Introducing abigai

If you’ve spent any time at all in the personal development world, you’ve almost certainly have run into the concept of ikigai.

Look a little closer and you’ll find out how a nuanced Japanese philosophy was commercialised for Western consumers. In the hands of career coaches and corporate consultants, it was stripped of its cultural roots and neatly squeezed into a Venn diagram about productivity and profit.

In global culture, ikigai is widely visualized as a Venn diagram where four core elements overlap.

Finding your ikigai, in this context, means identifying an activity or career that satisfies all four criteria:

What you love: Your core passions, hobbies, and the things that bring you pure joy
What you are good at: Your natural talents, developed skills, and strengths
What the world needs: The value you can provide to your community or society
What you can be paid for: A viable market, job, or business model that sustains you financially

There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach, but it can turn every interest into a problem of optimisation.

Can you monetise it? Does it serve a purpose? Are you good enough at it? Does the world need it?

What happens to all the things that don’t fit?

The hobby you aren’t very good at. The book you read that changes nothing. The journey that leads nowhere. The painting you never finish (or even start).

What about all the things that make life interesting but contribute nothing measureable?

As part of my studies in the Faculty of Nothing in Particular at The Academy of Abigail, I am proposing a completely unnecessary alternative to this model of so-called ikigai.

It seems appropriate.

ab•i•gai \ ˈa-bi-ˌgī \
noun

The art of doing things for no particular reason.

Etymology
Early 21st century; formed as a deliberate blend of Abigail (source of joy) and the Japanese ikigai (a reason for being), signifying the physical space or state of comfort where one’s life can simply be peacefully pursued.

abigai is a philosophy of living that rejects the idea that everything we do must have a purpose, fulfil a need, generate income, improve ourselves or contribute to something greater. Sometimes the reason to get out of bed is simply because we can hear the bin lorry and we forgot to put the green bin out last night.

The principle of abigai is that you don’t have to find the purpose of an activity to justify doing it. You can do it because you are curious, because it’s fun, because you have never tried it before, because it makes an afternoon more interesting, or because you simply feel like it.

It doesn’t need to:

Earn money
Improve your health
Advance your career
Develop a marketable skill
Make you a better person
Contribute to society
Become a project
Lead to anything else

It can just be something you did, and you can stop whenever you like.

Rather than replacing the familiar ‘ikigai ‘diagram with another model that tells you how you should organise your life for ultimate fulfilment, I am creating an alternative that refuses to organise anything.

Imagine a diagram with the following elements:

Things I love

Things I’m curious about

Things I might try

Things I’m terrible at

Things I have abandoned

Things I do for no particular reason

Things that might become something

Things that absolutely will not

And in the middle?

Nothing in particular. No intersection, missing piece to complete or requirement to turn the contents into a coherent identity.

The four questions of abigai:

Do I want to?
Why not?
What happens if I do?
Does it actually matter if nothing comes of it?

Unlike the popularised western concept of ikigai (which isn’t really ikigai at all), abigai doesn’t require finding the intersection between passion, talent, purpose and paid work. It doesn’t require an intersection at all.

I don’t have to find my purpose. I can just get on with living, like the (currently) living organism I am.

So can you.