The Practice of Ikigai in Penang

A contributor essay. This piece is reflective rather than clinical.

There is a man at a kopitiam near my office who has been making kopi at the same counter for longer than I have been working. He does not look up when I arrive. The cup appears. Kopi o kosong, half-filled the way I take it, and he has already moved to the next order.

I used to read that as routine. I have come to think it is something closer to the opposite. He knows perhaps two hundred people's orders. He arrives before five. He is, in a very specific sense, needed at that counter in a way that nobody else is, and he will be there tomorrow.

If you asked him what his ikigai was, he would probably tell you to stop bothering him and drink your coffee. That is rather the point.

The diagram that was never Japanese

Most people meet ikigai through a diagram: four overlapping circles labelled what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for, with ikigai sitting at the centre where all four intersect.

It is a useful business framework. It is not ikigai.

That diagram began life as a Spanish-language drawing about purpose, made by Andrés Zuzunaga around 2011, and was later relabelled with the Japanese word by a British blogger. It travelled well because it looks like a strategy tool, and it has been reproduced in a million presentation decks since.

The Japanese word carries no such requirement. Iki is life. Gai is worth or value. Together they mean something closer to that which makes life worth living, and Japanese researchers who have surveyed the population find that most people name something small and domestic. A garden. A grandchild. A morning walk. Work appears, but it is not privileged above the rest, and payment does not enter into it at all.

This matters practically, not just pedantically. The four-circle version tells you that unless your passion, your talent, your income and the world's needs converge in one place, you do not have an ikigai. That is a discouraging message to deliver to a retired accountant, a full-time carer, or a man making coffee at five in the morning. The original concept was never so demanding.

What the research actually shows

I am not a clinician, and I want to be careful here, because this is an area where the writing tends to run ahead of the evidence.

The most cited work is the Ohsaki study, a large Japanese cohort of tens of thousands of adults followed over several years. Participants who reported having ikigai had lower all-cause mortality than those who did not. Related Japanese cohort work has found associations with cardiovascular outcomes, and studies in the United States using the related construct of purpose in life have reported similar associations with mortality among older adults.

Three honest caveats.

These are observational studies. They establish association, not causation. It is entirely plausible that people who are already healthier, more mobile and better connected are more likely to report a sense of purpose, rather than the purpose producing the health.

Purpose travels with other things. People with a strong sense of purpose tend also to be more socially connected, more physically active and more likely to attend to their health. Disentangling those threads is difficult.

And ikigai is not a treatment. Nothing in this literature suggests it substitutes for managing blood pressure, sleeping properly or moving your body.

Ken Mogi's five pillars

The neuroscientist Ken Mogi describes ikigai through five pillars, and they are useful because none of them requires you to reorganise your life.

Starting small. The kopitiam man's precision with a cup. Attention to a small thing done properly.

Releasing yourself. Setting aside self-consciousness and the constant measurement of how you are doing.

Harmony and sustainability. Fitting into the people and place around you, rather than optimising against them.

The joy of little things. The first coffee. The sound of rain arriving on a zinc roof. These are not consolation prizes for a life lacking grand purpose.

Being in the here and now. The absorption that comes with doing something with full attention.

Notice what is absent. No income requirement. No requirement that the world need what you do. No requirement that you be exceptional at it.

Where this already exists in Penang

Here is what strikes me about living on this island. We did not import this idea. We have been practising it, without the vocabulary, for a very long time.

The morning people. Go to the Botanic Gardens or the Moon Gate trail at six. There is a whole society up there, and it has been meeting for decades. People know each other's names, notice when someone is missing, and carry on up the hill afterwards for breakfast. That is physical activity, social connection and daily structure delivered as a single package, and nobody involved thinks of it as an intervention.

The hawkers. A char koay teow stall run by the same family across three generations, at the same corner, with a queue. That is mastery pursued over a lifetime, in public, with immediate feedback from people who will tell you frankly if standards have slipped. The Japanese would recognise this immediately. We simply call it the stall we go to.

The trades of George Town. The signboard carvers, the rattan weavers, the goldsmiths, the joss stick makers. Many of these trades are commercially marginal now, and many of the people practising them continue anyway, because the work is theirs and they are the ones who know how to do it. That is ikigai in an almost undiluted form, and it is quietly disappearing.

The clan associations and houses of worship. Temple committees, mosque committees, church volunteers, kongsi, residents' associations. Unglamorous, meeting-heavy, occasionally exasperating, and among the most effective structures we have for keeping older people connected and needed. Being needed is not a small thing.

The households. Multi-generational living remains common here in a way it no longer is in much of the world. A grandmother who fetches the children from school has a reason to be up, dressed and out of the house on a schedule. That is not a burden dressed up as a benefit. It is a genuine structural advantage that many wealthier societies have lost and are now trying to reconstruct through policy.

Tai chi at the Padang, the sea at Tanjung Bungah, the balcony garden with too many pots on it. Small, repeated, attended-to things.

The transition nobody prepares for

The part of my work at Hayat that surprised me most is how often people arrive not with a symptom but with a gap.

They have retired. They planned the financial side carefully. Nobody planned the other side. Forty years of structure, identity, colleagues and a reason to leave the house at a fixed hour, all switched off in a single week. Within a few months the days have flattened out. Sleep drifts. Activity drops. The social circle turns out to have been mostly work colleagues.

We treat retirement as a financial event. It is at least as much a structural and social one, and the structural piece is the one that goes unplanned.

If you are approaching that point, the useful questions are not about money.

What will get you out of the house on a Tuesday morning? Who will notice if you do not appear? What are you going to be good at next? Who benefits from something you specifically do?

None of that requires a grand answer. A regular walking group, a weekly volunteering commitment, a craft taken seriously, a class you teach, grandchildren you fetch on fixed days. What matters is that it is regular, that it involves other people, and that your absence would be noticed.

Starting, practically

If you want to work at this deliberately, I would suggest three things, none of them ambitious.

Anchor a morning. One thing you do at roughly the same time every day, preferably outdoors and preferably involving other people. The walkers on the hill have understood something the rest of us pay consultants to explain. If you want the version with the research attached, our article on forest bathing in Penang covers where to go and what the evidence supports.

Take one thing seriously. Not professionally. Seriously. Cooking one dish properly. Growing something demanding. Learning an instrument badly and persistently. The absorption is the point, not the standard reached.

Be needed by someone on a schedule. Regular, committed, difficult to cancel. Being needed occasionally is pleasant. Being needed reliably is structural.

You will notice none of these is a purchase, and none is a programme. That is deliberate.

The last word

I began with the kopitiam. I will finish there.

We have a habit in the longevity field of importing ideas from elsewhere and presenting them as innovations. Ikigai gets this treatment constantly, usually with the diagram attached.

But if you walk through George Town early enough, you will see the practice everywhere, unbranded and unremarked. People who are up before dawn because someone is waiting for them. People who have done one thing well for forty years. People whose whole social world lives within a few streets.

We do not need to import this. We need to notice that we already have it, and be careful about the things that are quietly eroding it: the trades closing, the households scattering, the retirement that arrives with no plan for the hours.

That, more than any supplement or protocol, is the part I think about.

If you are interested in the wider picture of healthy ageing, including the physical and metabolic factors alongside the social ones, our pre-consultation questionnaire is a straightforward place to start. Our article on healthspan versus lifespan covers why the distinction matters.

Written by Dave Ng, Managing Director, Hayat Longevity. This is a personal contributor essay and does not represent clinical guidance.

This is a contributor essay and is not medical advice. The research described is observational and demonstrates association rather than causation. For guidance on your own health, please speak with a doctor.