French Ikigai

I love storybooks, but nonfiction books have become far more relevant in my life in recent years. Specifically, I love learning about behavioral & cognitive psychology. One captivating book on this topic is How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett. In her book, Barrett explains that different languages use words to describe different emotional experiences. Not just in the obvious translation of one emotion in English (“happy) to the same emotion in French (“heureux”), but rather by creating a unique and untranslatable word that describes a specific state of emotion. For example, I don’t think I’m alone in feeling uneasy when someone is going out of their way to help me even though it’s clearly inconvenient for them. In Thai, this feeling is called “greng-jai”, but there is no English translation. Barrett suggests that knowing more of these untranslatable words increases our emotional intelligence because it allows us to label a feeling we are experiencing and therefore better understand and identify that experience. So, we can feel happy but we can also feel cheerful, peaceful, elated, content, thrilled, or satisfied. Each of these is synonymous with the feeling of happiness but defines a more specific emotional experience. By describing our experience more pointedly, Barrett says, we are expanding our emotional intelligence. 

When I learned about “ikigai”, my first thought was “is this a translatable word?”. Ikigai is a Japanese concept that defines a person’s purpose as that which finds itself at the intersection of what that person loves to do, what they are good at, what the world needs, and what they can be remunerated for. As I understand it, ikigai can be experienced as both a feeling and/or as originating from a source or object. Easily put, ikigai is defined as having meaning in life. If you type the word into Google Translate, the English result will be “reason to live”. Considering I’m French, I wanted to find out whether my native language might have such a word. “Reason to live” or “purpose” are themselves close to ikigai and are easily translatable, but in my opinion, I find them still too vague compared to the precision of the Japanese term. So, I got lost in the back and forth between the French equivalents of Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com. It seems the closest word I could find—which is spelled the same in French and English—was “vocation”. A vocation is akin to a calling and though I still feel it misses the mark, it’s as close as I could get to translating ikigai into French. 

So, though I tried, I found no better word for what Exquis is to me than ikigai—and I think that is incredible. How special is it that we can find new terms for experiences yet unlabeled in our own language? How exciting is it to know that we can expand our intelligence just by searching for new words to describe our internal and external environments? And this in any language, not just our own? In sum, there is no “French ikigai”. But, just as this beautiful Japanese word has no translation, neither do many beautiful French and English words—and I encourage you to look them up.