Tokyo Girl – Three Life Lessons to Learn from Aya

It’s Friday evening and you’re heading home from work with promises to yourself of a fulfilling and productive weekend. You’ll finally get to do all those things you’ve been putting off for a while. It’s time to focus on yourself and and what you should be doing. That all sounds great, but as another Friday evening has approached, you find yourself binging TV shows on your couch, snuggled under a blanket.

Yes, I was talking about myself. But I’m pretty sure you’ve been there too. Yes, you didn’t do all those chores you promised yourself you would do, you didn’t really socialize, you didn’t really do anything productive. But it’s ok, sometimes it’s exactly what we need. And after spending a whole weekend not doing anything noteworthy and watching a whole TV show from start to finish, I wanted to see what life lessons I could take from it.

I stumbled upon the show Tokyo Girl on Prime Video and was immediately drawn into the world of Aya as she finds her way in the big city of Tokyo. Having wanted to live there all of her life, after graduating from university, Aya finally moves to Tokyo to pursue her dreams. The show follows her throughout the years, her success and failure, happiness and heartbreak. It showcases the vibrant city from many aspects as Aya grows in her career and moves from one place to another. All the different neighborhoods she finds herself in and people she surrounds herself with. It’s almost as if it’s not Aya who’s the main character of the story, but the city itself.

Go your own way

What I really took from this show was that you should always go your own way and not give into the standards and expectations of society. People tell you what to do all your life. It might be your parents pressuring you to pursue a certain career path, your friends chiming in on your life decisions or your neighbors giving you a judgmental look when all you’re trying to do is live your life. And that’s something that’s very important to me – making my own choices and living my life as I see fit. We tend to stress over what will our parents say or what will he or she think of me? Well they can say or think what they want. It’s your life and you get to decide what to do with it.

Focus on yourself

The show puts a lot of focus on envy. It’s easy to give into it. You see someone who’s a year younger than you, but has accomplished so much already. I think any of us have experienced it at some point in our lives. It’s a very human feeling, but it can eat at you until there’s nothing left. We are the main characters of our lives and that’s who we should focus on. It’s really only ourselves that can fulfill our dreams. So that’s where we should put that energy – on working on our goals, because no one is gonna hand it to us.

Appreciate what you have

I’m sure you’ve thought to yourself “If I made x amount of money, I would be happy” or if you lived in a certain neighborhood or could afford luxurious things, you would truly be happy. As Aya grows up, she flips through magazines that tell her what to buy and what to wear to be happy. What kind of job to do, what kind of people to surround herself with. She grows up with this idea of material happiness. So when she still isn’t happy having accomplished everything she wanted, she realizes that there’s more to life than that. And while we do live in a material world, surrounded by material things, it’s important to remember that there are more important things in life. And all the money in the world can’t buy you happiness.

So did I just try to justify having watched an entire TV show over the course of two days? Yes, yes I did. But I truly found the show touch on several things we should all remind ourselves from time to time. It’s easy to give into it and stress too much of what other people expect of us, compare ourselves to others or put too much value on material things. So I’m glad Tokyo Girl reminded me to stay true to myself. There’s nothing else I’d rather do.