The gasoline fight from Zoolander — not what I’m talking about.
In Japanese the word is ikigai, in French raison d’être, and in English life passion. While there are cultural differences in meaning, the concepts are similar.
Life passion is the most frustrating and least useful concept of the three. The phrase strongly implies both singularity and permanence. A person has only one true life passion, and it doesn’t change.
I think life rarely works that way. Even looking at the most inspired and productive individuals in history, many of them were all over the place. Thomas Jefferson, in addition to his service as a founding father and POTUS #3, was also a voracious reader, an accomplished architect, an inventor of mechanical devices, and a polyglot. Issac Newton is famous as a physicist and mathematician, but was equally consumed by both alchemy and theology. Buckminster Fuller contributed to humanity as an inventor, philosopher, writer, and speaker. Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in both chemistry and physics.