What "Laughing, Then Turning Serious" Taught Me About Living by What Life Asks of Me

Laughing, Then Turning Serious: A Joke Collection (Lecture Recordings on Laughter, Vol. 1) by Japanese lecturer Kobayashi Seikan is the book behind this personal record of what I've actually started doing at 66. I've written before about a book by Norman Cousins on this blog, but this time I switched genres entirely and read this one instead. True to its title, it opens with puns and light anecdotes, and before you know it, you're being led into surprisingly deep territory — why people are born, what money really is, how to live alongside aging. It's a strange, layered kind of book. At 66, I found myself laughing my way through it, only to be left with something that stayed with me afterward.

Treating "what I'm asked to do" as my compass

A phrase that comes up again and again in the book is that "being asked to do things is life itself." The author argues that rather than setting your own goals and pushing toward them, what matters more is how often people come to rely on and ask things of you. He suggests that requests naturally gather around people who don't complain, grumble, whine, criticize, or make excuses.

This turned my old way of thinking about work and career upside down. Back when I was running my own business, setting goals and hitting them was the centre of how I worked. Now that I'm retired, though, I find more daily purpose in taking on what's asked of me properly than in deciding entirely on my own what to do next. Writing blog posts, making videos — both started, if I trace them back, because someone said they wanted to see or know something. Now, when a request comes in, I try to treat it as "something I'm grateful for" rather than "something bothersome."

Feeling "Utopia" — being happy with now, no conditions attached

The author says happiness comes in two kinds. One is "Paradise" — happiness you get once you clear some condition. The other is "Utopia" — happiness where you accept exactly what's here, right now, as the thing itself. Paradise-style happiness, he says, never actually completes itself, because as soon as one condition is cleared, another one appears.

That one stung a little, given how much time I've spent building up assets through investing. Even when unrealized gains grow, I find myself wanting more. Now, when I notice dew on a tomato leaf in the greenhouse in the morning, or when Meg (our cat) curls up on my lap, I try practising saying, with no conditions attached, "this, right now, is already enough." I haven't stopped tracking the numbers, but I've started keeping the substance of happiness somewhere separate from them.

Letting money "pass through" like currency

The chapter on money stood out too. The author argues that when you treat money that comes to you as "yours" and try to hoard it, it stops coming; money instead flows toward people who see it as something passing through them.

Having kept up property and stock investing for years, some of this felt extreme to me. But on the question of removing money worries, the idea of not making hoarding itself the goal was useful. I still keep my asset-building plans as plans, but I've started setting aside time to deliberately put into words: "this money is just passing through me on its way to helping someone." Thinking about how money gets used and who it makes happy, rather than the money itself, seems to ease the worry more than the numbers do.

Treating anger as a "learned habit," not an instinct

On relationships, one idea stood out: humans aren't actually built to get angry — we're just putting on a show of anger. Anger, in this telling, isn't instinct but a habit learned from the environment we grew up in.

When I have to see someone I'd rather avoid, instead of bracing myself with "that's just how this person is," I try stepping back and thinking, "this irritability is probably just a habit they picked up somewhere." It makes things a little lighter. In practice, this has let me stop trying to change the other person and instead just decide, calmly, how I'll behave in that moment. I've come to think that much of the suffering in relationships comes from trying to change someone else.

Not letting my mouth turn downward — aging and expression

In a chapter that speaks directly about aging, the author writes that the way not to age is to never furrow your brow, and to keep smiling. He also shares an anecdote about a salesman whose sales changed entirely depending on his facial expression — a concrete link between expression and luck.

At 66, with more joint pain and less stamina than before, I can't stop aging itself. But I can consciously reduce the time I spend frowning out of frustration with it. Now, when I pass a mirror, I check whether the corners of my mouth are turned down. It's a small habit, but even though the difficulty of aging itself doesn't disappear, I've come to feel that how I face it is something I have more control over than I'd assumed.

Living "plainly" — refusing to judge things good or bad

Later in the book, the author describes a way of living where you stop judging what happens to you as good or bad, simply accept it, and ask only what you can learn from it. He calls this "the third man."

Of all the practices, this is the one that has fit me best for enjoying old age. I've stopped judging aging itself, or the loss of stamina, as good or bad, and instead just ask: given this body, how do I stay in good spirits today? Doing that, the irritation I feel toward aging has slowly started turning into something closer to curiosity.

A small way to spend today laughing

The author also touches on something on a much bigger scale — the idea that the soul goes through repeated reincarnations before eventually reaching a state beyond the physical body. Honestly, I don't know where life comes from or where it goes. But when I line up these six practices — taking on what I'm asked to do, feeling happy with now unconditionally, letting money pass through, releasing anger as a learned habit, softening my expression, and living plainly — I find they all come down to one thing: small ways of spending today laughing. And maybe that's enough.

The book I mentioned here:

Kobayashi Seikan, Laughing, Then Turning Serious: A Joke Collection (Lecture Recordings on Laughter, Vol. 1)

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The era Kobayashi Seikan lived through, and who he was

Kobayashi Seikan (1948–2011) was born in Tokyo and graduated from the law faculty of Chuo University. From his student days he had a strong interest in human potential, ESP, and paranormal phenomena, and continued independent research into them throughout his life. He gave roughly 300 lectures a year across Japan, and until his death at 63 in 2011, published many books drawn from transcriptions of those talks — this one among them.

His active years overlapped with Japan's shift from rapid postwar economic growth through the bubble economy and into the post-bubble years, when the old assumption that effort reliably pays off began to crack. At a time when the postwar model of setting goals and working hard toward them was losing its footing, his emphasis on "what I'm asked to do" rather than "goals achieved," and his call to live plainly, at some distance from competition and efficiency, seem hard to separate from that backdrop. He may have been offering an answer, for a society no longer assured of continuous growth, to what to do instead of simply pushing harder.

As for the man himself, his eldest daughter was born with a disability, and this experience seems tied to his frequent remarks about having encountered, far more than most people, a kindness in others that isn't visible under ordinary circumstances. Between claims like "cleaning toilets brings good luck" — the kind of idea that divides opinion — he comes across as someone who trusted lived experience and observed phenomena over theory, with a distinctive way of speaking. Despite keeping up a lecture schedule busy enough to take him across the whole country, he reportedly said he had no sense of mission at all — he simply talked because he enjoyed it. That relaxed, unforced stance seems, in itself, to embody the message he was trying to pass on.