In this video, Nick Kemp delves into the importance of meaningful roles in life—covering both professional and personal spheres. While work often serves as a default purpose or ikigai due to the time invested, psychologist Gordon Mathews and neuroscientist Ken Mogi suggest that focusing solely on a professional role can limit our broader sense of purpose.
Finding meaningful sources of ikigai
Nick: I think it highlights the importance of role. Like we all have roles, multiple roles, professional, family roles. And I guess in a way, if you lose both, you'd wake up thinking: what am I going to do? I just can't keep lounging about. And maybe, to some degree, hobbies don't fully satisfy a person's sense of purpose.
It reminds me actually of Gordon Mathews and Ken Mogi. Gordon Mathew said, work becomes this de facto ikigai because you spend so much time at work. It's all that you do. And then Ken Mogi warns us, he described it so poetically, that if you restrict yourself to a professional role, you have this tragic loss of ikigai opportunities.
And I guess if you've done that, and then you finally retire, it'd be very hard to break away from the past and find something new. So it's fascinating that you can reach this point where retirement's sort of this prized time of your life, yet, it sounds like a lot of people struggle to transition to find a meaningful role or to find meaningful sources of ikigai.