You Don’t Need to Choose

“I’ve decided to take it easy at work this year and focus on myself.” I’ve recently been hearing variations of this sentence over and over again. Magazines are publishing stories about “the end of ambition” and how more people are taking extended sabbaticals. It seems like we need to make a constant choice between our … Read More

Purpose Anxiety: The Fear of not Knowing your Purpose in Life

“What am I here for?” is one of the oldest questions humans have been grappling with. For millennia, religion has provided for many a source of meaning — the comforting idea that someone was in control and that, even if we didn’t have the ability to comprehend it all, the world ultimately made sense. With … Read More

How to measure meaning in life

Philosophers and psychologists alike have long argued about the definition and factors of a meaningful life. What does it mean to live a meaningful life? Is meaningfulness necessary for happiness? While these questions may seem to belong to the realm of the metaphysical, meaningfulness is actually a field of experimental study, and scientists have devised … Read More

The neuroscience of ikigai

I lived in Japan for seven months when I was younger. For all of the challenges I faced there as a woman and a foreigner, I still was fascinated by the culture. Because Japan experienced a long period of relative isolation from the outside world—caused by sakoku (“closed country”), the isolationist foreign policy of the … Read More