Words are not fixed stones. 'Nice' moved from ignorance to pleasantness, showing how language carries old meanings, loses them and quietly becomes something else.

The Japanese word joins iki — life — with kai — worth. It names whatever makes your days feel worth living, and in Japan that is usually something small and ordinary: a garden, a grandchild, the walk to the shop.

The psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya gave the word its serious treatment in her 1966 book On the Meaning of Life, written after years working with patients at a sanatorium. For her ikigai was not a plan or a purpose to be solved, but the quiet sense that your days point somewhere worth waking for — and she found it in people whose circumstances were desperately hard. If you have ever come across a four-circle diagram promising to locate your ikigai where passion, skill, money and the world's needs overlap, that is a separate idea: it was drawn by a British blogger in 2014, adapting an earlier diagram about finding your purpose. The Japanese original asks far less of you, and gives more back.