Ikigai (Garcia and Miralles)

The Ikigai book flashed in the bestseller section of bookshops for multiple years. I first glanced through the book in one of the Bangalore stores. I loved the physical appearance of the book. It is very 'neat and clean'. The colour theme of the covers is charming. The book is very light in weight. It feels great to hold the book in hand.

The feel-good continues as one starts reading the chapters. The book does a nice job of introducing interesting ideas from other best-sellers like

• logotherapy from Viktor Frenkl's works
• anti-fragile from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• optimum-daily-mental-challenges to create new neural pathways from Martin Seligman's Learned-Optimism

The book also introduces well-known and proven practices/habits/tricks that enrich our lives and are stimulating. For example:

• mental health hacks like gratitude-journaling, cultivating a few good friends, meditation, deep-breathing, and being okay with imperfection (wabi-sabi)
• physical health hacks like stopping eating before the stomach is full, walking and adequate sleep
• Productivity hack like Pomodoro based time management.
• Describes the fun of Japanese script by drawing picture analogies
• Explains the concept of 'escape velocity of life' in the context of immortality

Unfortunately, for me, all the above were known facts. So it felt like listening to a joke which I already knew. It felt okay to reaffirm my existing knowledge but it failed to delight me as a reader.

I did learn some new beautiful stuff though:

• Shakunaga porcelain created by master artisan (Takumi)
• Miyazaki and his studio Ghibli

There were a few aspects in the book which I found slightly jarring and disappointing:

• It talked about wine being good for health (which is a debunked theory).
• The meaning of 'om manipadme hum' looked out-and-out incorrect.
• The authors are too fixated on a 'long' life. I feel more inclined towards a more impactful/purposeful life, rather than the mere duration of life. As Rajesh Khanna said in the movie Anand "zindagi bari honi chaahiye, lambi nahi".

However, to summarize, I would still say it is a good book. I will recommend it to folks unfamiliar with the concepts I wrote above. For me, too much familiarity with the content prevented the book from being a 'wow'.