Remarks

From Carl Jung’s On the Psychology of the Unconscious:

Our life is like the course of the sun. In the morning it gains continually in strength until it reaches the zenith-heat of high noon. Then comes the enantiodromia: the steady forward movement no longer denotes an increase, but a decrease, in strength. Thus our task in handling a young person is different from the task of handling an older person. In the former case, it is enough to clear away all the obstacles that hinder expansion and ascent; in the latter, we must nurture everything that assists the descent. An inexperienced youth thinks one can let the old people go, because not much more can happen to them anyway: they have their lives behind them and are no better than petrified pillars of the past. But it is a great mistake to suppose that the meaning of life is exhausted with the period of youth and expansion; that, for example, a woman who has passed the menopause is “finished.” The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different. 

Jung’s metaphor is simple and profound: life unfolds as the rising and setting of the sun. In the morning—the time of childhood, youth, and young adulthood—we grow in strength and ambition. Life stretches out before us, radiant with possibility. Goals multiply. Meaning feels imminent and instinctive.

But then the sun reaches its zenith. Noon arrives quietly, and with it, a shift. We reach our forties, then fifties, and beyond.

Looking back, we begin to realize that much of what was, has passed. The body no longer ascends, but begins its slow decline. Vitality gives way to fatigue. Ambitions that once stirred the soul begin to feel stale, as salt that has lost its flavor.

Many of us arrive at this turning point unaware. We were young, and suddenly we are not. The realization can strike with force, often leading to the so-called “midlife crisis.” We quit our jobs. End long relationships. Take up diets, new routines, new identities. Buy things we don’t need. We try to reroute the story.

But often, these attempts conceal a deeper error—the illusion that we can somehow recapture the morning, reclaim a vitality that no longer belongs to us.

As Jung goes on to warn, the refusal to face life’s descent can lead to psychological fragmentation. To abandon one’s life in pursuit of a life that can no longer be had is, in the end, a lost cause. It brings us back to the very place we tried to escape: face-to-face with the inescapable facts of aging and an eventual death.

Instead, Jung urges us to embrace the afternoon of life, not with despair, but with courage. This later phase has its own meaning, its own unique purpose.

If the morning of life is for flowering—growth, achievement, expansion—then the afternoon is for ripening. It is the time for harvest, for letting go, for preparing to fall as the leaf in autumn. It is the time to cultivate spiritual rather than material aspirations, to seek wisdom rather than material success.

To embrace aging is not to surrender, but to awaken: to discover that the value of life does not lie in its endless ascent, but in its capacity to reveal what matters most.

In doing so, we may begin to contemplate not only death, but also our own moral, social, and spiritual compass. We may even glimpse into the possibility of something more, of life after death, of a return and spiritual reunion with a higher power and source.

The moral behind Jung’s metaphor is this: as we age, we can either chase after youth—like a dog chasing its tail—or, by embracing the future and accepting the reality of aging and death, discover a deeper, fuller life than we have ever known.

As the Psalmist once said (Psalm 4:7):

You have put more joy in my heart than they have when their grain and wine abound.