Define Your Delicious

A recipe for self-authored living, your own version of beautiful

🌸 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 still remember the first spoonful of goosegog crumble at my Nana’s house when I was seven. It cost next to nothing, growing abundantly in our council estate gardens… scalding hot and sharp and messy and a little burned at the edges with cold cold custard to sweeten and contrast. No Michelin star, yet utterly hers and mine. A moment in time that whispers to me when I'm tempted to accept someone else's neat and expensive slice of life. Does it taste like my crumble or like their polite, posh canapé?

Recently stood in a friend's pristine kitchen admiring marble countertops and spice jars containing things I’ve never even heard of with a fleeting thought of “I should save up to make my kitchen like this”... and then wondering why I was even having that thought, I always wanted a sparkly glittery one when looking for Pinterest inspo!

The goosegog whisper awoke and made me question, why is it so easy to measure our success in life against someone else's idea of delicious?

The second-hand menu

We're handed a prix-fixe from birth. GCSEs, A-Levels, degrees, sensible jobs, mortgage, pension pot, the annual beach body by Summer panic. Polite society even provides a garnish of productivity hacks so we can swallow it down even faster. But an inherited menu can never account for the seasoning of our quirks, wounds and secret dreams.

Society collectively agreed that salary figures, postcode prestige, and brand recognition would determine our worth. We accepted that productivity equals value, that busy equals important, that expensive equals better. We let external validators become our internal compass.

But who keeps reinforcing that these are the rules and recipes worth sticking to?

The most insidious part about living by society's scorecard is how natural it feels. From childhood, we're trained to measure ourselves against external markers. Gold stars, test scores, rankings, job titles. Each milestone another rung on someone else's ladder.

Perhaps it's time to create our own menu.

The adventure of tasting

An adventure needn't be a huge big difficult thing, more a take a different route home than do a trek to the South pole kinda vibe. Yesterday I wrote a paragraph of a challenging email in Comic Sans purely because it made me grin and took some of the pain out of it. Five minutes later I returned to Calibri, but the experiment reminded me I am free to season my sentences, and my schedule, however I fancy.

This is what Ken Mogi calls "starting small" in his 5 pillars of ikigai framework. You don't need a complete life overhaul. One tiny taste test, one small rebellion against inherited expectations, one moment of choosing authenticity over approval.

What if you intentionally tried next week to notice when you feel most alive versus when you feel most "successful"? Is Sunday contentment actually more valuable to us than Monday showmanship?

Start with curiosity. Ask yourself "What made me feel most deliciously me this week?" Maybe it was something at work… or maybe it was the quiet satisfaction of organising a chaotic drawer whilst listening to the gulls throw back their heads and shout joyfully outside your window.

Measuring flavour

How do we know when our day has tasted good? Society offers us convenient metrics of success and so-called taste; salary bumps, likes, appraisal scores, steps walked, tasks completed… but these can often leave us feeling oddly empty after the initial sugar rush. Like eating a beautiful dragonfruit that somehow tastes of nothing.

Real ikigai suggests different measurements entirely. What if instead of asking "How much did I earn today?" we asked "How alive did I feel?" … or “How many people did I make smile?”

Energy over exhaustion. Notice the difference between feeling energised and feeling drained and how often it happens. When do you finish work feeling lighter rather than heavier? Which conversations leave you buzzing with possibility versus depleted and flat? Energy is honest feedback from your body about what genuinely serves you.

Presence over productivity. Some of the most meaningful moments can't be measured in outputs. The afternoon you spent listening to a friend who needed to talk. The hour you "wasted" watching clouds shift over the Irish Sea which sparked an idea that saved you several hours. The evenings you put your phone away and actually taste and savour each mouthful of your dinner. These moments embody what ikigai calls "being in the here and now", presence rather than performance.

Kindness over competition. Did you build someone up today or tear them down? Did you choose compassion over clever comebacks? Did you treat yourself with the same gentleness you'd offer a good friend? The ripple effects of kindness, to others and yourself, matter more than any metric on a spreadsheet.

Curiosity over certainty. What made you genuinely interested today? Which problems drew you in not because you had to solve them, but because they fascinated you? Curiosity is ikigai's secret ingredient, it leads us toward "the joy of little things" and helps us notice what actually matters.

Authenticity over approval. Did you choose what felt right or what looked right? Did you honour your actual preferences or perform someone else's version of success? The days that taste best are usually the ones where you've been most yourself, even in small ways.

What would you do even if no one was watching? What do you find yourself thinking about whilst walking along the beach?

These aren't random feelings, they're breadcrumbs leading toward your own definition of delicious. Start tracking them like you would any other important data, because they are.

Bubbles of beauty

It’s so magical to create spaces and rituals that reflect your authentic preferences rather than magazine spreads. My office currently features a chipped beaker filled with a bunch of sweet peas, a rainbow neon sign that says ‘LOVE WINS’ and a mixture of completed and new unused journals and notebooks. None of it matches. All of it helps me breathe.

This connects beautifully with ikigai's principle of "releasing yourself", embracing your messy, imperfect humanity instead of some polished version you think the world wants.

Your bubbles of beauty might include fairy lights where others expect grownup lighting, books scattered on surfaces where design magazines suggest minimalism, or plants thriving in spots where they technically shouldn't because you like a bit of gorgeous chaos.

What makes your desk sing? Your living room whisper contentment? Your walking route feel like an outdoors expression of home?

Rewards & rituals

Society teaches us to reward ourselves with things that often numb rather than nourish. Shopping sprees after stressful weeks. Wine to "unwind". Expensive treats that provide temporary pleasure but lasting debt.

What if we reframed rewards as replenishment instead of bribery? Which treats actually refuel you rather than exhaust you further? What is a better investment in yourself?

For me, it's early morning walks along the shore before anyone else is up and my Island feels empty and infinite. A decadent afternoon in a bath with no agenda except relaxation and warmth. Time spent writing without worrying whether anyone will read it. Joining a new group of likeminded people in a monthly masterclass or community.

These rituals might look unremarkable to others, but they taste like home to me.

A most delicious day

06:30 Wake to gulls and cold toes, pad out into the garden with a mug of coffee

07:00 Beach walk with sketches forming in my head for an essay

08:00 Deep-work block… drafting, fave songs in the background, completely absorbed

11:30 Coffee replenishment, Wordle break, messages with friends

12:30 Taking Henry Hound out somewhere he can joyously chase his ball

13:00 Marmite on toast

13:30 Work that feels like play finishing with a satisfying click of "publish"

16:00 Time with people I love, conversation that meanders

18:00 Tasty tea, more chats and laughs… watching something entertaining

22:15 Journal reflection; Did today taste good?

22:30 Bed. Dog snoring. Heart light.

Not especially Instagram-worthy but everything soul-sustaining. Your delicious day will look completely different, and that's exactly the point.

The gentle edit

Each week asking ourselves two questions… What's feeling stale? What's begging for a bigger bite?

One gets nudged off the plate, the other gets a booking in next week's diary. Progress by plate-rotation, not plate-smashing. This is ikigai's "harmony and sustainability" in practice… rhythms that nourish rather than deplete.

The courage to define your own delicious means accepting that some people might not understand your choices. It means being okay with looking unsuccessful by conventional standards whilst feeling deeply successful by your own.

Your delicious will be different from mine, and that's the entire point. The adventure lies in the discovery, in peeling back the layers of should and supposed to until you find the core of what actually matters to you. In creating spaces and routines and goals that fit your particular way of being alive.

In learning to trust that your version of beautiful, successful, meaningful life is worth pursuing, even if it doesn't look like anyone else's.

Especially then.

Your invitation to taste

What would a "delicious day" include for you? Not the day that would impress others, but the day that would make you feel most deeply yourself?

Start small. Notice one tiny pul towards joy tomorrow. Ask yourself what made you forget to check your phone this week. Trust that your preferences are data, not flaws.

Because at the end of the day, you're the one living your life. Shouldn't you be the one keeping score?

Sarah, seeking ikigai xxx

PS - ✍️ Bullet Journal Reflection Prompts;

"If I could design tomorrow with zero regard for what others think, what would it include?"

"What metrics am I currently using to measure my days? Which ones actually serve me?"

"What small thing am I doing because I 'should' that I could gently remove from my life?"

PPS - 🌟 AI Super Prompt;

"I'm designing my own life menu and scorecard rather than using society's default recipes and metrics. Based on what I've shared about my authentic preferences and energy patterns [either paste in journal pages, or a brain dump, or if using ChatGPT with memory on or a Claude project with a knowledgebase of your writing you don’t need to attach anything more], please help me create a personalised balanced scorecard across these key life dimensions: Work/Purpose, Relationships/Connection, Health/Energy, Creativity/Growth, Rest/Renewal, and Service/Impact.

For each dimension, suggest meaningful metrics I could track that would actually indicate whether I'm thriving (not just surviving). These should be qualitative measures of aliveness, authenticity, and alignment rather than traditional productivity metrics. Then help me identify potential early warning signals for each dimension - subtle signs that would alert me when I'm drifting away from what truly nourishes me.

Finally, design a simple weekly review framework I could use to check in with these dimensions and make gentle course corrections. I want this to be easy, feel sustainable and life-giving, not like another task to optimise."

PPPS - 🎶 Soundtrack for defining your delicious this week: "Beneath Your Beautiful" by Labrinth ft. Emeli Sandé.

Because the whole point of defining your delicious is learning to see past the glossy surface of society's scorecard to discover what's actually beautiful to YOU underneath it all. This song reminds us that real worth isn't found in the polished and pretty version of success, but in the authentic, sometimes messy truth of who we are and what genuinely nourishes us. It's an invitation to look deeper, past the marble countertops and ivory towers, to find the beauty that can only be measured by how alive, how present, how ourselves we feel.

PPPPS - I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, to connect and converse.. If your current life had a flavour, what would it be? And what flavour are you actually craving?