🌸 ikigai 生き甲斐 is a reason for being, your purpose in life... from the Japanese iki 生き meaning life and gai 甲斐 meaning worth 🌸
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.