The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

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What can the healthiest one-hundred-year-olds in the world teach us?

Men and women in Okinawa live an average of seven years longer than Americans and have the longest disability-free life expectancy on Earth. Ancient Chinese legends call these sandy islands popping out of the sparkling blue East China Sea “the land of the immortals.” This is where a ninety-six-year-old defeated a former boxing champ in his thirties. This is where a 105-year-old killed a poisonous snake with a flyswatter. There are more people over a hundred years old there than anywhere.

Researchers from National Geographic were so fascinated by Okinawans that they studied what helped them live so long. What did they find out? They eat off smaller plates, they stop eating when they’re 80% full, and they have a beautiful setup where they’re put into social groups as babies to slowly grow old together.

But they also have an outlook on life that is very different from ours in the West. While we think of retirement as the golden age of putting greens, cottage docks, and staring at the clouds, guess what they call retirement in Okinawa?

They don’t!

They don’t even have a word for retirement.

Literally nothing in their language describes the concept of stopping work completely.

Instead, they have the word ikigai (pronounced like “icky guy”), which roughly means “the reason you wake up in the morning.” You can think of it as the thing that drives you most.

In Okinawa there is a 102-year-old karate master whose ikigai is to carry forth his martial art, a 100-year-old fisherman whose ikigai is to feed his family, a 102-year-old woman whose ikigai is to hold her great-great-great-granddaughter.

Sound bunk?

Well, Toshimasa Sone and his colleagues at the Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine thought it might be—so they put the ikigai concept to a test. They spent seven years in Sendai, Japan, studying the longevity of more than forty-three thousand Japanese adults, looking at age, gender, education, body mass index, cigarette use, alcohol consumption, exercise, employment, perceived stress, history of disease, and even subjects’ self-rated scores of how healthy they were. Then they asked every single one of these forty-three thousand people: “Do you have an ikigai in your life?”

Can you guess what they found out?

Participants reporting an ikigai at the beginning of the study were more likely to be married, educated, and employed. They had higher levels of self-rated health and lower levels of stress.

What about at the end of the seven-year study?

95% of folks with an ikigai were alive!

Only 83% of those without an ikigai made it that long.

So guess what I gave Leslie for Christmas last year?

An ikigai card. I made two cards out of construction paper, folded them up, and put one on each of our bedside tables. They cost me about ten cents. We each wrote down our ikigai and left the cards on our bedsides. She wrote “To turn young minds into future leaders,” and I wrote “To remind myself and others how lucky we are to be alive.” We leave the cards on our nightstands so we’re reminded of them first thing in the morning. We change what they say sometimes. I changed my ikigai to “Finish writing The Happiness Equation” for a while.

Why do we have these ikigais?

They are a reason to get up in the morning.

With an ikigai card when you wake up . . . you know where you’re going.