The Same Heaven

Ikigai

There is a village in Japan with an unusual density of 100 year olds. This caught the interest of a group of scientists. To their surprise, the people in the village didn’t live healthier lives; they didn’t exercise more, eat healthier food nor did they sleep more. The one outstanding characteristic was that each inhabitant was assigned a task to ensure that everyone in the village had a purpose.

This was at least how the man next to me on the plane described it. After a quick fact check [1], it seems like they actually did eat healthier, but they also did put great importance on making sure everyone has a purpose. “Ikigai” is a Japanese concept referring to something that gives a person a sense of purpose, a reason for living. Your ikigai is the intersection between what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for.

The man on the plane had worked his entire life as the CEO of his own company. He had just recently semi-retired, and I don’t think I have ever seen someone so proud of something. Such pride over one’s career is surely the best conditions for a sweet retirement. But retiring fully he would never do he said. The lesson from the Japanese village resonated with him. Most of his friends had recently retired, and the ones that didn’t find a new purpose “died quickly” he said.

The end of this world

AI will soon be able to do almost all jobs we have in today’s economy. Some people don’t think this will be the end of the world. Previous technology shifts created more jobs than they replaced. “Look at the industrial revolution! Yes, machines replaced many jobs, but they created even more”. However, this is not just another technology shift. This time, we (humans) are replacing our defining characteristic, our intelligence. New types of work will certainly be needed, but AI will be able to do them too.

The same people also point to the fact that the introduction of cars didn’t put horse drivers out of a job. Instead, they became car drivers. But what happened to the horses? A horse defining characteristic was its strength, but they were no longer the strongest. Horses’ relevance to the economy is now almost insignificant. This will be our fate too once we are no longer the wisest.

For horses, the consequences were more devastating than mere economic insignificance, as shown in the graph [2] above. When the most intelligent species at the time no longer aligned with horses’ interests, their population rapidly declined. This is a disturbingly plausible scenario for humanity if AI researchers fail to align AI’s goals with the goals of humans. But consider the best-case scenario: AI handles all tasks, and the benefits are evenly shared, meeting everyone’s basic needs. Yet remember the lesson from the Japanese village on the critical importance of purpose. In such a world, two of Ikigai’s four pillars become unattainable—the world would no longer truly need anything from us, nor would it rationally pay for human effort when AI outperforms us in every way. No one would die from hunger or thirst, but would we instead meet the same fate as the man on the plane’s friends?

The same heaven

This is a big deal. A huge change in humanity’s collective consciousness. How will we ever manage to get through cocktail parties without the icebreaker “so, what do you do for a living?”. Our identity is so tied to our occupation that we say “I am a teacher”, instead of “I work as a teacher”. It makes sense; our work is a cog in the machine that gave humanity amazing things like penicillin, the scientific method and space travel. That is something to be proud of. But what will be our Ikigai when the machine has no use for our cog?

I’m currently reading A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. The book challenges the common belief that your identity is defined by your thoughts, emotions, or social roles. Instead, Tolle suggests that true freedom and happiness come when you break free from this illusion. The title refers to a biblical prophecy in which a “new heaven” symbolizes a shift in human consciousness, and a “new earth” represents how this shift manifests in the physical world. This is the long-term solution to our upcoming identity crisis. This way, happiness is attainable without the two missing pillars of Ikigai. However, Buddha taught essentially the same ideas 2,500 years ago, and humanity hasn’t made much noticeable progress. Changing the way we think, a new heaven, takes time. Time we don’t have, given how soon superintelligent AI might come.

A new earth

So, how can our physical reality adapt? How can we find happiness in this new world without a change in mindset? A plausible solution is to just fool ourselves that what we do is more meaningful than it is. In this new world, I think most people’s main pursuits will be close to what we today call “hobbies”. But unlike most hobbies, we will build big systems around them to fool ourselves that they are something the world needs. This way we artificially make the lost pillars in Ikigai attainable.

We already have many things like this today. Take soccer for example. Some of my happiest moments in life have come from this seemingly pointless activity. I remember the rush of joy, packed tightly in that small sports bar with a hundred people, everyone jumping, shouting, hugging, beer splashing into my hair, my voice disappearing from screams of pure happiness as my favorite team scored. I could not tell you what the meaning of 22 adults chasing after a ball is, but because of the system we have built around it, stadiums, journalists, fan clubs and broadcasting networks, I have no problem fooling myself when I am not being asked. These systems are key to maintaining the illusion. You don’t question its importance when it gets that much attention. The new earth will have more things like this. For example, we might get a tree-carving “industry”. Millions of people spending their days carefully sculpting beautiful shapes into the bark of city trees. Around them, a vast ecosystem emerges: journalists dissecting each artist’s style, critics passionately debating the merits of different carving techniques, even whole media empires dedicated entirely to documenting the lives of prominent tree-carvers. This might seem absurd, but try to explain soccer to someone without making it sound absurd.

The people caught right in the middle of this shift will have it hardest—especially those whose jobs disappear first. Societal illusions only stick when they’re collectively endorsed. You can’t fool yourself alone; everyone else has to play along too. But once they do, life might not actually look that different. The tree-carving journalist will probably still work 9 to 5. Eventually, we might even have technology sophisticated enough to physically rewire our brains, literally forcing ourselves to believe these illusions. But by then we won’t need to. It’ll already feel normal—like money, a fiction everyone accepts without hesitation. Of course, just as some people today reject the very idea of money, there will always be a few who see through the charade. Some will find peace in deeper wisdom, embracing something like Buddha’s teachings. Others, unable or unwilling to adapt, will face the same sudden emptiness that befell the friends of the man on the plane—and “die quickly.”

Epilogue

This isn’t really a prediction—it’s more of a plausible story. As I said earlier, none of this works unless we first achieve a genuine post-scarcity world. And to reach that point, two big hurdles remain: solving AI alignment, and figuring out how to fairly distribute the fruits of aligned AI. Neither is guaranteed. Even if we do, a post-scarcity society might bring its own troubles. Imagine social media algorithms engineered by superhuman intelligence—they might become so addictive we’d struggle to ever look away. Dystopian scenarios where humanity slides into passive helplessness, as vividly portrayed in the (world’s best) movie Wall-E. But we don’t even need fiction to see what might happen: some groups today already experience something similar to post-scarcity, and their stories aren’t always encouraging. One example is wealthy wives living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, as studied by anthropologist Wednesday Martin. They ended up trapped in elaborate status competitions that weren’t exactly great for their mental health [3]. The difference, of course, is that those wealthy wives are just a subgroup, with little influence over society at large. When everyone finds themselves in a post-scarcity world at the same time, fooling ourselves for the benefit of our well-being will be much easier.

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[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/09/japan-okinawa-secret-to-longevity-good-health/

[2] https://agpolicyreview.card.iastate.edu/fall-2022/electric-vehicles-horses-oats-and-ethanol-does-last-transportation-revolution-reveal

[3] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/primates-of-manhattan

Thanks to August Erseus, Rudolf Laine, Ollie Jaffe, Axel Backlund and Jakob Wiren for feedback <3