The second half

James Hollis is a Jungian analyst who in 2005 wrote Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, a book for the people who've done everything they were supposed to, built the career, raised the family, met the expectations, and woken up one morning asking: whose life is this?

Hollis's argument, from Jung, is that the first half of life has one job: to build an ego strong enough to survive. You adapt to your family, your culture, your economy. You become what's needed. And it works, until somewhere in the middle years, when the adapted self has done its work and something else starts asking to be lived. Jung called that the second half, and Hollis says most people enter it as a crisis, because the first-half self doesn't want to let go.

His questions are the key. What did you have to give up to fit in? What's been asking to be lived through you that you've been too afraid or too busy to allow? What will you regret not having done? Where is your life too small for you now? He's blunt that the answers usually require leaving something: a role, a relationship, a story about yourself. And that the leaving is terrifying and necessary.

It belongs late in the Meaning chamber because it's the question of meaning asked by someone who's already made a great deal and found it wasn't enough. Hollis doesn't tell you the first half was wrong. He says it was the first half.

I'd add that you don't have to be fifty for this key. The second half of life, in Jung's sense, begins whenever the adapted self stops being enough. For some people that's thirty-five. For some it's seventy. The question is the same.