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.
4
The single greatest lesson we can learn from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
The ikigai idea of having a purpose reminds me of my favorite quote from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree.
“Which road do I take?” she asked.
“Where do you want to go?” was his response.
“I don’t know,” Alice answered.
“Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”
5
The horrible idea the Germans had that ruined things for everybody
Where did retirement even come from? No purpose, no ikigai?
It doesn’t matter which way you go if you don’t know where you’re going.
Sure, we all have bad days at work. Bosses agitate, coworkers frustrate. But work gives us purpose, belonging, and direction. Retirement plucks us out of the spinning gears of the world and drops our withered bones off at the beach. Now you’re nowhere, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Ever again!
Why did we think this was a good idea?
Who came up with this plan?
The Germans.
Yes, it was their invention of retirement completely out of the blue in 1889 that established the concept for all of us. Retirement was meant to free up jobs for young people by paying those sixty-five years and older to do nothing till they died.
But there was one big difference between 1889 Germany and the world we live in today.
The average life span was sixty-seven years old.
“Those who are disabled from work by age and invalidity have a well-grounded claim to care from the state,” said Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of Germany, in 1889. Given retirement age and average life span were two years apart, that was easy for him to say. Penicillin wasn’t discovered for another forty years!
Otto ended up setting an arbitrary world standard for retirement age at sixty-five. The number had no significance other than its proximity to the age people died. Other developed countries kept following suit in the years to follow, which brings us to today.
Harold Koenig is an expert on retirement. A table from his Purpose and Power in Retirement shows the percentage of men over age sixty-five still working by year:
1880 − 78%
1900 − 65%
1920 − 60%
1930 − 58%
1940 − 42%
1960 − 31%
1980 − 25%
2000 − 16%
Here is an excerpt from his history of retirement painted in his excellent book:
At first, retirement—especially forced retirement—was viewed negatively by a significant proportion of the American population. Some studies indicated that 50–60 percent of those over age sixty-five would continue working if retirement could be deferred . . . “Activity theory” argued that retirement was a violation of older persons’ need for social and occupational integration . . .
After World War II, older persons in America became more and more a generation separate from the rest of a society that did not value them or their contributions. Young adults, who in the past often lived, raised their families, and worked near their parents’ homes, were becoming increasingly mobile because of jobs that frequently took them to a different state or across the country. At the same time, older adults were becoming more financially secure because of pensions and entitlement programs. They were also living longer and having better health because of advances in medicine and healthier lifestyles. Because of increased finances and improved health, older adults began to rely less and less on children and other family members. It was into this “cultural vacuum,” says [author Marc] Freedman, that the leisure entrepreneurs stepped in to offer older adults their vision of the “golden years.”
The first inkling of such efforts were seen in 1951 when the Corning Corporation had a roundtable discussion in which a national marketing campaign was proposed to educate people over fifty about how to enjoy leisure. The strategy was to glamorize leisure and to make every older adult feel like he or she had a right to it. Insurance companies, deeply involved in the pension business, got into the act by mass advertisement of retirement preparation classes that encouraged separation from society and focused on consumption and self-preoccupation. This began the transformation of retirement as a time of rest, relaxation, and fun that every American would look forward to as the reward for a lifetime of hard labor . . . Efforts were made to counteract the principle that work had value in itself, arguing that the psychological and social needs met in the workplace could be fulfilled just as well outside of it . . .