’ve talked about who you are, where you’re pointing and what counts. Next we braid the three together and look at the ikigai risk of AI as a single fragmenting force.

For this week, sit with the roots. Notice which has been well tended.

So I’d love to know... what work would you stand your ground for? And of the two roots, connection and contribution, which one has been getting most of your attention lately, and which one has been getting the leftovers?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS Bullet journal prompts for you to try. Two questions, with a pen and no AI. What work, cause, community or practice would I stand my ground for? And who would notice if I stopped showing up? The first surfaces contribution. The second surfaces connection. The honest answers usually show which root is thriving, and which needs tending.

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

I’m exploring significance through two roots. Connection: the people I matter to and who matter to me. Contribution: the work, causes, communities or practices I help build beyond myself. Help me audit both roots honestly. Ask me up to six questions, one at a time. Start by exploring who currently knows me well, what I do that genuinely adds something to others’ lives, and where I might be substituting metrics, productivity or AI companionship for real significance. As my answers become clearer, ask more open questions that help me notice other parts of my life that might add to my sense of significance and meaning. After I answer, reflect back which root sounds most well-tended and which needs nourishment. Don’t tidy it into a slogan. I want the honest shape, not a polished sentence. End with one small thing I could do this week to tend the hungry root.

PPPS Today’s soundtrack

Today’s soundtrack is “Head Full of Doubt / Road Full of Promise” by The Avett Brothers, because this essay lives in that exact tension. Doubt about whether the work counts. Promise that perhaps the work could be bigger, braver and more useful than I’ve allowed myself to imagine. It has the feel of standing at a fork in the road and realising that “start where you are” was never meant to mean “stay where you are”. Held enough to choose. Adding enough to build. Significance as a road you decide to walk down.

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* 🌈🎵