How do work and the rest of life interact to make life feel worth living? Dr. Shintaro Kono (Shin), is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation at the University of Alberta. He was born in Japan and spent the first 21 years of his life there. He studies leisure and well-being, and a large part of his research is about ikigai, the Japanese idea that people in the West often know from a four-circle Venn diagram. Shin thinks that diagram points us in the wrong direction.

Leisure Studies, Briefly

Leisure studies is an interdisciplinary field. Researchers come at it through psychology, sociology, economics, management, anthropology, geography, and the humanities. Leisure means free-time activity, but the field also looks at how people feel during those activities, where they happen, and how social institutions shape them. Shin describes it as a small community, a few hundred people across North America, and says each of them is a bit of a snowflake. His own corner is leisure and well-being.

He also has a good example of how the two kinds of well-being we talk about on this show can pull apart. Shin is the father of a two-year-old, and he says parenting wakes him up at 6 a.m. and keeps everyday life from being dull. He mentions studies showing that new parents' positive emotions dip, while their sense of meaning goes up.

Ikigai Isn't a Venn Diagram

You may have seen the diagram: what you love, what you're good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Shin's concern is the last circle. Once being paid is part of the picture, ikigai becomes a financial and career question, and people stop connecting it to leisure and the rest of life.

He points to large social surveys in Japan that measure ikigai. In those, he says, work doesn't come out as a strong predictor, usually landing somewhere in the top five to ten. The top few are usually things like leisure, hobbies, sports, and family relationships.

As for the diagram, Shin passes along a story he heard from Nicholas Kemp of Ikigai Tribe, who interviewed its original creator. According to that account, the diagram was originally made with entrepreneurship in mind. Someone else later put "ikigai" in the middle and shared it online, where it went viral. Shin isn't against it. Questions like what you love, what you're good at, and what the world needs are useful to think about. They just don't capture what ikigai means when it comes to leisure.

A Life Worth Living

Shin often translates ikigai as having a life worth living. The core of it, in his research, is a simple question: "Do you think your everyday life is valuable?"

He doesn't mean worth in a financial sense. He means whether you feel it. When you wake up, do you want to get out of bed and start your day, or would you rather stay under the covers? And it's a matter of degree, not an on-off switch.

He also separates meaning of life, the big metaphysical question of what the point of it all is, from meaning in life, which is how meaningful you find your everyday experience. Ikigai is closer to the second. As Andrew puts it, it doesn't need to be a big, future-oriented purpose. It can be as plain as whether your days feel worth living.

Four Kinds of Valuable Experience

At the center of Shin's theory are four types of valuable experience.

1. Enjoyment is doing something because you love it. It can be a passion or hobby that builds over time, or something simple like a really good meal.

2. Effort is facing a challenge and working to meet it. It can mean improving yourself (skills, knowledge, character) or working toward goals that matter to you personally.

3. Stimulation is novelty. At the small end, it's a different lunch or running into someone new and swapping ideas. At the deep end, it's a trip that teaches you about another culture and leaves you feeling like a different person.

4. Comfort is relaxation: music, or a good talk with someone you feel at ease with. At the deep end, it's a place where you can be fully yourself without fear of judgment, which Shin says matters a lot for people who have been through trauma or live with a stigmatized identity.

The basic idea is simple: the more valuable experiences you have across these four, the better.

Variety, Balance, and Too Much of a Good Thing

Shin adds two layers to that. The first is variety. If one person has 100 enjoyable experiences in a month and almost nothing else, and another has about 20 of each type, he expects the second person to do better on ikigai over the long run. A few weeks of nonstop enjoyment may be fine. Over months and years, variety wins.

The second is balance, especially between enjoyment and effort, and between stimulation and comfort. Shin says most of us have an internal compass for this. Too much effort leaves you exhausted. Too much fun can leave you feeling empty, like you had a great time and your life isn't going anywhere. The right balance is different for each person and changes with life stages. His own changed after his son was born. Andrew compares it to a polarity, an infinity symbol with enjoyment at one end and effort at the other.

Shin's research also shows that any of these can be too much, effort most of all, because it's demanding cognitively, physically, emotionally, and socially. He notes that many positive psychology ideas assume more is always better (even flow), and his work says no. His own example: they recorded at the end of August, and his semester started the next day.

His advice for when effort takes over: keep some area of your life where you can have enjoyment or comfort, and know that it's okay to disengage for a while. Stepping back from effort for a time, he says, can help you re-engage later, and that's good for ikigai in the long run. Andrew adds that the same applies to meaningful work. Even something good can be too much.

What Leisure Gives Us That Work Often Doesn't

Leisure researchers usually define leisure as involving freedom of choice. Shin's argument is that this includes choosing the kind of experience you need. If work is nonstop effort, you can choose enjoyment or comfort in your free time. If you retire and lose the effort altogether, you can build it back into leisure. Done on purpose, leisure can balance the rest of your life.

In other areas, like work and school, the values are often set for us. Shin points to his own university's slogan, "Leading with a purpose," as a message that emphasizes effort, and says students pick up on a culture of grinding. It's hard to walk up to your boss and ask for a little less effort and a little more enjoyment or comfort. Leisure tends to be more neutral, and people tend to have more control over it. Andrew connects this to the restorative niches that Brian Little talked about in an earlier episode.

Shin is careful on both sides of this. He is skeptical of people who say that if you love your work, you don't need to worry about leisure. His response: "Good for you, but not everybody."

He also defends work. Its value comes ready-made, so it's the easiest way to get an ikigai boost. A colleague of his in Japan works with people who have serious mental illnesses, and many of them can't hold paid jobs, which creates its own stigma and a real challenge for their ikigai. The flip side is that leisure doesn't come prepackaged. You have to build it through learning, reflection, trial, and error.

Why "Work-Life Balance" Misses the Point

Andrew mentions that the former U.S. Surgeon General's office preferred the phrase work-life harmony. Shin agrees that the usual phrase doesn't work for him either. Work and life aren't really comparable, he says, since life includes work along with leisure, family, community, spirituality, and finances. The usual advice also tends to be to add more life to an already busy life, which just makes busy people busier. He compares it to doing yoga more, which becomes another thing on the to-do list. And it puts work first and center.

His alternative is to start from zero. Treat work as one area of life among others. Then label each area with the four kinds of experience (enjoyment, effort, stimulation, comfort) and see which ones dominate and which are missing. He encourages doing this on paper, even as a doodle. The question to ask about work becomes whether it supports your ikigai or harms it.

Ibasho: Ikigai Is Shared

Shin built his theory in his PhD work, and he calls it an ikigai trilogy. The experiences are the first part. The second is ibasho, the interpersonal side.

Your valuable experiences can go only so far when you do them alone. Ibasho adds two things. One is doing valuable things together with people you trust, which can make the same activity more valuable. A trip is a good example. The other is sharing what's happening in your life with people close to you and getting positive, constructive feedback. When a supervisor or colleague tells you your idea is great and asks how they can support it, the value of the work goes up.

Shin later found that this is similar to what Shelly Gable calls capitalization. Andrew draws out the larger point: a lot of Western purpose and meaning work focuses on me instead of we, and ibasho is a reminder that there's no ikigai without a sense of we.

Hokosei: Connecting Past, Present, and Future

The third part is time, which Shin calls hokosei, or life directionality. Picture a line through your life from where you've been to where you're going. Do the dots connect?

Past to present is what he calls life legacy: feeling that what you've done, even failures and things you didn't enjoy at the time, helped get you where you are and what you value now. Present to future is life momentum: feeling that you're moving toward goals that matter to you.

The connection doesn't need to be logical or provable. It just has to make sense to you. You can build it by reframing what experiences mean, and also by choosing what you do now based on past experiences you valued and future goals you care about. Andrew notes that together the three parts give ikigai a three-dimensional quality that most conversations about purpose and meaning don't have.

Where to Start

Shin admits this is a lot, since the theory comes from research data and each part has several pieces. His suggestion is to take one piece at a time, for a week or even a few months, and begin with the experiences: reflect on what's going on in each area of your life, and change a little if you want to.

For people who think they have no ikigai, he suggests two things. Notice that the value may already be there and you aren't taking time to see it. A gratitude journal can help, such as jotting down three things from the day that you value. If you don't keep a diary, the photos on your phone can do the same job. Shin takes a lot of photos of his son, and watching a two-year-old grow gives him a sense of momentum even when his own career feels steady. Talking with someone you trust over coffee can help too, because we're often too hard on ourselves and a friend can point out what's good.

If that doesn't help, just do it. You can't know how valuable an experience will be until you try it, and we all have things we've always wanted to try or invitations from friends and family we haven't said yes to. Try something once a week or once a month, even for a short time, and see how it feels.

Andrew ends the conversation with that same lesson: he says he wouldn't have known how valuable this episode would be if he hadn't just done it.

Additional Resources

• Shintaro's research on ikigai and leisure

• The popular ikigai Venn diagram

• Meaning in life vs. meaning of life, and the work of Michael Steger on meaning

• Shelly Gable's research on capitalization and sharing positive events with others

• Nicholas Kemp and Ikigai Tribe

• Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's framework for workplace well-being, including "work-life harmony"

• Our earlier episode with Brian Little on restorative niches