What happens to us in midlife

Dante called it a dark wood. Jung called it the afternoon of life. Here is what they were describing.

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Dante wrote that around 1308. It is the oldest popular description of something that still ambushes us seven centuries later, usually in the middle of life. I’ve been thinking about it again while preparing a Do Lectures workshop I’ll be running in a few weeks.

And it’s a timely topic for me. My own midlife journey has been nothing short of a complete change of identity. From Somerset farmhouse to digital nomad. From straight to queer. From spreadsheets to shadow work. I’ve seen the changes in my own life, and I’ve supported many others through their own.

What I’ve seen from my own personal and therapeutic experience, and what everything I’ve read on the subject seems to agree upon is this:

We spend the first half of our lives building the ego, and the second half recovering the parts of ourselves we had to abandon in the process.

Jung was among the first to treat the changes of midlife as the beginning of a second task rather than the wind-down of the first:

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. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

Richard Rohr gave it its plainest spiritual form in Falling Upward. Our job in the first half of life, he says, is to build the container. In the second half, our task is to discover what the container was for. The danger, he says, is mistaking the scaffolding for the building and spending our whole lives defending a structure we were only ever supposed to leave from.

The phrase we often still use, “midlife crisis,” was coined by the psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques in 1965, after he noticed how often great artists hit a wall in middle age, the first time mortality became real to them. Erik Erikson described it as generativity against stagnation: either we find a way to pour ourselves into something beyond ourselves, or the energy turns inward and sours.

I’ve just spent two months being with my mother in her own dying. And in the bitter battle she fought with herself in her dying days, I know first-hand what Erikson is talking about.

James Hollis calls the midlife event an insurgency of the soul: an uprising against the self we assembled to get approval. The work he points to, that Jung named individuation, is becoming the whole person we were meant to be, rather than the person our family, our tribe, or our own frightened ego settled for.

Some cultures expected this change and built space for it within the social order. Classical Hindu life is divided into four stages, and the third, vanaprastha, the way of the forest, begins around fifty: the householder hands the household and the work to the next generation and turns from outward striving toward inward seeking. They expected the second half to ask for something different, and they made room for it. In Western culture, we get no such map, which is part of why many of us are caught off guard.

David Brooks wrote about it directly in his book The Second Mountain, which gave the name to the gathering I am preparing for. He names the two peaks cleanly. The first mountain is about building the ego and making our mark, the goals our culture hands us. The second is about setting the ego down and giving ourselves away, and the reward it offers is not the happiness we chased but a joy that arrives only when we stop chasing.

And from the far end of it, the plainest evidence of all.

The palliative carer Bronnie Ware, after years sitting with the dying, found that the most common regret was a single sentence: they wished they had lived true to themselves, rather than the life others expected of them.

What strikes me, reading across them, is how little they disagree. Poets ancient and medieval, developmental psychologists, a Franciscan friar, a Jungian analyst, the sages of ancient India, and a palliative carer all describe the same archetypal process.

“Life,” as Richard Rohr puts it, “is a matter of becoming fully and consciously who we already are, but it is a self that we largely do not know.”

In a few weeks, on a farm in West Wales, we will start to get to know it.