Blogs and Articles from Third Way Forum Membrs

・ With the work-from-home, more people have more time at home. The question is how people are using the freed up time.

・ It seems people are spending more time with their families and/or for their health and fitness.

・ However, it is questionable if they are also doing something to re-invent themselves for the future by trying to do something new and different.

・ Probably many Japanese people are still struggling with the work/life integration. For a long time, the office time was work and the at-home time was rest. But now we need to be professional and private in the same place, and many Japanese are still not feeling comfortable with this change itself.

・ The Japanese people seem used to a very short vacation. Many Japanese spend more time on the traveling time to the vacation place than on the actual vacation itself.

・ Maybe the view is different in Japan. In Germany, work and vacation are two separately important things. Now under the pandemic, it is becoming a serious issue in Germany that they can not go anywhere on vacation. On the other hand in Japan, work is life. Vacation is just a nice thing to have. So the Japanese have no serous attitude toward vacation.

・ Also due to strong peer pressure, unless other colleagues all start taking long vacations, it seems very difficult to encourage the Japanese to take proper vacations.

・ The question is this. Let’s say the Japanese could manage to take longer time off. Then how would they spend that free time? Would they do something to re-set themselves for the future? Or would they just watch TV, play video games and drink a lot? Or maybe worse, they may even do more work on their time off!

・ Most likely, the most Japanese people will not spend free time to re-invent themselves by learning something new and different for the future simply because they are not taught to do so. Unless they are taught or ordered, they will not do anything different from what they are doing today. The more free time they have, the more time they will spend either on indulgence or on work.

・ This is because the Japanese people are still lacking the mindset of self-driven career. Taking initiatives with self-responsibility for one’s future was missing in the education. Young people and a minority of self-aware professionals have started driving their own career recently, but it is still very slow and very small.

・ Many Japanese were trained to follow the surest path to reach the guaranteed goal and a correct answer. In the past, entering an elite school and joining a big famous company was the correct answer and the goal of a decent career and life after retirement was pretty much guaranteed. That’s why doing something new and different was considered as a detour and as a waste of time.

・ But in today’s VUCA world, there is no correct answer and no guaranteed goal anymore. Yet, many people in Japan still seem to be looking for the obsolete surest path and they still avoid tryingto do something new and different as an unnecessary detour.

・ It seems many Japanese people need to reset their mindset (=mind re-set) first in order to realize the need to reset themselves for the future.