Americans Pursue Happiness, Japanese Chase ‘Ikigai.’ The Difference Is a Powerful Lesson in Emotional Intelligence
You might think happiness is self-explanatory — you know it when you feel it — but an experience I had many years ago when I was teaching English as a foreign language showed me defining happiness is much more complicated than that.
It was a fairly advanced class: basically, a free-flowing discussion among an international group of students. I don’t remember how we got started on the topic, but I do remember that eventually we began discussing cross-cultural relationships.
One Japanese girl shared that she had once dated a European guy but had found the experience exhausting. “He was always asking me about whether I was happy,” she explained. “It was so tiring.”
As a 20-something woman at the time, this was a head-scratcher. I knew a whole lot of women who were dying to find a guy who would show interest in their emotions. And as an American trained from an early age that the “pursuit of happiness” is a central goal of life, it was hard to understand why this student wouldn’t want to reflect on her happiness.
But this clever, well-spoken Japanese girl found continually interrogating her feelings in this Western way draining.
