Anime Has What Your Life Is Missing
Imagine living a life filled with balance between the spiritual and the practical. You awaken each morning with clarity, purpose, contentment, and joy. You feel fulfilled. In english, we don’t really have a term that encapsulates the whole of that feeling. In fact, we more often than not just avoid those type of conversations altogether. After all, shouldn’t work life balance mean that you don’t have to find joy in your work?
Well, here at SUGOI, we believe that there is a better way of living — a happier and more joyous one. And we believe in opening opportunities for our Anime Content Creators to achieve that happiness.
Thankfully, the Japanese do have a word for that sort of balance. The term is “Ikigai” (pronounced “ee-ka-guy”), and it can be understood in english as “a reason for being”. The following Venn diagram speaks louder than words, so we encourage readers to take a moment and reflect on how living your life at that center point might feel.
Ikigai In Anime
After learning about Ikigai, we came upon a crazy realization! What if it’s seeing Ikigai in action that makes anime so compelling for its fans?
In anime, we often see our favorite heroes and heroins truly living their best lives. Sure, many of their struggles are absolutely jarring to watch, but at the end of it all, their ‘reason for being’ is as clear as day. They’re often good at a particular power, love protecting others, know that they are needed, and are able to make a living doing all of those things. All of that sums up to a perfect center dot in that Venn diagram, doesn’t it?
Of course, this is just a theory. But the next time you’re watching an anime, try asking yourself: are these characters experiencing Ikigai? Let us know in the comments below if you come up with any neat examples! We’d love to hear them.
Ikigai For Anime Content Creators
For now, we’ve decided to explore how we might begin to incorporate Ikigai into our real lives, to mirror what our anime heroes/heroins accomplish with such ease. We decided to go through an exercise imagining a future where our Anime Content Creators (ACC’s) are truly living their best lives. What you can imagine, you can bring to fruition. So let’s see what it might look like for ACC’s to achieve Ikigai!
What you can imagine, you can bring to fruition.
Now, although it’s true that achieving Ikigai today is not easy or even advocated for when you’re an ACC, SUGOI is working diligently to change that. We want to make the benefits that ACC’s provide to the anime industry visible for the world, and we want to curate a cycle of trust and respect that our ACC’s can benefit from.
If you, a friend, or a loved one is or wants to be an Anime Content Creator, now is the time to reach out to them. Share this vision of Ikigai, so that together we can turn this vision into a reality.
Stepping back from the “we” narrative for a moment, as the founder of SUGOI Media, I can think of no greater joy than to open as many doors as possible for our Anime Content Creators to achieve the perfect balance of contentment and purpose. As anime enthusiasts, we see it all the time in our favorite heroes and heroines, so why not fight for that sort of ‘reason for being’ to exist in the real world, too?
SUGOI Media was formed to encourage and enable Anime Content Creators to do what they do best, while properly thanking the original creators who drive us to new heights of inspiration. To watch our progression, sign up for our monthly newsletter at SUGOI!
Adventure on anime enthusiasts!