Dr. Kentaro Fujita

I think that's an interesting idea that I think in psychology we are wrangling with.

There's a lot of research in this area, so perhaps it's not quite answering your question.

The other notions that I think are interesting is just the notion of

this notion of wabi-sabi, that there's beauty in decay and non-perfection.

And again, I think that's an idea that can be foreign in the Western cultural space where, you know, like if we think about our landscaping or we think about

you know, what we want, you know, the way that we dress, it has to be perfect, right?

Like, you know, so we get all this cosmetic surgery or we, you know, buy all these clothes and if it's one wrinkle, we have to, you know, change clothes or whatnot.

Like we always, you mentioned the word optimization before that we things have to be perfect.

where in Japanese culture, there's a beauty in the imperfection.

In fact, you actually intentionally build in the imperfections to have beauty.

And I think, again, in the context of this conversation that we just had, embracing the suck and starting from the place of not being perfect to try to strive for something better, again, might be an idea that we could incorporate.

And we also already talked about ikigai, this idea of finding...

connection and expansion and meaning, purpose and something really mundane or ritualistic or simple, I think is also a really interesting idea that might sort of explain some of the lack of happiness that we are currently experiencing in our own culture where we're constantly future-oriented and we're always looking for bigger things as opposed to finding beauty in the simple things that we do.

Like the most mundane tasks that we do might be the most important things that we do, but we just don't code it that way because our eyes are on the prize downstream.

And I wonder if that too might be an interesting idea worth exploring.

Yeah, that brings us back to the idea of wapi-sabi, like beauty and the imperfection, beauty and the decay.

And yeah, like we can embrace what is not perfect, which seems, you know, just sort of thinking about my own life, like, wow, in some sense that's totally foreign.

You're taking pictures and it has to be the perfect picture.

You're saying this perfect family, like we have these mental models of what the goal is and we only achieve it when you're there.

Um, it's interesting to think about like other, like being, giving some degrees of freedom in that and finding meaning in that.