Midlife and the Call to Individuation

You did everything right. Career. Family. House. The things you were supposed to want. And now you’re sitting there thinking, “Is this it?”

That’s not a crisis. That’s a wake-up call.

Jung had a framework for this. He saw the first half of life as a building phase—constructing an identity, achieving goals, adapting to what the world expects. You build a persona that works. You climb the ladder. You check the boxes. And for a while, it’s enough.

Then somewhere around midlife, the persona starts to feel like a costume you can’t take off. Values you never questioned suddenly seem hollow. The goals that used to drive you feel like someone else’s ambitions. There’s this persistent whisper: something’s missing.

Jung called what comes next individuation—the process of becoming who you actually are, as opposed to who you thought you should be. It means looking at the shadow material you’ve been avoiding. It means withdrawing the projections you’ve been placing on other people. It means developing a relationship with what Jung called the Self—the deeper organizing center of the psyche that’s bigger than your ego.

None of this is easy. You’re being asked to let go of identities you’ve spent decades building. To sit in the uncertainty of not knowing who you’re becoming. That’s uncomfortable. Sometimes terrifying.

But I’ve seen what happens when people answer this call. The second half of life doesn’t have to be a slow decline into irrelevance. It can be the most honest, most authentic period you’ve ever lived. Not because you’ve figured everything out, but because you’ve finally stopped pretending you had.