I recently came across a stat that stopped me mid-scroll.
People in their first year of retirement have a 40% higher chance of getting a stroke or heart attack than people who are still working.
That’s not a small number. And it made me wonder… what exactly happens to a person when they stop having a reason to get up in the morning?
This isn’t an essay arguing that everyone should work into their 80s. But that statistic sent me down a rabbit hole and I want to share where it led.
One of the first things I kept coming back to was Japan, a country that consistently ranks among the highest in life expectancy, and a concept called ikigai: “a reason for being.”
It combines what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for.
And because of it many Japanese people never retire. At least not in the sense of chilling on a yacht in a linen gown, ordering French wines we cannot pronounce, surrounded by supermodels – which I suspect is how most of us picture it.
They keep going because their lives, even in their 80s and 90s, still feel like they have a point.
I should be honest, my academic background is in science and I can’t claim with certainty that ikigai is why Japan has such a long life expectancy. It might be their diet, their activity levels or their low rates of chronic illness.
But even if the work is a symptom of good health rather than its cause, the principle underneath is worth sitting with.
Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World imagined a world of perfect comfort: a government that had eliminated pain, risk and uncertainty in exchange for total control. Near the end, a character called John the Savage, raised outside that system, confronts the controller Mustapha Mond and says:
“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”
I think most of us have that savage spirit somewhere in us.
It’s probably why some people jump out of aeroplanes 4000 metres above the ground. Why others climb sheer rock faces or ski down icy Swiss mountains at 100 km/hr. They’re not crazy… they’re chasing something that a comfortable life cannot give them.
We don’t actually want perfect.
We want life in its fullness: with its contradictions, its risks, its depth. A controlled and comfortable existence in perpetuity sounds appealing until you’re actually living it.
There’s a famous study by the behavioural scientist John B. Calhoun called Universe 25 that stayed with me as I wrote this.
He built a perfect environment for mice – unlimited food, water, no predators, no disease. He wanted to see what happened when every need was met.
What happened was: they collapsed. And then they went extinct.
As resources became abundant, behaviour deteriorated. Aggression developed, birth rates plummeted and death rates rose. The mice had everything and fell apart anyway.
I won’t claim humans would respond the same way as there’s no proof of that.
But it raises a question:
What happens when everything is easy, but nothing feels meaningful?
I mean it’s not hard to imagine that some version of the same thing would emerge. We are not, by nature, built for pure comfort. We need a reason for being. And we seem to understand instinctively that this reason will probably be uncomfortable and that even discomfort is better than emptiness.
I’ve seen this play out in real life. There are countless stories of founders who sell their companies and immediately spiral. And I don’t think it’s because they’re ungrateful; perhaps it’s because they suddenly have no idea what their life is about.
Vinay Hiremath, founder of Loom, sold his company to Atlassian for close to a billion dollars ($975 million to be exact) and then described himself as “rich” with “no idea what to do with his life.” He went back to school and started looking for an internship.
Wild, right?
I’m not one of those people who’ll tell you money doesn’t matter. We all know it does. I can only claim otherwise once I have some. But I think most of us already sense it’s not the only thing that matters, and Vinay’s story is a useful reminder of what can happen when it becomes the only thing you were chasing.
Maybe purpose shifts as we move through life. But I think whatever form it takes, it needs to make you want to get up in the morning. To look forward to the caress of the wind, the warmth of the sun and the chorus of birds at that hour.
How do you find it?
I’m reluctant to give blanket answers because I can only see life from my own perspective.
But perhaps it’s worth sitting with this question from time to time: if money were not an issue, what would I be doing with my time?
You might not have a solid answer, and that’s fine. But the question alone might make you reconsider some of your current choices.
I’d also say: pay attention to your energy. Notice what drains you – tasks, environments, people – and notice what restores it.
Purpose rarely lives in the things that drain you.
And I think purpose is almost always outward-facing. It’s usually something that benefits other people more than it benefits you… something that pulls you forward even when it’s hard, even when nobody is watching, even when there’s nothing obvious in it for you.
I’ve been writing this essay for nearly four hours.
Why?
I genuinely don’t know how to answer that. Because I don’t even know who will read it. I’ll get nothing for it in any measurable sense.
But something in me believes it will land in front of someone who needs it, and that’s enough to keep going back to fix a sentence, to delete a paragraph or to start again.
That’s what purpose feels like to me. I can’t tell you what it looks like for you. But I’d bet it involves some version of that… something you’d do even when it costs you something, for someone you may never meet.
Because ultimately, the purpose of life is a life of purpose.
© Phumzile