Life Gets Better for You Later

Life gets better for you later.

After dropping out of high school — the hard years.

And when I think of the years spent on my second and third attempts at the college entrance exam, tears come.

It wasn't simply because studying was hard.

Looking back, the me of those years

was not living like a person.

I spent most of every day studying in a dim room,

and how many questions I got right

mattered more than what I felt that day.

More than what I liked,

who I wanted to meet,

where I wanted to go,

or what kind of person I wanted to become —

first, I had to pass the exam.

My life felt like it had been put on hold somewhere.

Not time being lived now,

but time to be endured in order to live later.

That was the feeling.

Then I got into university.

And I experienced utterly ordinary things.

Eating with friends after class,

meeting people for no particular reason,

going to new places,

looking for things I liked,

sometimes doing nothing at all.

That was when I first thought:

ah, so this is life.

So this is how people actually live.

I didn't have to prove something every day,

and a slightly lacking result today

didn't mean my entire life had gone wrong.

Laughing, talking, loving, failing,

being curious about new things,

walking in the direction you choose.

That ordinary life was, for me, quite a discovery.

And more time passed.

I now do work that I love.

I build things,

meet people,

solve problems,

start new ventures,

and watch the things I've made become useful to someone.

It's hard to draw a clean line between work and life.

Rather than working reluctantly and living in the leftover hours,

I've come a little closer to living by doing what I want to do.

Then one day, someone said to me,

“You've found your ikigai.”

Ikigai.

What makes life worth living.

A reason to get up again in the morning.

The something that keeps a person living their own life.

When I heard it, I just thought it was a kind thing to say.

But after remembering the years of my second and third tries at the exam,

those words sound completely different.

There was a time

when I lived because I had to.

At university,

I finally learned what living even was.

And now, someone looks at me

and says I seem like a person who has found his reason for living.

Come to think of it, I've come a long way.

To the kid who was barely holding on,

grinding through his second and third attempts —

if I could show him one brief glimpse of the future,

I wouldn't want to tell him a success story.

Not about money,

not about business,

not about the things he would one day achieve —

I don't think I'd bring any of that up first.

Because what that kid truly wanted to know

was probably none of those things.

I'd just want to tell him this:

life gets better for you later.

You'll meet many people,

you'll find the things you love,

and you'll get to do the work you want, as much as you want.

And one day,

someone will look at you

“You've found your reason for living.”

— that is what they'll say to you.

So let's go just a little further.

Because the life you know right now

is not all there is to life.

And thankfully, truly thankfully,

that kid is, in the end,

meeting his own life.

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