I’m afraid we’ve got everything wrong about long life. In the West, people hold on to their faith, themselves with Bas Kast, ice-cold showers and diets to be able to forego eternal longevity. And since I, too, wished I could play Mau-Mau with my friends over non-alcoholic eggnog at the age of 96, I’ve been pouring some linseed oil into my yoghurt in the morning. Touchingly naive. Because the secret to being a real superager is actually: work.
I just finished it recently Japan traveled. Japan is the country with the highest life expectancy (don’t tell me Monaco or Hong Kong). One evening in Sendai I dragged myself to the nearest ramen shop around the corner. An older man was leaning over huge tin pots behind the counter. Sweating, he pulled the noodles out of the steaming water and concentrated on preparing each plate. The soup tasted delicious, every spoonful told of broken pork bones, chicken cooked for hours, finely chopped vegetables… Why would someone go to so much trouble for such a cheap, secluded shop with so few customers? A very western question. I encountered the answer in proudly bowing conductors, in perfectly rolled sushi and in the classics Ikigai by the Japanese neuroscientist Ken Mogi (Dumont, 176 pages, 13 euros). Ikigai means something like “what is worth living for”. A Japanese art of living, according to Mogi, “the reason to get up in the morning.” Ikigai is made up of different pillars, it’s about mindfulness, harmony and so on. But Ikigai means, above all, doing something as well as possible, not because you have to, but because you want to. Work is “not a necessary evil,” says Mogi; many Japanese want to work instead of retiring. “If you can make the process of making effort your main source of happiness, you will have overcome the most important challenge of your life.”
