I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
In the second half of life, you might find yourself turning away from what you focused on in the first half. In the first half, you have the tasks of leaving your family of origin, establishing your autonomy, and figuring out how to support yourself. Crucially, the first half of life is a time to conform to social goals set out for you by your family and culture. That might include getting married, achieving material success, and building status in the world. You don’t focus on what you want to do but rather what your family and your culture wants you to do.
In the second half of life you are called to put down work that builds up your ego and instead pursue a vocation that expresses your soul. You are called to integrate all parts of yourself into a unique and whole person, even if that means turning your back on what your family and culture expect of you.
In Finding Meaning In the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up, Jungian analyst James Hollis writes:
Too often we remain in service to the agenda of the first half of life when the soul has already moved on to the agenda of the second. In the first half of life there is a place for ambition, for the driving powers of the ego, which compel us to overthrow our fears and to step into the world. As we have seen, the chief task of the first half of life is to build a sense of ego strength sufficient to engage relationship, social role expectations, and to support oneself. But we all fall into an overidentification with the ego and these various roles. No matter how successfully one has played out those roles, no matter how worthy they may be, and often they are not, ego identifications alone will not suffice to satisfy the soul over the long run.
In the first half of life, we are driven by what our family and culture handed to us as goals.
Jungian complexes are emotionally charged clusters of unconscious feelings, memories, and perceptions organized around a specific theme. They can influence thoughts and behaviors without the conscious mind being aware.
Hollis suggests that complexes can keep your life small and drained of energy, if you allow them to prevent you from taking on a new kind of life task at midlife:
The ambitions of the first half of life are largely fueled by the charged images, that is complexes, one has obtained from one’s family and one’s culture, and often have very little to do with the support of one’s personal destiny. While these powerful complexes may pull us out of dependency and into the world, they ultimately divert and distract consciousness from the care of the soul. Because of the grounding of these choices in complexes, with their origins in the disempowered past and their narrow frame of reference, lives are constricted and diminished rather than expanded. While we all must be weaned from the naive sleep of childhood, and the lethargy of dependence, the ego has a tendency to prefer security over development, and wind up with neither.
The tasks of the first half often result in dissatisfaction, when you thought that pursuit of money and status would bring happiness:
Ambition that drives the ego so often focuses on material things that even its achievement leaves us with the weariness and ennui of overindulgence.
But this unhappiness is exactly what can drive you in the second half of life to pursue something more meaningful:
The sense of ennui, restlessness, sometimes even depression that comes from the achievement of one’s ambitions, or the failure to achieve them, is the generally unwelcome invitation to disidentify with those goals.
What is the agenda of the second half of life? To let go of identification with the goals you were handed by your family and your culture, and instead find authentic meaning and drive within yourself.
This is not easy, writes Hollis:
In the second half of life the ego is periodically summoned to relinqush its identifications with the values of others, the values received and reinforced by the world around it. It will have to face potential loneliness in living the life that comes from within rather than acceding to the noisy clamor of the world, or the insistency of the old complexes. It will have to submit itself to that which is truly larger, sometimes intimidating, and always summoning us to grow up.
This is something I’m confronting right now, needing to let go of what I valued before: material wealth, career prestige, social acceptance.
Hollis provides encouragement:
A person strong enough to face the futilities of most desires, the distractions of most cultural values, who can give up trying to be well adjusted to a neurotic culture, will find growth and greater purpose after all. The ego’s highest task is to go beyond itself into service, service to what is really desired by the soul rather than the complex-ridden ego or the values of the culture.
How are most desires futile? The pursuit of material goods and social status fails to improve satisfaction over time; you can acquire more and more and yet you stay on the hedonic treadmill, never improving on your feelings of well-being.
The tasks of the first half of life make it look as though everything makes sense. You think: all I must do is get married, find a good career, build material wealth, have a family, and show the world I am an upstanding person who fulfills the goals that society wants me to fulfill.
In the second half of life you start to realize that, actually, life isn’t that easy:
During the second half of life the ego will be asked to accept the absurdities of existence, that death and extinction mock all expectations of aggrandizement, that vanity and self-delusion are the most seductive of comforts, and that the deep, infantile yearnings of childhood will forever go unsatisfied.
A new abundance awaits, if only you can let go of what your ego is demanidng you do:
The relinquishment of ego ambition, as fueled by first-half-of-life complexes, will in the end be experienced as a newfound and hitherto unknown abundance. One will be freed from having to do whatever supposedly reinforced one’s shaky identity, and then will be granted the liberty to do things because they are inherently worth doing.
I am feeling this so strongly right now, as I move forward with my 1000-day project, after completing a year-long prelude to it. All the things I thought mattered to me—growing my wealth, experiencing career success and prestige in my corporate technology job, acquiring more and better consumer goods—no longer call to me.
Instead, I feel called to express my soul, through my art and through my writing. I feel called to do it not just because it is fun (it is) and because it calls me to grow (it does) but because I want to contribute something valuable and meaningful to the world I live in.
In the second half of life, the ego must submit to the soul, in its eccentric and idiosyncratic glory. Hollis quotes Jung (in which Jung uses the word personality to mean something more like soul):
The development of personality means nothing less than the optimum development of the whole individual human being. It is impossible to foresee the endless variety of conditions that have to be fulfilled. A whole lifetime, in all its biological, social, and spiritual aspects is needed. Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination.
It is an act of high courage to individuate in this way. Jung’s individuation is a lifelong process of integrating conscious and unconscious aspects of the personality to become one’s unique, whole self. Once you succeed with the tasks of the first half of life, you are ready to proceed with the tasks of the second, in which you can become that unique and whole person you were meant to be. This is frightening, leaving the sturdiness of the societally-approved life you built for something unknown.
This quote from Hollis is particularly comforting to me today, when some part of me keeps saying “you are going to ruin yourself and your life by continuing to pursue art and writing instead of something more practical”:
We prize something called “success” yet grow the more miserable for having achieved it. If our life ends in ruin, from a collective societal standpoint but has fulfilled the calling intended by the gods, it has been a life well lived.
Because you will die in the end, it is okay if your life ends in ruin. But if you spend the second half of your life focused on the tasks of the first half and do not pursue your vocation and the call to individuate, you have created ruin even while you live.