The other day, over coffee with my friend Hanna, I had another of those conversations about the meaning of life (the 42nd one). We found ourselves wondering why so many people feel so lost despite all their attempts to find themselves.
We’ve become masters of introspection. We meditate. We journal. We analyse our thoughts and feelings with the precision of brain surgeons. It’s a strange paradox of our times, if you ask me. In the age where everyone’s looking for biohacks for happiness, longevity, and fulfilment, we’re overlooking the most powerful “hack” of all – genuine human connection and service to others.
Simon Sinek puts it perfectly:
“We’ve architected our lives to be lonely.”
It’s a strange paradox of our times, if you ask me. In the age where everyone’s looking for biohacks for happiness, longevity, and fulfilment, we’re overlooking the most powerful “hack” of all – genuine human connection and service to others.
Sometimes I think about my grandparents’ generation. They didn’t have the luxury of endless soul-searching. They worked in fields (forced by the Germans, and then when liberated), they sowed the grain and mowed it from morning till night, bred like rabbits (free workforce 😉) and raised large families – not because these were their “calling”, but because that’s what needed to be done and because there was not much choice.
I’m not romanticising their era. It was undeniably harder in many ways, with fewer opportunities, especially for women. It was all about survival and creating something out of nothing. My mom said if they ever had a desert, it was usually bread sprinkled with sugar or a similar fancy dish.
But there’s something striking about their clarity of purpose. When your choices are limited and there’s work to be done, you don’t spend much time questioning your path. In fact, ironically, the busier you are, the more you seem to be able to achieve.
We live in an age of abundance – of choices, information, and opportunities. We can work remotely for companies across the globe, switch careers with a few online courses, start a business from our laptops. It should be liberating. Yet for many, those limitless choices have become a burden. I see it in my friends’ endless career pivots and dating app swipes. We’ve become professional self-optimisers, always tweaking, always searching, never quite arriving.
You have one job
This makes me think about the Japanese concept of shokunin – masters who dedicate their entire lives to perfecting a craft that serves others. If you haven’t watched “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” – you absolutely HAVE to – it tells the story of Jiro Ono, a sushi master who’s been perfecting his craft for over 50 years. His son spent a decade just learning to make rice. When asked about it, Jiro simply stated that his son wasn’t ready to do anything else until he mastered rice completely. Maybe it’s a psychopathic sadism and building your ego at the expense of your offspring, I don’t know. Or maybe they’ve discovered satisfaction through years of dedication and now they want to spare their children from existential crises. (I think a bit of both).
I see the same story within the Japanese blacksmithing community I have an honour to work with through my second business Oishya. The older blacksmiths teach their sons their craft. Starting with sharpening, slowly moving into more complex parts of the knife making when a master decides that a student is ready.
This lifetime dedication to craft runs deep in Japanese culture. But ironically, this very devotion to perfection is creating a crisis today. Many of these family businesses are struggling to find successors. Young people aren’t willing to dedicate decades to mastering a single craft, and many master craftsmen won’t pass down their businesses until they believe someone is truly worthy. Over two-thirds of Japan’s small and medium businesses have no successors lined up.
Some see this succession crisis as the death of tradition, but others spot opportunity in the gap. I recently read about Shunsaku Sagami, a 32-year-old who turned this generational disconnect into a billion-dollar business. His company, M&A Research Institute, uses AI to match ageing business owners with potential buyers. No decade-long apprenticeships required – just algorithms connecting those who want to sell with those who want to buy.
In just five years, his firm has grown to over 160 employees and handles about 500 deals at any given time. Their success rate keeps climbing – they closed 62 transactions in just six months of 2023, more than double their previous year’s numbers. Their revenue shot up from a modest ¥376 million in 2020 to ¥3.9 billion in early 2023.
Although it’s a great success story, it’s also a sad one.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve developed a deeper appreciation for things crafted with time and dedication. There’s something magical about family businesses. Perhaps it’s romantic idealism, but products made with generational knowledge seem to carry a piece of their makers’ souls. This is exactly what drew me to Japanese handmade knives. It’s a freaking difficult market to crack, especially as a woman trying to build relationships in this traditional, patriarchal world. But I still find it worth it and I fight for their acceptance and respect. There is a difference between efficiency and essence, between scaling up and holding on. Between a knife churned out of a factory and one crafted by hands that have spent decades perfecting their art. It makes you proud of owning one.
At the same time, I love technology, all that’s innovative and fresh. I’m wondering how those two mindsets can coexist in one person and don’t even themselves out, but I guess they can. Japan is like that on a macro level. It’s a country where tradition meets the future and both seem to be thriving (ok, minus those dying family businesses 😶).
So I really think we don’t need to reject modern opportunities, but we can be more intentional about them. Instead of trying everything and blaming it on self-diagnosed ADHD (hey, it’s trendy now), you should choose a few areas where you can make a real contribution. I guarantee you, once you surpass the sucking newbie level, you’ll start feeling satisfaction.
The truth is, meaning isn’t something you find by looking inward – it’s something that finds you when you stop looking for it. When you’re too busy being useful to worry about being fulfilled. Navy SEALs’s extraordinary performance doesn’t come from individual excellence but from their profound commitment to serving each other. They fear letting each other down more than they fear dying.
I’m not saying abandon self-reflection entirely. But maybe we’ve overcomplicated this whole meaning thing. Maybe we’ve taken individualism too far. Maybe it’s as simple as looking outward instead of inward, asking “what can I give?” instead of “what can I get?”.
In the end, it’s not about finding yourself. It’s about losing yourself in something worth doing.
