About
MyInvestThe Essence
Three Japanese concepts that capture what matters...
There are three Japanese terms that describe, more compactly than lengthy English explanations, what my work is about:
- Ikigai (生き甲斐) – reason for being, life purpose
- Nagomi (和) – harmony, balance
- Karōshi (過労死) – death by overwork
Together, they form a triangle:
→ The pursuit of life purpose and harmony,
→ to avoid self‑destruction through structural overload.
This is not about adopting Japanese culture or philosophy. It is about recognising a systemic principlethat applies universally:
- When we lose sight of purpose,
- when internal and external systems fall out of balance,
- and when we compensate by overloading ourselves or using substances and behaviours to keep functioning,
we move toward collapse – slowly at first, then suddenly.
How this connects to dependency
In my definition, addiction is a management errorin how we handle the dependencies that are already part of life.
The Essence framework helps clarify what goes wrong:
- Ikigaiis disrupted: we lose touch with genuine purpose and replace it with substitute activities.
- Nagomicollapses: the system (body, mind, relationships, work) is no longer in balance.
- Karōshilooms: we are heading toward burnout, breakdown, or chronic dysfunction.
The work I do is about:
- recognising where these disruptions have occurred,
- mapping the actual forces at play,
- and restoring functional balance – not through mysticism, but through clear, evidence‑based intervention.
Why these terms?
I use these Japanese concepts because they capture, in three words, what would otherwise require long paragraphs:
- a life lived with purpose,
- in harmony with internal and external realities,
- without self‑destruction.
That is the essence of what recovery, autonomy, and sustainable change look like.
It is not a recipe. It is a direction.