kp5005's review
4.0
Very good, easy to read book for teens who aren't sure about what they want to do when they grow up or even adults who want to evaluate their purpose and future plans. There are prompts to help aid reflection and idea generation.
opalescence's review
4.0
First and foremost, I appreciate a secular book for teens guiding them on how to find their purpose in life. I wish I had this book when I was a struggling teen.
Yes, this is a “teen edition” of a popular adult book that already exists; therefore, my critiques about this edition may be non-existent or “solved” in the “adult edition,” but as they are systemic societal issues, I doubt they are addressed in there as well.
1) I know that the authors have lived in Japan for many years, but it still bugs me that it’s essentially white guys educating 60 countries worth of potential readers on Japanese cultural concept rather than a native. That does not diminish the value of their work, but rather that we need to increase opportunities for minorities in publishing so that they can write their own lived-experiences and culture. I’m white bread so I can’t say if they were offensive or not to Japanese culture for reducing down most references to pop culture, but I digress.
2) The writers frame this book through a painfully abled old cis straight white male perspective. Sure, they mention inspirational people of color throughout, but their lens is painfully limited to middle and upper-middle class teens. No acknowledgement that structural, systemic issues sometimes thwart the “search for meaning” for a majority (yes, a majority) of women, poc, and other minorities (compounded by the more minority groups an individual identifies with). The authors were also anti-technology with their sentiments through The Nightingale story that “virtual reality” is responsible for making youngins’ lives less fulfilling. For a book published in 2021 with the benefit of living through a global pandemic, they grossly undermine the profound benefits and conveniences of technology on modern-day society. Para-social relationships were paramount to weathering the pandemic, something neurodiverse and other marginalized people have known for decades. And although they did mention neurodiverse people like Tony Hawk and Greta Thunberg in their inspirational examples, that’s a low bar considering how famous and “buzzy” their names are, especially when this book was probably getting sanitized.
3) This book is fat-phobic when it lists a key tenant of an ikegai life as “not eating too much food, especially junk food.” For the love of God, they don’t have to be fat positive, but could they at least be body-neutral? Licensed nutritionists know that the key to a good diet is not “avoiding eating to excess” but rather eating a BALANCED diet with lean proteins, unprocessed carbs, fats, and veggies. To minimize excessive weight as being solely from “eating too much—especially junk food” is regressive, ignores the complexity of the obesity crisis even our best doctors and scientists in the world can’t solve, and completely out of place in a book that’s supposed to be about finding your purpose in life. Why does self-actualization, arguably “nourishing your soul,” have to have anything to do with the physical body?
4) The last chapter on finding love was completely unnecessary. Attributing romantic and xual relationships as an integral human experience excludes a currently estimated 1% of the human population that identifies as asexual and/or aromantic. They feel no desire for X or romance and they should not be made to feel sub-human due to society’s obsession with one very particular type of “superior” love. Familial love matters and so does platonic love. And neither romantic love nor xual attraction are “above” these other forms of love.
5) Some of the “inspirations” they chose have been known problematics that the school system still pushes (for some reason). Edison stole experiments from other inventors and conducted horrific experiments, Steve Jobs was the talking head of Apple whereas Wozniak was arguably the brains, and Arnold Schwartzanegar had any number of affairs and had absolutely no relevant experience whatsoever to become a mayor of a town let alone a governor of the most populous state in the US.
6) They reduce success down to “personal responsibility” when we really need to be holding corporations and industry responsible for the worldwide issues THEY have caused, not individuals. When 80% of pollution is done by industry, personal recycling can only account for a maximum of 1/5 of the problem. Corporations have repeatedly used marketers and lawyers to circumvent accountability for their actions to give as many opportunities for loopholes and dodging their ethical responsibility to stop killing our planet and exploiting the workers to increase their bottom line.
They reduced everything down to sanitized, camouflaged chunks of “wisdom” on how truly easy it is to succeed in the world as long as you have the guidance and vision to achieve it—the world is a lot more complex than that, but this could again be pressure from the publishers on excluding nuance in nonfiction books for minors (and/or resulting in fewer localization content censorship jobs).
TLDR: this book is almost every bad “ist” in the book for not acknowledging and challenging the frameworks of our broken society. But so is the American education system.
*This was supposed to be a lighthearted book yet I somehow turned it into a critical theory dissertation with a social justice emphasis. My review is basically ranting at society, but since this book is enforcing those norms to children (like the public education system) I got mad, I guess. I used this book as a proxy for the American education system, oops.
Yes, this is a “teen edition” of a popular adult book that already exists; therefore, my critiques about this edition may be non-existent or “solved” in the “adult edition,” but as they are systemic societal issues, I doubt they are addressed in there as well.
1) I know that the authors have lived in Japan for many years, but it still bugs me that it’s essentially white guys educating 60 countries worth of potential readers on Japanese cultural concept rather than a native. That does not diminish the value of their work, but rather that we need to increase opportunities for minorities in publishing so that they can write their own lived-experiences and culture. I’m white bread so I can’t say if they were offensive or not to Japanese culture for reducing down most references to pop culture, but I digress.
2) The writers frame this book through a painfully abled old cis straight white male perspective. Sure, they mention inspirational people of color throughout, but their lens is painfully limited to middle and upper-middle class teens. No acknowledgement that structural, systemic issues sometimes thwart the “search for meaning” for a majority (yes, a majority) of women, poc, and other minorities (compounded by the more minority groups an individual identifies with). The authors were also anti-technology with their sentiments through The Nightingale story that “virtual reality” is responsible for making youngins’ lives less fulfilling. For a book published in 2021 with the benefit of living through a global pandemic, they grossly undermine the profound benefits and conveniences of technology on modern-day society. Para-social relationships were paramount to weathering the pandemic, something neurodiverse and other marginalized people have known for decades. And although they did mention neurodiverse people like Tony Hawk and Greta Thunberg in their inspirational examples, that’s a low bar considering how famous and “buzzy” their names are, especially when this book was probably getting sanitized.
3) This book is fat-phobic when it lists a key tenant of an ikegai life as “not eating too much food, especially junk food.” For the love of God, they don’t have to be fat positive, but could they at least be body-neutral? Licensed nutritionists know that the key to a good diet is not “avoiding eating to excess” but rather eating a BALANCED diet with lean proteins, unprocessed carbs, fats, and veggies. To minimize excessive weight as being solely from “eating too much—especially junk food” is regressive, ignores the complexity of the obesity crisis even our best doctors and scientists in the world can’t solve, and completely out of place in a book that’s supposed to be about finding your purpose in life. Why does self-actualization, arguably “nourishing your soul,” have to have anything to do with the physical body?
4) The last chapter on finding love was completely unnecessary. Attributing romantic and xual relationships as an integral human experience excludes a currently estimated 1% of the human population that identifies as asexual and/or aromantic. They feel no desire for X or romance and they should not be made to feel sub-human due to society’s obsession with one very particular type of “superior” love. Familial love matters and so does platonic love. And neither romantic love nor xual attraction are “above” these other forms of love.
5) Some of the “inspirations” they chose have been known problematics that the school system still pushes (for some reason). Edison stole experiments from other inventors and conducted horrific experiments, Steve Jobs was the talking head of Apple whereas Wozniak was arguably the brains, and Arnold Schwartzanegar had any number of affairs and had absolutely no relevant experience whatsoever to become a mayor of a town let alone a governor of the most populous state in the US.
6) They reduce success down to “personal responsibility” when we really need to be holding corporations and industry responsible for the worldwide issues THEY have caused, not individuals. When 80% of pollution is done by industry, personal recycling can only account for a maximum of 1/5 of the problem. Corporations have repeatedly used marketers and lawyers to circumvent accountability for their actions to give as many opportunities for loopholes and dodging their ethical responsibility to stop killing our planet and exploiting the workers to increase their bottom line.
They reduced everything down to sanitized, camouflaged chunks of “wisdom” on how truly easy it is to succeed in the world as long as you have the guidance and vision to achieve it—the world is a lot more complex than that, but this could again be pressure from the publishers on excluding nuance in nonfiction books for minors (and/or resulting in fewer localization content censorship jobs).
TLDR: this book is almost every bad “ist” in the book for not acknowledging and challenging the frameworks of our broken society. But so is the American education system.
*This was supposed to be a lighthearted book yet I somehow turned it into a critical theory dissertation with a social justice emphasis. My review is basically ranting at society, but since this book is enforcing those norms to children (like the public education system) I got mad, I guess. I used this book as a proxy for the American education system, oops.
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