“And then comes the knowing that in me there is space for a second, large, and timeless life.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
According to Carl Jung the second half of life cannot be lived in the same manner as the first. “Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning must pay for it with the damage to his soul…” wrote Jung. In this video we explore the changes that Jung believed were necessary as we move into our forties and fifties. These changes, as we will learn, ward off the neuroses and depression that strike so many people in the mature years of life and help us harvest meaning and fulfilment from life’s afternoon.
“Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands . . .No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 8
The program of life’s morning, according to Jung, is that of expansion and growth. We must break from the controlling bonds of family, cultivate self-reliance and independence, and establish our own footing in the social world. Building a career, earning money, getting married, having children, attaining personal power and social status are some of the important tasks of life’s first half. Or as Jung explains:
“The child begins its psychological life within very narrow limits, inside the magic circle of the mother and the family. With progressive maturation it widens its horizon and its own sphere of influence; its hopes and intentions are directed to extending the scope of personal power and possessions; desire reaches out to the world in ever- widening range. . .”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 7
An extraverted attitude is best suited for the tasks of life’s morning. Whether it be finding a spouse, building a career, or gaining social status, if our attitude is oriented to the outer world, we will be more successful. Too much introversion can lead us to miss out on many of the opportunities that bring fulfillment to youth and early adulthood. Or as Jung’s colleague Jolande Jacobi explains:
“. . .the introverted, the seekers, the quiet and reflective ones…nevertheless in the end feel they are the losers, because the promises of youth have flown away, because the first half of their life was actually lived under the sign of the second, a situation not lacking in tragedy.”
Jolande Jacobi, The Way of Individuation
While the program of life’s morning favors the extravert that of life’s afternoon favors the introvert. “What youth found and must find outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself”, writes Jung. (Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 7) Jung believed that as we move into our forties and fifties striving for external ends is not sufficient, what we need in the latter half of life is not more power, social status, romance, wealth or career advancement, but meaning. Or as Jung writes about the patients in his private practice who were in the grips of a mid-life crisis:
“. . . we are no longer concerned with how to remove the obstacles to a man’s profession, or to his marriage, or to anything that means a widening of his life, but are confronted with the task of finding a meaning that will enable him to continue living at all – a meaning more than blank resignation and mournful retrospect.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 7
Fulfillment in life’s afternoon requires that we set aside others’ expectations and start living a life guided by our inner needs and wants. This necessitates that we detach ourselves from our persona, which is Jung’s term for the mask we wear to navigate the social world. A strong persona is useful in the expansionary phase of life’s morning, but in the afternoon of life it becomes a hinderance to discovering meaningful ways to live our life.
“. . . so many men are nothing more than the decorum accorded to them by society. In vain would one look for a personality behind the husk. Underneath all the padding one would find a very pitiable little creature. That is why the office – or whatever this outer husk may be – is so attractive: it offers easy compensation for personal deficiencies.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 7
Jung believed that in our mature decades, with time running out on our life, we must focus on cultivating a complete personality and moving toward what he called psychological wholeness. For this process is inherently rewarding and as Jung explains:
“The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many—far too many—aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber- room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 8
The Jungian psychologists Robert Johnson and Jerry Ruhl call this process of turning inward to discover our unactualized inner needs and potentials, living our unlived life and as they explain:
“Living our unlived life is the most important task in our mature years, to be achieved long before tragedy shakes us to the bone or we reach our deathbed. . .What is unlived life? It includes all those essential aspects of you that have not been adequately integrated into your experience. We can hear the distant drumbeat of unlived life in the back of our heads: “Woulda-coulda-shoulda.” Or in second guessing of life choices.”
Robert Johnson & Jerry Ruhl, Living Your Unlived Life
Jung also suggests that we can find meaning in the second half of life by seeking out wisdom with the same dedication that many of us seek out wealth, material goods, and status in life’s first half. Wisdom cannot be intentionally grasped for, but is something that comes to those who display an openness toward life and all its experiences. “[M]en who love wisdom’, Heraclitus stated, ‘must be good enquirers into many things indeed.” Time spent in solitude, reflecting on the great works of philosophy, science, psychology, and literature, and most importantly a willingness to explore the depths of one’s own mind will help us cultivate wisdom.
Jung believed the pursuit of wisdom was important for several reasons – firstly, it can help us navigate the trials and tribulations of life’s second half. Secondly, the pursuit of wisdom is a meaningful endeavor in and of itself. And thirdly if we attain wisdom we can partake in one of life’s timeless and meaningful archetypal roles – that of being a guide and mentor to the younger generation, or as Jung writes:
“In primitive tribes we observe that the old people are almost always the guardians of the mysteries and the laws, and it is in these that the cultural heritage of the tribe is expressed. How does the matter stand with us? Where is the wisdom of our old people, where are their precious secrets and their visions? For the most part our old people try to compete with the young.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 8
Another piece of advice that Jung offers to those moving into life’s afternoon is to change our perspective of death. For in an age largely devoid of religious myths, far too many people, especially as they move into the second half of life, fear death to the point of becoming neurotic. Instead of drinking the riches from the cup of life’s afternoon such individuals are paralyzed by their health anxieties. To avoid being one of these sad souls Jung suggests that we view death not as something to be fought against, but paradoxically, as life’s ultimate goal.
“I have observed that a life directed to an aim is in general better, richer, and healthier than an aimless one, and that it is better to go forwards with the stream of time than backwards against it. To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it…As a doctor I am convinced that it is hygienic – if I may use the word – to discover in death a goal towards which one can strive, and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 8
If we view death as complete annihilation, then adopting death as our goal may seem absurd. But Jung did not look at death in this nihilistic manner. Jung recognized that death is a great mystery and his interest in parapsychology opened him up to the possibility that there may be something to the notion of life after death. Jung encouraged his elderly patients to be open-minded about the process of dying and to adopt belief in some form of immortality, or as Jung put it:
“As a doctor, I make every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal, and life’s inclination towards death begins as soon as the meridian is passed.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 13
Turning inward, detaching from our persona, living our unlived life, seeking wisdom and viewing death as a goal can help bring meaning and fulfillment to the second half of life. But most people do not heed this advice. Rather, when a mid-life crisis strikes most people cling to the ways of their past and obsessively try to look and act young. Whether it be plastic surgery, adopting the fashion trends of a younger generation, neurotically obsessing over health, seeking out young romantic partners or base pleasures – entire industries are built upon helping people deceive themselves about their age. But as Elliot Jacques wrote:
“The compulsive attempts … to remain young, the hypochondriacal concern over health and appearance, the emergence of sexual promiscuity in order to prove youth and potency, the hollowness and lack of genuine enjoyment of life … are familiar patterns. They are attempts at a race against time.”
Elliot Jaques, Death and the mid-life crisis
And as Bernardo Kastrup explains:
“The tragedy of the West is that, because we are so naturally inclined to, and skilled at, the ethos of the first half of life, we become over specialized. When the game changes in the second half, we don’t know what to do. . .Many of us then keep on playing the same game as in the first half – more money, more status, more power, more consumption. . .”
Bernardo Kastrup, The Daimon and the Soul of the West
This refusal to change as we move into the middle decades of life comes at a steep price. For pretending to be young may work for a while, but time will catch up to us and as Jung put it: “… the problems that crop up [in the second half of life] are no longer to be solved by the old recipes: the hand of this clock cannot be put back.” The course of life has a natural arc and the more we deny it, the more we set ourselves up for tragedy. If we fail to harvest the meaning that is only to be found in life’s second half we will likely be plagued by immense regrets as we reach the final years of our life.
“Aging people should know that their lives are not mounting and expanding, but that an inexorable inner process enforces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself. After having lavished its light upon the world, the sun withdraws its rays in order to illuminate itself. Instead of doing likewise, many old people prefer to be hypochondriacs, pedants, applauders of the past or else eternal adolescents – all lamentable substitutes for the illumination of the self, but inevitable consequences of the delusion that the second half of life must be governed by the principles of the first.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 8
