In a very readable and refreshing piece Young & Meaningful, the Japanese-American high school student Elise Mayumi Beal notes a Japanese philosophy of finding pleasure in the small things, and matches it with an online trend.

And she takes a look at and compares these two ideas:

‘Hopecore’, as its name suggests, is an aesthetic focusing on hope. Often while scrolling through the hopecore hashtag, one will find simplistic pictures, say, of rabbits asleep in fields, accompanied by inspirational quotes like “Lovely things come and go, but they come” scrawled atop the image. “Slow down. Appreciate the little things” now appears on a glowing screen amidst the mess of online content. Following this advice, one might pause and take a break from the endless scrolling…

The intention of such posts is to get the audience to appreciate the little things, to pause and feel the warm feeling that rabbits in fields and words of affirmation give us. Hopecore centers on humanity and positivity, often focusing on everyday interactions, and on romanticizing the little things: the way sunlight filters through the window, or the smell of coffee on a rainy day, for instance…

Basically, ‘finding’ ikigai isn’t something grand and monumental, but rather consists of many, many little moments that each make you appreciate life. The idea is that it is from this appreciation that purpose is born. It is from this latter, traditional definition that we can draw similarities with hopecore. In essence, both ikigai and hopecore are simple: The little things make life worth living.

Understanding hopecore’s similarities with ikigai, and recognizing its birth from a place of psychological instability, gives us a unique perspective on the younger generation and how we deal with complex topics. Being exposed to so much online content with negative existential undercurrents has changed the way my peers and I perceive life, but it’s being combated with yet more online content, now utilized in a positive way, in the form of hopecore and other trends, to offer purpose and structure at a time when it’s direly needed. Sparked by the nihilism caused by echo chambers of bad news, hopecore is a stand against the bad in the world, and is one of the younger generation’s unique ways of countering the nihilism to which we’re so often exposed…

However much society and culture changes with time, I am confident in one thing: humanity’s unyielding hope. There has always been hope, manifesting in billions of ways among billions of people: by drawing horses and other animals on cave walls, in the hope that the day’s hunt would be bountiful; burying a king beneath a vast pyramid of stone in the hope that he may go to a place of eternal happiness; putting a post on the internet in the hope that others may stumble upon it and begin to dream again; and, creating a philosophy to appreciate the mundane in the hope that this will grant you meaning.

The Japanese government gives us a definition of Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Joyful Life: 

The Japanese word ikigai, which has recently gained attention worldwide and enjoys widespread use, refers to a passion that gives value and joy to life. The author who prompted its craze speaks about the word’s appeal and the effects it has on mental and physical health.

And in a piece last year, the Independent asked: What is TikTok’s new ‘hopecore’ trend and is it exactly what we need right now? 

“I don’t think there will be a decline in usage of social media any time soon, but what people can do is start filling their feeds with things that inspire them to reconnect, re-ignite a spark of hope, and remind them that no matter how overwhelming other things in life may be, there is a whole world of beauty around them – to access it, they need only choose to look.”

…