Ikigai

A short, breezy read that makes you kinda feel good about living. Or at least, that you could do better. I like this book because it pulls from other great sources, like Blue Zones of Happiness, and Flow State from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yeah, I don't think I pronounced it right).

Ikigai is a Japanese word that roughly translates to “the reason you get up in the morning” and the researchers (I assume they're researchers anyway) follow the advice and lives of Okinawans. Supposedly, there are more 100+ year olds living there than anywhere else in the world.

I give it four stars. Plus, it makes for a lot of deep discussion about living, culture, and society.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The beginning of this book seemed unrealistic and generic as other self help books are. One sentence in the book was rather eye opening.
Being a practising artist it's difficult not to think about selling work. In the midst of it all you lose sense of achievement and progressing in your profession. To do it better quickly, you do it worse. However, when the author talked about how artists have no retirement age. That stayed with me. My profession actually allows freedom from the rat race. My life doesn't end at 60.
I am free to be me until the end of me.

A great look into Eastern “self-help” and finding your purpose. This was my introduction into Eastern views on these topics and Ikigai was a good introduction.

Great takeaways about staying active, including examples (with photos) of the exercises. My favorite part was all the interviews conducted by the author's and the digests of those.

Okay-ish. I liked the first half, mostly because it mentioned a lot about local Japanese culture. Also why I picked the book for my year end trip to Japan, I want to know local things.

Second half was more of advice and tips without a story, which I don't enjoy reading. Too much advice and info anyway in the world, I'd rather read stories.