13. Jobs, employment and ikagai
June 13, 2025 “Living-on” jobs
In this essay, I will continue to explore how language covertly drives our beliefs and our patterns, I’m finding myself again aware of the limitations our language has in terms of defining our needs. There are also cultural assumptions that drive our thinking - it makes sense that our language aligns with our cultural condition. Let us consider jobs and employment. For my entire life, I’ve heard the saying “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” It’s a very common refrain you hear when people are choosing college majors or deciding what career path to follow. As if, each of us, by the time we are 18 or so, deeply knows our heart’s desire. More recently, you may have also seen, like I have, stories on places like LinkedIn and reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/195s2d2/if_you_do_what_you_love_for_work_you_will_ruin/) that say the opposite, that making your passion into paid work can break your heart.
In my life, I have known people who have been able to make a career out of their natural talents; a friend recently used the word “ikagai” to describe his employment, referring to the Japanese concept of life purpose. I have also known many people who have jobs that are not their passion, but allow them to pay bills and provide the benefits that they and their family need; jobs that they can tolerate, that they sometimes enjoy, but that do not align with their purpose. We don’t talk about this in our culture, at least not in my experience, but it seems like an important distinction to have words for. I feel we need language that makes a distinction between people for whom their paid employment is aligned with their inner purpose.
Based on the hundreds of people I have known over my 57 years, I’d say most people are simply working a job to support themselves and their families. Some like their jobs, sure, but would drop them in a heartbeat if they could afford to not work. And I believe it will help us move forward on valuing our inner life if we were to acknowledge this and accept that this is nothing to be ashamed of. This is completely normal. This idea of our paid employment being aligned with life purpose is relatively new. I remember asking my dad who was born in 1938 if he liked his job. He had worked at the same company for almost his entire career, after spending four years in the Navy post-college. I was just out of college myself, fired up and inspired to find work that I found meaningful and rewarding. My dad seemed entirely confused by the question. “It’s work,” he said, “it pays the bills.” I remember this conversation well because it made me sad at the time. Now I am recognizing it as something wiser, more timeless than my 22-year-old self could appreciate. We need to pay bills. Things need to get done. What people are willing to pay us for is very likely to be something we do not have a deep desire in our heart to do. And that’s ok.
The way I will try to move us to this understanding is by introducing a new term for this – a “living-on” job. It’s a job we have to provide us with funds to live-on – to pay for our housing and food, support our family, provide healthcare and wellness, participate in leisure activities, and save money for the future. We can all work at our “living-on” jobs while we also consider what our ikagai is and how to grow it. Let’s shift away from the perception that those are the same thing. Musicians, actors, and other artists do this already because they most likely start out not making enough money to support their lives. But I am arguing that it is not only artists for whom this is relevant- we all have an inner purpose, a calling if you will, that we may be neglecting. Making this distinction opens up a lot of freedom and opportunity. We can focus on the skills and talents we are drawn to as part of our purpose and worry less about what type of employment it could lead to. We do need to think about what jobs our earned skills and natural talents align with, that could help us to find a job that does not wear us out and is sustainable, and that we can be good at. But it’s not our purpose, necessarily. Then, we could culturally start to talk about a calling as something you are able to explore separately from your paid employment.
I expect this would take a lot of pressure off of young people who are hoping to find meaningful work, and help all the mid-career people who may otherwise be disappointed in where their career path has taken them. Work the job that works for your life. Earn the money you need to earn. Separately, allow space for that idea of your calling or your passion, and see where it takes you.
