Ikigai

ikigai

A [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) skill for discovering — better, *noticing* — what makes your life feel worth living, grounded in the actual Japanese scholarship on ikigai rather than the Western self-help caricature.

Invoke it with `/ikigai` from inside Claude Code. It walks you through seven short sessions across several weeks, with a quiet daily noticing habit in between. It writes to a journal at `~/Documents/ikigai/journal.md` that grows with you.

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Why this is the real thing

Most ikigai content on the internet is built around a four-circle Venn diagram — *what you love / what you're good at / what the world needs / what you can be paid for* — with "Ikigai" labeled in the middle intersection. **That diagram is not Japanese.** It was made by British entrepreneur Marc Winn in 2014 by taking Andrés Zuzunaga's 2011 "Purpose" diagram and swapping one word. Ken Mogi, the Japanese neuroscientist who wrote the bestselling book on ikigai, calls it "rubbish."

This skill refuses the diagram. It is built on primary Japanese sources:

• Mieko Kamiya — the psychiatrist who founded ikigai psychology. Her 1966 Ikigai ni Tsuite (生きがいについて) established the concept and its seven underlying human needs.
• Ken Mogi — the five pillars from The Little Book of Ikigai (2017): starting small, accepting yourself, connecting with others, the joy of little things, being in the here and now.
• The Ikigai-9 Scale — a validated nine-item instrument developed by Japanese researchers (Imai et al.), used here for baseline and re-measure.
• The Ohsaki Study — the 43,391-person cohort study (Sone et al., 2008) where higher ikigai predicted lower mortality. The researchers asked one question: "Do you have ikigai in your life?" They did not draw circles.
• Morita therapy & the arugamama ("as-it-is") tradition — for the idea that ikigai can live in dutiful, repeated attention, not just in things you "love."

What the skill holds onto t