Geo had a friend over the other night. While playing together in his room, his friend found a toy robot. He asked, “what does it do?”. After watching Geo eagerly show him the awesome steam that comes out of his hand in tandem with its slick disco moves, I started pondering a bit on this question; what does it do?
I would imagine that a casting agent for a Broadway production would ask the same of his auditioning actors. Can he sing and dance? Can she project her voice? Juggle? Do a back flip?
That question: what does it do, for a human becomes a question of vocation. This is not necessarily someone’s job. It is rather a feeling of a strong suitability for some type of work. It is a place where someone wants to give all of their time and energy. Some people are lucky enough to regard their profession as a vocation and not just a job. For others, it is a trickier thing.
The Japanese use the term ikigai to mean ‘a reason for getting out of bed each morning’. Finding ikigai is key to living a happy life. When someone is infused with a strong sense of ikigai, each day is lit up with more meaning.
When a person finds what they want to pour their time and attention into, when they feel a strange calling or suitability towards something, then the robot inside is ready to work for us, as it was built to. We have the capacity to become masters at a chosen activity, thanks to the robot.
Colin Wilson writes about the robot that lives within us all which serves as an evolutionary time-saving device. When we learn something new, like typing for example, it is at first an arduous task that deserves our complete attention. But pretty soon our robot takes over and ‘types’ for us while we are free to think about what we want to write. The robot familiarizes these things so we don’t have to devote so much attention and time to them.
The problem is the robot also familiarizes things we don’t want it to, like the freshness of the new day. It renders a piece of music less powerful after hearing it a couple times, it demystifies aromas and deflates the majesty of a vista. The robot has a terrible tendency to convince a person that there is nothing new under the sun.
Wilson often quotes T.S. Elliots phrase “where is the life we’ve lost in living?” to get this idea across.
The robot is clearly needed. We can’t move forward without it. Yet we also can easily sink backward if we don’t keep its habits of “devaluing life” at bay.
And here is where ikigai and the question of vocation serves as a remedy. There is no room for life devaluation when life feels purposeful, and rich with forward movement.
It is this kind of identity, one that merges with a chosen activity, that has real staying power in a psyche. That chosen activity is an orientation to life that is forward-moving, like a reason to get out of bed each morning. Ikigai is like the arrow of time, it goes forth.
The philosopher FWJ Schelling said, “Time is not something that flows independently of the self; the self itself is time conceived of in activity.”
The question becomes, how much more Self do we become when that activity is meaningful and correctly chosen? How much more natural do we become when such an activity is something we feel suited for, even born for? This is the essence of ikigai, and the real purpose of the robot within us.
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