After reading the various articles on “Ikigai” (Japanese meaning: Reason for Being, encompassing joy, purpose, well-being etc) and the corresponding Venn Diagram, I have strong tendency to draw a parallel between Ikigai and Play (the central element in Live-Work-Travel-Learn-Play model found in Hypercube project), especially in the context of “Enlivenment” as promulgated by Andreas Weber in his book of the same title.
Work is generally left-brain related, rational and analytical... the heritage of the Enlightenment. Life should be, on the other hand, fun and playful, very much right-brain related... it is being alive or the Enlivenment ( Enlightenment 2.0) perspective which leads to the Economy of the Commons, providing healthy ecosystems, economic security, stronger communities and a participatory culture, realizing objective benefits and experiencing subjective pleasure and joy.
Unlike market economics, commoning is not only about producing and distributing resources, but about constructing meaningful relationships to a place, to the earth and to one another. The shift from a neoDarwinian / neoLiberal economy to a world of biospheric householding is not a utopian dream.
Being an active participant in the biosphere does not mean to obey all its laws, but to enact freedom within the constraints of existential and ecological necessity. Negotiation of these paradoxes was necessary to live a true and meaningful life. The entanglement of individual autonomy and larger necessity could only – momentarily – be fulfilled through play. Play unfolds from a person’s free choice about how to do what is necessary, and this opens up new possibilities in the process. We are fully human only in play, Schiller believed.
The practice of an enlivened economy then amounts to nothing less than the practice of a rich and playful life. That vision, the deep attraction and satisfaction of serious play, may be the most potent, imaginative force for helping us deal with the realities of our time. . Or, as psychologist Marshall Rosenberg expressed it:” Don’t do anything that isn’t play. Because it will be play if you are meeting your own needs.” Your own needs as an embodied being in relation and in need for constant transformation, as a being entangled in a continuous material and meaningful householding hitched to everything else.
