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+ JENI MILES

Behavioural science, meaningful experiences, sustainability

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June 23, 2011

+ What Is Your Ikigai?

Dan Buettnor’s TED talk How To Live To Be 100+ explains some of the common dominators in the world’s ‘Blue Zones’, areas where people are living to age 100 at rates up to 10 times greater than Americans are and where the life expectancy is an extra dozen years. Below is a diagram of what Buettnor’s team found when working alongside National Geographic and the National Institute on Aging:

For me, some of the most interesting points raised were that one of the most common denominators in achieving longevity was keeping active even after retirement. Interestingly, “in the Okinawan language there is not even a word for retirement. Instead there is one word that imbues your entire life, and that word is “ikigai.” And, roughly translated, it means “the reason for which you wake up in the morning.” What a great idea!

If I could summarise in one sentence why I wake up in the morning, it’s because I believe my life is worth something. I believe that there’s no point being alive unless you actually want to achieve something while you have the ability to do so! It doesn’t mean that I’ve actually achieved anything or have an all-consuming passion that’s my sole justification for existence, but I do have a willingness to get up in the morning to find exactly what that is.

The TED talk got me thinking more about how human beings try to make their life worth something. I don’t really care if I live to seventy, eighty or 114 (the age of the oldest person in the world), but what I do care about is making sure my years on this earth actually amount to something.

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My #maternityleave in summary:

- At #8monthspregnant I contended with an abandoned #houserenovation due to our builders going bankrupt! 
- I recorded an @lse.pbs assessment hours before my waters broke
- Ev was born on the day the #covid_19 genome was sequenced
- We went into 🔒down when he was #10weeksold
- My agoraphobic mum needed help throughout it with groceries/bins taking out, so I did my absolute best to keep her safe while stuck in London
- I wrote a 3K essay + a 10K thesis with NO INTERNET for several weeks (yep, a car smashed into the street's broadband box!)
- I abandoned an @glideapps app I spent 6 weeks building for my #behaviouralscience experiment due to incompatibility w/ #prolificacademic
- I sorted the house purchase of a retirement flat for my mum

Hmm... I think that was it! Being a #firsttimemum in a pandemic has been hard but I cannot WAIT to crack on with 2021. I'm so grateful to have had this year with Ev despite all the challenges and to have a job to go back to 🙌

#matleaveover #maternityleave #maternityleaveisover #breastfeeding #pandemicbaby
Each year on NYE Ned and I ask each other question Each year on NYE Ned and I ask each other questions like "when did you laugh the hardest this year" or "biggest lesson you learned this year".

This year we struggled to find answers because we genuinely have less memories to choose from as we've barely seen anyone else 😐

While I can flippantly say f*ck you 2020, I did learn a valuable lesson. I truly witnessed/appreciated for the first time the inequalities within and between nations, & the fallout from exploiting nature, animals and other humans. (The BLM movement, reading books like @drjasonhickel's #thedivide and researching for my dissertation on pro-environmental behaviour change have massively evolved my worldview this year).

I'm hopeful for a 2021 where I live closer to my values--using my various privileges to do better, create more, consume less, think less about myself and more about others

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