We Are the Soul: Ikigai, Joy and Purpose When Everything Becomes Possible. When everyone will be able to do everything, the hardest and most important skill will be choosing what you love enough to give your time to. Here is how I see work, joy and purpose in the age of AI, through the eyes of ikigai.
Joy of living starts on an ordinary morning
I have worn many hats. I have taught for more than 20 years, and I am a former head of school. From 2006 to 2009 I was Campaign Manager at UNICEF Denmark, where I helped build the fundraising department. For around 20 years I have run my own booking agency, Kvalitetsbooking. I have performed as a musician, as DJ GrannMaster, as a stand-up comedian and as a conferencier. Today I work with ikigai and ADHD coaching and mentoring, and I run more than 20 AI assistants in my daily work.
All of it has taught me one thing: joy of living and work are not opposites. My best days, in a classroom, behind the decks or in a meeting, were the days when what I did felt like an expression of who I am. The Japanese have a word for that feeling. It is called ikigai.
The four circles, and the small reasons to get up
Ikigai is often translated as "a reason for being", or simply that which makes life worth living. In the West we usually draw it as four overlapping circles:
- What you love
- What you are good at
- What the world needs
- What you can be paid for
Where all four meet, the model says, you find your ikigai. I use the circles a lot in my mentoring, because they are a simple and honest way to look at a life.
But here is what I find even more beautiful. The four-circle diagram is largely a Western framing. In Japan, ikigai is often much smaller and much closer to everyday life. It can be the morning coffee, the garden, the grandchildren, the quiet satisfaction of a job done properly. Not one grand life purpose carved in stone, but small, daily reasons to get out of bed.
We need both: the circles give direction, the small reasons give joy.
When everyone will be able to do everything
Here is how I see the future. We are moving into a world where AI makes almost everything possible. In my own work, with my team of AI assistants and the local AI running on my MacBook Pro M5, I can do things on my own that used to require a whole team: writing, design, research, music, planning. The walls between "something I can do" and "something I can't" are falling.
That sounds like freedom, and it is. But it creates a new problem. When everyone will be able to do everything, the scarce thing is no longer ability. The scarce thing is choice. It is going to be very, very hard to actually limit yourself to something you spend any significant time on. There will always be another project, another tool, another possibility one prompt away.
As an ADHD coach, I know that feeling well, and I think the whole world is about to get a taste of it: too many open doors, too many shiny options, and the quiet question at the end of the day: "But what did I actually become?"
That is why I believe that finding our purpose, our joy in life and what we are genuinely interested in focusing on will probably be the most important thing for humans going forward. Not as a luxury. As a necessity.
What Japan teaches us about devotion
For an answer, I turn to Japanese culture. Japan has a word, shokunin, for the craftsperson. It describes not just skill, but an attitude: a sense of responsibility to do your work as well as it can possibly be done, for the sake of the people who will use it. Think of the sushi apprentice who may spend years on the rice before being trusted with the fish, the swordsmith, the carpenter who joins wood without nails, the potter who shapes the same bowl again and again. Many of these masters spend a lifetime on one craft. And there is a deep, quiet pride in that.
The samurai carried a similar spirit. Bushido, the way of the warrior, was an ideal of discipline, loyalty and self-control. A samurai trained with the sword day after day, year after year, and many also practised calligraphy, poetry or the tea ceremony with the same seriousness.
And then there is kaizen: continuous improvement, small steps every day. Not the big breakthrough, but getting a little better at the thing you have chosen.
This is how I think people in the future can become something. Not by doing everything, because soon anyone can do that. But by choosing something, devoting themselves to it, and taking pride in becoming truly skilled at it. In a world of infinite capability, depth becomes the new luxury.
Where life and work melt together
What strikes me most about this tradition is that work is not something you do so you can live afterwards. Work and life melt together. Happiness, a feeling of purpose, a sense of duty to the craft and to the people it serves, and the joy of learning, perfecting and doing: in the Japanese craft tradition, all of that becomes life itself.
You can hear it in the language. Many Japanese arts end in -do, which means "the way": sado or chado, the way of tea; shodo, the way of the brush; budo, the martial ways. Making tea, writing a character, drawing a sword: none of these is just a task. Each is a path you walk for life, and walking it is the point.
Compare that with how many of us spend our free hours. Life is not sitting at home looking at your PlayStation, or just hanging out at the mall. And yes, I know the irony: Japan is also the country that gave us the PlayStation and some very big malls. Not everyone in Japan lives like a master craftsman. But the ideal Japan has kept alive is clear: life is the time you spend on the things that actually have meaning and soul, like arts and craftsmanship. That is what we can learn from.
We are the soul, AI is the hands
Many people fear that AI will take over, and that we will end up as passengers while the machines act through us. I see it the other way around. We are no longer the entity that acts. We are actually the soul.
Even though we might think it is the AI acting through us, it is actually the opposite. We are the center. We are the soul. We are the epicenter of it. And all of AI is acting on behalf of us.
AI can do almost everything, but it does not know what is worth doing. It has no taste of its own, no longing, no reason to get out of bed in the morning. That is where we come in. Our taste, our values, our humour, our devotion to the one thing we love: that is what can give AI a soul and a personality. The shokunin of the future may not always hold the tool in their own hands. But they will know exactly what the work should feel like, and they will refuse to accept less.
I experience this every day with my own assistants: the direction, the tone and the "no, that's not quite it" come from me. Without that, they produce a lot. With it, they produce something that feels like mine.
Learning to enjoy being who we are
Our job now, I think, is to learn, and to enjoy, how to exercise what we are and the things we are interested in, through a new world of capabilities and dangers and possibilities, and an endless infinity of options.
The dangers are real. It is easy to drown in options, to lose ourselves in endless output, to let the tools decide for us. That is exactly why ikigai matters. It is an anchor. It asks the four questions again, and one more: what small thing makes you glad to get up tomorrow?
And here is what ties it all together. When AI handles the rest, we get time back. The question is what we do with it. I hope the time we free goes to the craft, not the couch. Because life is not the hours we kill. Life is the time we spend on what has meaning and soul.
Find that. Choose it. Get a little better at it every day. Take pride in it. Let AI be the hands, and remember that you are the soul.
If you want to explore your own ikigai, on your own or with your team, I would love to talk. Book: olivercgrann@hotmail.com · +45 2757 3670 · LinkedIn. Related: What is an Ikigai mentoring engagement? · Ikigai, ADHD coaching and mentoring · AI expert: my take on the future.