I saw the meme before I understood why it had stopped me mid-scroll. Two book covers, side by side.
On the left, the real one. Ikigai, the Japanese secret to a long and happy life. A man on a porch somewhere quiet, coffee in hand, mountains behind him, the sun doing something soft and orange over water.
On the right, someone’s parody. Itkighai, the Marathi word for “rush,” dressed up in the exact same cherry-blossom branding. Instead of the porch, there’s a traffic jam.
Trucks nose to tail, a red bus wedged sideways, autos threading gaps that don’t exist, rain coming down on all of it. The caption underneath read, “Always in a hurry, reach nowhere, live shorter.”
I laughed, the way you laugh at something that’s clever enough to not need explaining. Then the laugh didn’t quite land, because I recognized the photograph.
Not literally. I don’t know that intersection; I don’t know those trucks. But I knew the itkighai traffic jam from the inside, the way you know a room you lived in for years even with your eyes closed.
I’d spent a long time living inside that itkighai, long before I ever got into an actual car and sat in actual Dehradun rain.
Let me tell you what itkighai actually felt like for me, because I think the meme is funnier and truer than most of the people sharing it on LinkedIn have sat with long enough to notice.
What Itkighai Actually Felt Like
It didn’t feel like a crisis. That’s the part nobody warns you about. It felt like nothing at all for years, which in hindsight is the most frightening part of the whole thing.
It wasn’t a single bad day. If it had been a single bad day, I’d have noticed it and done something about it years earlier.
It was Tuesdays, the quiet kind that never announce themselves as anything worth remembering. Thousands of them, stitched together so seamlessly that when I tried to recall one specific Tuesday from three years into a particular role, I genuinely couldn’t.
Not because nothing happened. Plenty happened: reviews, targets, a reorg, a flight to somewhere for a client who needed hand-holding, and a dinner I was too tired to actually taste. It was that none of it had enough texture to survive as a memory.
I’d come home some evenings and realize I couldn’t honestly tell my wife what the day had been about, not because I was hiding anything, but because there was nothing distinct enough left in me to report. The day had happened to me more than I had lived it.
They’d all been spent the same way: in motion, toward the next thing, with the actual experience of being alive compressed into whatever five minutes were left over at the end.
I want to be precise about this, because I think people hear “corporate burnout” and picture something dramatic. A breakdown, a shouting match, a resignation letter thrown on a desk. Mine wasn’t that.
Mine was quieter and, in some ways, more frightening, because nothing about it looked like a problem from the outside. I was good at my job. I was winning; by every external measure, the itkighai side of that meme runs on.
Promotions arrived roughly on schedule. The number in my bank account went up roughly on schedule. I could tell you, to the lakh, what my net worth was on any given birthday for about a decade, the way some people can tell you their weight.
I had built exactly the kind of life that the traffic-jam photo secretly depicts. Not a life in crisis, but a life in permanent, well-compensated motion, going nowhere in particular at considerable speed, and feeling, somewhere underneath all of it, quietly and persistently hollow in a way I didn’t yet have words for.
The thing that finally cracked it open wasn’t a health scare or a public failure. It was smaller, and looking back, it was almost embarrassing how small it was.
I was in the car, the kind of traffic that’s been shown to measurably raise stress and lower well-being long before anyone needed a study to tell them, so the Delhi-NCR kind of the itkighai photo is clearly modeled on, though it could have been any city. I reached for my phone to check what was next, out of pure reflex, the way your hand reaches for a light switch in a dark room you’ve lived in for years.
In that reflexive half-second before I even unlocked the screen, a thought arrived fully formed, like it had been waiting a long time for me to be still enough to hear it: I have no idea what I actually want anymore.
Not “I’m tired.” Not “this is hard.” Just a flat, almost clinical observation that somewhere in the last decade, the wanting itself had gone quiet. I was still moving. I had just stopped knowing toward what, and sitting there in that stopped traffic, that realization felt less like an idea and more like something physical, a cold weight settling into my chest that no amount of explaining away could lift.
That’s the part the meme gets right, underneath the joke. Itkighai isn’t the opposite of ikigai in the sense of being a different destination. It’s the same road with the exits removed.
You’re not going nowhere because you lack ambition. You’re going nowhere because the road never asked you to choose an exit. It just kept extending, and every mile you’d already driven made turning off feel more wasteful than continuing.
The Thought That Wouldn’t Leave
I didn’t quit the next week. That particular fear deserves its own essay, and I’ve written it.
I want to be honest here too, because the version of this story that sells well is the dramatic one: man has epiphany in traffic, quits by Friday, is drinking coconut water on a hillside by Monday.
That’s not what happened. What happened is that the thought wouldn’t leave.
It sat there for months, showing up at inconvenient times. During a board presentation I’d prepared meticulously. During my daughter’s school function. Once during an actual vacation, which is its own kind of proof that the problem was never the job itself, it was the operating system underneath the job.
You can remove yourself from the office and still be running itkighai in your head on a beach.
There is one specific evening I still think about, small enough that I almost didn’t include it here, and that smallness is exactly the point. My daughter was eight, and she’d spent two weeks building something out of cardboard for a school project: a model of a house, which I only notice the irony of now, writing this.
She wanted to show it to me before it went to school the next morning. I was on a call that ran long, the kind of call that always runs long, and by the time I came out, she’d already gone to bed.
Nothing dramatic happened. Nobody cried, nobody said anything to me about it the next day.
I found out only because my wife mentioned it in passing, almost as a joke: she waited up for you, you know. I remember standing in the kitchen with that sentence landing somewhere I couldn’t immediately locate and thinking, with a quiet, sinking clarity, that this was the fortieth version of this exact evening, and I had only noticed this one.
The other thirty-nine were simply gone, filed under ordinary, the way itkighai files almost everything under ordinary until there’s nothing left that feels extraordinary enough to stop you.
What I did instead, eventually, was something almost childish. I got a wall, one wall, in a spare room, and I painted on it.
Not well. I want to be clear this was not a beautiful piece of art.
The proportions were wrong, the sun looked more like a fried egg than a sunrise, and a friend who saw it later asked, not unkindly, what exactly the brown blob in the corner was supposed to be.
It was a house. It was supposed to be a house.
The point was never the quality of the painting. The point was that for roughly three hours on a Sunday, I did something with no deliverable, no deadline, and no audience.
I sat with a wall and a few pots of paint and asked myself, slowly, with no one waiting for the answer, what a life that actually belonged to me might look like, if it weren’t built entirely out of the next thing.
The Wall I Painted Instead of Running the Itkighai Loop
That badly drawn house on a bedroom wall, in 2013, the one I’ve written about before, is the thing that eventually, years later, turned into an actual move, an actual published book, and an actual life in Dehradun that people now message me about on LinkedIn, assuming it arrived easily, as if I saw a nice photo of mountains one day and acted on it.
It didn’t arrive easily. It arrived slowly, built out of a hundred small refusals to keep driving the same road, most of which looked, from the outside, like nothing was happening at all.
Here’s what I think the itkighai meme gets dangerously wrong, even while it’s being funny and true: it frames the whole thing as a binary. Japanese porch versus Indian traffic jam. Purpose versus rush.
As if the only two available lives are perfect stillness by a lake or perpetual gridlock, and the choice between them is obvious once you see it stated plainly, underlined in red: the choice is ours.
I wish it were that simple. If it were, nobody would still be stuck.
The actual choice isn’t between the porch and the itkighai traffic. It’s between staying in an itkighai you’ve stopped noticing is an itkighai and doing the much less photogenic work of figuring out, slowly, with no guarantee of a good ending, what you’d even be driving toward if the road ever opened up.
I think about this every time someone tells me, almost apologetically, that they’re not in crisis. Their job is fine, their marriage is fine, and their health is fine, so what exactly would they even be looking for in a conversation with me?
I had a man tell me something close to this a few weeks ago. He and his family live outside Sydney, by the coast, genuinely peaceful, genuinely unhurried by any reasonable measure.
What he said was that he didn’t know how to appreciate the peace he’d already built. He’d spent a decade and a half getting out of the traffic jam, and once he arrived, he discovered that nobody warns you that the itkighai habit of mind doesn’t automatically switch off just because the external traffic has cleared.
You can sit on the actual porch, coffee in hand, mountains in view, and still be running it high in your head: still checking the time, still waiting for the next thing, still unable to simply be where you already, technically, are.
That’s the part I don’t think the meme, or most of the advice built around Ikigai, honestly, fully reckons with. The Japanese version sells the destination.
Good health, good relationships, meaningful work, a simpler life, and four blocks stacked neatly under a man who’s clearly already arrived. It doesn’t spend much time on the part where you have to actually relearn how to want things slowly, after years of only knowing how to want them urgently.
I didn’t walk off a trading floor into instant contentment. I walked off into a strange, disorienting quiet that took longer to get comfortable in than the traffic ever did, because at least the traffic had a sound to it, a shape, and a next thing to react to.
Stillness, when you’ve spent fifteen years outrunning it, doesn’t feel peaceful on arrival. It feels like free fall.
Arrival Doesn’t Automatically Switch Off Itkighai
I moved to Dehradun eventually, deliberately, after actually comparing it against several other places, not because I saw a sunrise photo and got sentimental. It is not my hometown.
I chose it the way you’d choose anything after a long process of elimination: for the air, for the pace, and for a specific kind of ordinary life. I’d decided I wanted more than I wanted the next promotion.
It has its own version of itkighai creeping in now too, if I’m honest. More traffic than when I arrived, more horns, more of the hurry the city was supposed to be an escape from.
Geography was never going to be the whole answer, and I’d be lying to you and to myself if I pretended otherwise. What changed wasn’t primarily the zip code.
What changed was that I finally stopped treating itkighai as the default setting of a life and started treating it as a choice I was making, repeatedly, usually without noticing I was making it.
The Choice That Isn’t as Obvious as It Looks
So when I see itkighai doing the rounds on LinkedIn, liked by people who will go straight from liking it back into exactly the traffic jam in the photo, I don’t think the joke is wrong.
I think it’s one layer short of honest. The itkighai traffic jam isn’t a Tuesday-morning inconvenience you escape by moving somewhere with better infrastructure.
It’s a way of relating to your own time that will follow you into the car, onto the porch, into retirement, into a beach house in Australia, unless you do the slower, less shareable work of asking what you actually want instead of what’s simply next.
If you’re reading this from inside a version of that traffic jam right now, not in crisis, maybe, nothing dramatically wrong, just vaguely aware that a lot of Tuesdays have gone missing, I’m not going to tell you the answer is a hill station or a resignation letter or a badly painted wall.
I’m going to tell you what I wish someone had told me before I’d lost a decade of Tuesdays to a rush I’d stopped questioning: the itkighai doesn’t clear on its own. Something in you has to pull over first, even briefly, even badly, before you can see which direction you were actually trying to go.
The choice is ours, the meme says, underlined in red like it’s obvious. It isn’t obvious.
It’s just available. There’s a difference, and most of us spend years mistaking one for the other.
If what you want is four uninterrupted days to actually find that difference, Viram exists for exactly this. If what’s missing is just an honest number, what your version of “enough” actually is, Disha is the shorter, sharper version of that same conversation.