Something peculiar is happening in Japan. It’s been happening for a while. People there, especially young people, don’t seem to want things anymore. They’ve stopped going for promotions at their jobs, preferring to simply go through the motion at the office. They’ve stopped pursuing hobbies, preferring simple routines or passive entertainment. They prefer renting over buying homes, public transport over buying cars, and they prefer to keep the money they saved as cash instead of investing into assets. Half of all marriages are either sexless or nearly sexless. And I probably don’t need to tell you about the fertility rate, which is at an all-time low. In fact, many young adults have stopped looking for love altogether. About 45% of them have not had sex for at least 12 months. And of those never married, about half are virgins. The Japanese management consultant Ganichi Omai was the first to describe this phenomenon as a lowd desire society. In his book of the same name, he calls it quote Japan’s unique world unprecedented abnormality. It’s as if Japan has given up on the idea of ambition. People are afraid of hope and have become profoundly risk averse as a result. As Omay puts it, quote, “In Japan, men and women, young and old, all suppressed their desires and put money into savings to minimize anxiety, even if only slightly.” To

explain how Japan come to be this way, I need to tell you a story about the rise and fall of the Japanese economic empire and its aftermath, which lingers to this day. Our story begins at the end of World War II. Having lost that war, Japan was in ruin, its cities devastated, its economy shattered, and its people amongst the poorest in the world. So few expected that Japan was about to pull off an economic miracle the like of which the world had never seen. Over the next few decades, the country would embark on a remarkable period of unbelievable economic growth at a rate averaging about 10% per year. And by its end, Japan had become the world’s second largest economy, just behind the US, with many expecting it to soon overtake the US and become the most dominant economy in the world. Japan was anything but a low desire society back then. It was vibrant and ambitious. People dreamt big and worked hard. They aimed for the moon and some got there. The streets were packed with brand new cars, stores always crowded with people. The appetite for new experiences seemed endless. Everyone wanted to get ahead, buy homes, start families, and enjoy the good life. It seemed like the good time would never end, but all good things come to an end, and the end for Japan’s golden years was near. The decades of

rapid growth had become unsustainable, resulting in an asset bubble. For example, despite being 25 times smaller than the US in terms of land mass, Japan’s total land value was worth more than that of the entire US times 4. Tokyo’s real estate value, in particular, had become so astronomically high that the Tokyo Imperial Palace, an area of just 3.4 km, were said to be worth more than all the real estate in California combined. The signs of an economic bubble were there and at least in hindsight obvious. For example, people were buying things just to buy them, regardless of how random or useless they might seem, like golf club memberships that cost as much as $3 million. At one point, Japanese corporations seem to have literally run out of things to buy in Japan and started buying things in foreign markets, too. They bought the Rockefeller Center in New York for $1.4 billion. Colombia Pictures for $3.4 billion and Universal Pictures for $6.6 billion. There were concerns at the time that Japan was buying up too many foreign assets. Some worried that Japan might one day buy up the entire US or the whole world. Perhaps Japanese investors have become accustomed to seeing prices going up that they stop worrying about how much they cost today, expecting to always be able to sell it for more in the future. That was until that future came crashing down. In 1989, the Bank of Japan decided to raise interest rates sharply, hoping it would keep the rampant asset speculation and inflation under control. It worked, or rather, it worked too well. The asset bubble burst, causing a downward economic spiral. The crash started with the stock market in 1990 and the real estate market soon followed in 1991. Asset prices which people assumed would keep rising began to fall and kept falling. The stock market would go on to lose 80% of its value in the following decade and the real estate market 70%. Businesses and banks who had overextended themselves to acquire these assets were left holding nothing but massive amounts of debt and bankruptcies and layoffs soon followed. People who were rich on paper watched as their wealth turned to ashes before their

eyes. What followed wasn’t just a quick recession, but a long drownout economic stagnation that would come to be known as Japan’s lost decades. It’s called the lost decades because nothing really happened economically during those decades. The GDP more or less stopped growing with stagnating wages and deflating prices. The effects of this economic malay remained to this day. Tokyo’s real estate market never recovered to the height of its heyday, and the Japanese stock market only went back to its pre-crash value last year. To say that people learned their lessons is an understatement. Perhaps they learned it too well. People didn’t just grow cautious, they became pessimistic. Not only are they preparing for the worst, they expect the worst, too. Ambition always ends in frustration seem to have been the lesson many internalized. So instead of chasing big goals, they now gravitate towards stability. Steady income, simple routines, and cash on hand. Those who grew up during this era of quiet resignation who are the young people working and living in Japan now will come to comprise the bulk of the low desire society. These people never experienced the bullet train pace of rising living standards their parents did. Instead, they’ve grown accustomed to stagnation where the absence of progress is the norm. They know about the massive layoffs and bankruptcies from giant corporations that once looked too big to fail and understood job security to be elucory. Wages stay the same anyway, so why work that hard? Prices remain low anyway, so why buy assets? Fortunately, low prices also mean that things are cheap. Rent is low enough and the Japanese public transport works. Food is affordable. Well, except rice. That’s a long story for a different day, but for the most part, the cost of living is conveniently affordable in the neverending array of 100 yen shops and convenience stores. This allows people to get by with even a modest income. So, before long, people start thinking, you know, let’s just keep our heads down and we’ll survive. Don’t try anything bold. Live below our means and save what we can. walk carefully through life so that we may arrive safely at death. Now, I’m noticing that this might start to sound a bit depressing. It would seem that there’s something wrong with a low desire society, that it’s a problem that needs to be fixed. But is it a problem? Really? And if it is a problem, whose problem is it? Now, first of all, from

the perspective of the economy, low desire society is indeed a problem. In fact, the book Omaya wrote about lowd desire society is largely a book about the Japanese economy. Low desire society is an economic problem because desire lies at the root of any economic systems. Everything that happens in an economy from the money invested to the employees hired to the products building factories and solding stores. Everything happens for the purpose of fulfilling people’s desires. So if people stop having desires, the entire economic machinery will grind to a halt. After all, why have an economy at all if no one wants anything anymore? As such, to be a low desire society is to have an underperforming economy, and the data reflects this. Japan’s real GDP per capita has been growing at an average rate of 0.7% per year since the crash of the 1990s, a fraction of what it was before the crash and one of the lowest amongst all G7 nations. As such, low

desire society has been a thorny problem for Japanese politicians and policy makers who were elected to manage the economy and reelected based on how well they did. They’ve been struggling to fix this for decades. And I don’t blame them. They have on their hands an economy notorious for being uniquely difficult to manage. The Nobel Prize winning economist Simon Knatz once said that there are four types of countries. developed underdeveloped Japan and Argentina. In other words, Japan’s economy is so strange that Kousnet thinks it should be its own category. One of the reasons for this is again that people don’t want things. And as a result, economic interventions that work everywhere else just don’t seem to work in Japan. You see, most ways to boost GDP involve injecting money into an economy in one way or another to stimulate its activities. That works because when you give money to people, they spend it or invest it as one does with one’s money. That in turn boosts economic activities and some inflation. But when you give money to Japanese people, they don’t buy anything because they don’t want anything. They don’t invest it either because they are risk averse. So they mostly end up saving it as cash. In other words, when you inject money into the Japanese economy, it just disappears like the darkness at dawn. like the darkness at dawn.

Okay, so low desire society is a problem for the economy and a pain in the ass for the politicians. But let’s take a break from the abstraction of economy and politics for a moment. Let’s get real for a bit and talk about people. By people, I mean those real individuals who live and work in Japan today. Modern economic and political systems are, at least on paper, meant to serve the people after all. So how does this low desire phenomenon impact the people? Is it a problem for them? That is from their personal perspectives, is it really a problem to have low desires? Well, there the question becomes more nuanced because it’s not obvious why it’s a problem for someone to have low desire. Do people have to have a lot of desires? Is it bad if someone happens to not want anything? Look, if I truly don’t want anything and I’m just sitting here chilling upon this chair in a state of perfect comfort and contentment within my own skin, I can’t see how anyone could convince me that I have a problem. Quite the contrary, what I have looks like the complete absence of problems. In fact, it seems that I would only start to have problems when I begin to want things I don’t have, where the unfulfilled desires begin to induce suffering. So, am I saying that having low desire is not a problem? Rather, it is having desire that is the problem. Well, I’m not sure I’m the one saying that, but Buddha might have said something like that a few thousand years ago. My friends, we have stumbled upon

an age-old paradox in many schools of spiritual and philosophical discourse concerning the question of how to live a fulfilling life. Because there seems to be two contradictory ways to do it. You can either get what you want or you can want what you have. To put it another way, you can either fulfill your desires or you can lower your desires. And in many ancient teachings, having low desire is not only not a bad thing, but often viewed as a virtue. There is the

famous story of Socrates, for instance. He went window shopping in the Athenian marketplace one day and looked at all the beautiful items on display that people could buy and said, “Wow, isn’t it great? Look at all this that I don’t want.” or the more academic translation, how many things I can do without. Now, I don’t think that ancient wisdom says that having desires is always bad, but it does point out this tension between getting what we want and wanting what we already have as seemingly contradictory strategies in living a good life. One of my favorite stories that illustrates this tension is the one between Alexander the Great and Dioynes the cynic. Alexander the Great is of course one of the champions of having a lot of desires and getting them fulfilled. He’s won wars and conquered kingdoms and gone down in history as one of his most famous high achievers. Dioynes on the other hand was a minimalist philosopher who lived in absolute austerity. He was basically homeless and slept in a barrel. It was said that he once had a cup that he used to drink water. Then he saw a child drinking water with his hand. So he realized that even the cup was unnecessary and got rid of the cup. So the meeting between these two characters was bound to be interesting. When Alexander went to see Dioynes, Dioynes was lying on the ground bathing in the sun. Alexander stood in front of him and said, “Bro, I am Alexander, king of Macedon. Why is Dioynes? Name your desire. If it’s within my power, I’d be happy to grant it to you.” Dioynes looked up and replied, “Dude, that’s great. In that case, could you stand a bit to the side because you’re blocking my son?” Now, the question is, who is better? Is it better to be Alexander who happy goals and through the disciplined application of his efforts and intelligence achieved them? Or is it better to be Dioynes who simply skipped all that and was happy and content exactly as he was? Now to be fair,

Alexander and Dioynes do seem to represent the two extremes of a spectrum. One is a massive overachiever and the other is a complete non-achiever. So maybe the answer to our question lies somewhere in the middle, a healthy medium where one does have some desires and work hard but also have some semblance of work life balance. Now that answer sounds sort of right, but it’s not my favorite answer. For one, it doesn’t fully answer the question. If there’s a healthy medium, where is that medium exactly? In other words, how much desire is the optimal amount of desire to have? The answer is not very specific in this regard. So, it’s a little lazy, I think. And secondly, it implies that amount is the key to our question. But is amount really the center of the bullseye here? Now there’s another

answer that I prefer and that answer lies in the ending of our story between Alexander and Dioynes. Apparently the conversation with Dioynes blew Alexander’s mind. So as he was leaving he was in a pensive mood. While his men were making fun of Dioynes and telling Alexander that he shouldn’t take Dioynes seriously, Alexander said, “If I weren’t Alexander, I would like to be Dioynes.” Some people interpret this as Alexander being envious of Dioynes, but I think it’s deeper than that. If you look at what Alexander actually said, he didn’t say, “Buh, I wish I could be Dioynes.” He said, “If I weren’t Alexander, I’d like to be Dioynes.” In other words, it implies a lack of choice to some degree in that Alexander couldn’t be Dioynes even if he wanted to because he was in fact Alexander. It points to an interesting fact of life that in the end we’re all condemned to be ourselves. We can resist that fact all we want. We might not like ourselves. We can refuse to accept ourselves. We can disown or hate ourselves. We can even put on masks and pretend to be someone else. But deep down we are who we are. We can’t run away from ourselves no matter how hard we try. Now I’m not saying that people can’t change. But I am saying that for better or worse, each of us have our own uniqueness, our capacity to change included. For example, Alexander couldn’t be Dioynes because he was Alexander. He was someone who naturally had a lot of desires and was drawn to take actions towards them. However, he could at any moment choose to suppress his ambition, give up the throne, and sleep in the barrel next to Dioynes. I don’t know if that would have made him happier, but he did have the freedom to choose that life for himself. Now, we all know that in reality, Alexander chose to pursue his desires instead, and the rest was history. That was the decision Alexander made with him being who he was. And each person will need to make that decision for themselves based on who they are and what they authentically desire. So, the key to our question isn’t amount. There isn’t an optimal amount of desire a person should have. Rather, it is authenticity. Namely, what is your authentic desire given who you truly are and what will you decide to do about it? Now, that’s easy to say but very difficult to do. In fact, it’s three separate very difficult things. The awareness to know ourselves, the wisdom to decide what to do about it, and the courage to take action on that decision. To illustrate how easily one can fail at all three of these things, here’s an example from my life. After graduating college, I worked for two years as a corporate consultant. I was pretty miserable through most of it. Probably because I hated the job. But for a long time, I thought I loved that job because everyone around me loved that job and they loved me having that job. My Chinese parents became happy for the first time in their lives and I was constantly receiving LinkedIn messages from university students asking me to show them how they could get that job too. And my colleagues, oh my goodness, they were so enthusiastic and passionate about getting into good projects and networking and going for promotions and everything else that came with a consulting career. So I was taken in by all that. I thought I was lucky to get that job and should work hard and progress in that career. In other words, my desire for a consulting career was not my authentic desire. It was not my desire really. Rather, it was conditioned into me by my social environment. And the closer I got towards this fake desire, the further away I drifted from my authentic desires. Steven Presfield calls this the shadow career where you work in a career that you don’t care about to avoid working on what you do care about. Now, it took me a long time and a great deal of needless misery to see that. It took me even longer to come to the decision to quit my job and longer still to work up the courage to actually do it. All this is to say that given how malleable we are to our social programming, we’re quite capable of being very confused about what we genuinely want, let alone knowing what to do about it and actually doing something about it. Now, what this

means about the low desire society phenomenon is that whether it is a problem for an individual comes down to whether their low desire is authentic. For example, there are people who have low desire because that’s who they genuinely are. They are like Dioynes who have seen through the social programming that tries to keep them tied down to the culture of endless consumerism and decided not to be a part of it. They refuse to keep up with the Joneses and are genuinely content in the absence of incessant wants and needs. To these people, having low desire is not a problem. In fact, we have much to learn from them. All power to them as far as I’m concerned. And politicians should stop bothering these people with their economic interventions because asking these people to have more desire in order to boost the economy would be futile and annoying. But there’s another category of low-desire individuals. These people do have desires, but they’re not working towards them. Not out of a proactive conscious choice but because of some variation of passivity like fear of failure, low self-esteem, addiction to comfort, lack of support, etc. Whatever the reason may be, their refusal to pursue their dreams is eating them up from the inside and the world which could otherwise benefit from their gifts is made worse by their resistance to it. To these people, having low desire is indeed a problem. In so far as politicians might want to do something productive, these are the people they should try to help. But politics aside, this is first and foremost a personal problem because ultimately only we can be the one to put our own feet in front of one another towards our own unique journeys. People may help us along the way, but they can never do it for us, especially not the government. So I hope that those who are shunning their dreams find the courage to take their first step and keep walking. And I hope we too find the inspiration in their story to do the same in our own lives. I heard that there are only two mistakes along this journey. Not starting and not finishing. Thank you.