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

My democratic anxiety requires a bullet journal spread.

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

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

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

Subjects that keep me up at night

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The soft stuff becomes the hard stuff

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

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

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

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

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

• Curious Caleb asks, what might we be missing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

People are equal, ideas are not

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before polling day

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

I cannot make permanent despair my contribution to democracy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much love

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS ✍️ For your bullet journal

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

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

PPS 🌟 An AI reflection prompt

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

PPPS 🎶 This week’s soundtrack

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

I spent my Bank Holiday Monday mooching and journalling.

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

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

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

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

Down the dictionary rabbit hole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your values are not always friends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Makoto, or staying whole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The problem with problems

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

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

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

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

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

Bad is very good at getting our attention

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

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

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

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

Purpose needs a picture painting

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

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

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

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

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

Joy is not a distraction from the work

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

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

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

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

Twelve favourite possibilities

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

For each one, I will ask three questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The light we pass along

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Bullet Journal prompt

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

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

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

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

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

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

We answered, “We do.”

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

It was Wedfest, handmade, heartfelt and perfectly imperfect.

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

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

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

The love I want

Long before Andrew, there was an Elton John song.

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

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

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

Love, respect and fancy

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

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

I still love that formulation.

❤️ Love holds the emotional connection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two songs together

This is where the second Elton John song enters.

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

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

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

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

Being seen into becoming & purpose in the plural

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

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

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

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

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

We still do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy anniversary, Andrew.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS A love, respect and fancy review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PPS An AI prompt for a gift that shows you notice

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

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

PPPS The soundtrack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The words we borrow

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

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

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

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

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

Who is machine mode modelled on?

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

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

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

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

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

Room in the sleeve

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

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

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

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

What rest turns out to be

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

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

• Reading

• Sleeping or napping

• Nature

• Spending time alone

• Listening to music

• Doing nothing in particular

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

Somebody has to go first

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

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

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

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

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

What word am I going to use instead of recharging?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - A bullet journal spread for lying fallow

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

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

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

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

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

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

PPS - An AI prompt for telling rest from maintenance

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

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

PPPS - The soundtrack

I’m Only Sleeping by The Beatles

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

I didn’t know what to write today.

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

Today, not so much.

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

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

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

Most of life happens between the big moments

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

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

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

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

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

Purpose has to be able to live there too.

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

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

Their sense of purpose moved.

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

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

But I love the possibility hidden inside it.

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

Meaning might emerge while we are busy doing the living.

One block at a time

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

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

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

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

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

What we choose to cultivate

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

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

Sometimes you need to plant.

Sometimes you need to prune.

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

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

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

• Starting small

• Releasing yourself

• Harmony and sustainability

• The joy of little things

• Being in the here and now

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

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

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

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

Not everything needs optimising

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

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

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

Perhaps the antidote to optimisation is cultivation.

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

What are you tending?

Which brings me back to this morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - A little bullet journal gardening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PPPS - The soundtrack

The Garden by Rush

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Anna

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

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

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

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

A tribute in tracks

Night Fever

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

Older Than My Years

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

Horoscope

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

You Slayed All My Monsters

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

With Davy Knowles at the Garden Party

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

Be Here Tomorrow

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

Angel

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

A Revolution of Hope

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

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

Name that tube

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

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

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

The Island she loved and nurtured

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

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

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

She made ma for all of us.

Fermata, kept

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

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

We keep the beat

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

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

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

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

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

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

We love you forever and ever.

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The waiting

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

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

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

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

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

Enough reasons

So what do we do, in the waiting?

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

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

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

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

Fermata

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

We keep the beat

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

PPS Try this with your preferred AI tool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The freedom to pursue a life of your own

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

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

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

More doors opening for more people.

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

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

The power to shape the terms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mind that does not stop at the skin

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

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

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

Perhaps AI can too.

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

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

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

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

What I would need to see & the ikigai question underneath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four columns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can’t KPI a child

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

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

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

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

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

What difference did you make?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The columns a spreadsheet can’t hold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fourth column wears a lanyard

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

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

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

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

• What do we believe this work is ultimately for?

• What assumptions connect our activity to that purpose?

• What evidence would strengthen or weaken that belief?

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

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

Ships that didn’t sink

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

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

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

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

“Here is my first column, what I did.

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

What it produced, output.

What changed, outcome.

What I believe it meant, meaning.

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

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

Label each statement as evidence, inference or belief.

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

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

The row with the strongest evidence.

The row where my contribution was most shared.

The row where belief is doing the heaviest lifting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phase 1: the foundation, and what you love

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

A) what you love

1 Joy audit

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

2 Labels & loves

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

3 Values deep dive

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

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

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

B) what you’re good at (skill)

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

4 Effortless wins

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

5 Skills test

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

6 Ask three people

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

C) what you can be paid for (value)

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

7 Paid & thanked

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

8 Market scan

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

9 Smallest paid test

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

D) what the world needs (problem)

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

10 twelve favourite problems

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

11 SDG exercise

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

12 Talk to one

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

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

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

Face your constraints

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

Synthesise with AI

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

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

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

The point of all this

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was seeking comfort I guess.

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

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

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

Worse than empty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The name nobody used

Then, this week, the strangest sort of relief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purpose.

Agency.

Dignity.

Judgement.

Human relationships.

The slow surrender of the mind.

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

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

Thirty plants & thirty unprompted things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• A diagram drawn by hand.

• A walk where I thought instead of asked.

• A question I let sit unanswered overnight.

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

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

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

Making more of a fuss

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - Bullet journal prompt reflections;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have already stroked the cover several times.

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

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

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

A clean slate undermines acceptance

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

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

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

I do not need a new me

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the journal became

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

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

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

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

Closing time is not failure

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

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

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

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

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

Same woman, new notebook

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

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

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

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From cheat to treasure

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

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

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

The joy engineers

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

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

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

Finding your people

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

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

Joy is an input

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Be the developer

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

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

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

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

Player One, you’re up.

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

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

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

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

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

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

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.