Carl Jung suggested life splits into two halves, and the surprise is what the second is for — not more career or identity, but an inward turn he called individuation, reclaiming the parts of yourself the first half left behind

You did what you were supposed to. The grades, the degree, the good job, maybe the house. Every box is ticked. It isn't that you're working too hard. It's that you got what you aimed for and found it smaller than you expected. Somewhere along the way, a quiet question started showing up: is this it?

Jung didn't treat that question as a malfunction. He thought it arrived on a schedule.

Two halves, two jobs

In "The Stages of Life," an essay first published in English in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), Jung compares a life to the arc of the sun. There's a morning, a noon and an afternoon. The morning runs "from the years just after puberty to middle life, which itself begins between the thirty-fifth and fortieth year." Each half has its own task, and the second is not a slower version of the first. "We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning," he writes in the later Collected Works translation. The Guardian built a column around that line in 2025.

The name for the afternoon's task, individuation, doesn't appear in that essay. Jung states the turn in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, first translated into English in 1928: "what youth found and must find outside, the man of middle life must find within himself." Later in the same book he defines the word. In the Collected Works translation, individuation "means becoming a single, homogeneous being," and so "becoming one's own self." His plainer translation is "'coming to selfhood' or 'self-realization'" (Collected Works 7, para. 266).

Murray Stein, a Jungian analyst in Zurich and the author of In Midlife, summed up the scheme when I wrote to him. "The first half of life is dedicated to ego development, the second half to attaining consciousness of the Self."

So what does each half actually ask of us?

The morning is for getting useful

The first half is about becoming someone the world can use. Jung calls its goals "the aim of nature": children, money, a social position. To get there, we narrow ourselves. Society's "prizes are always given for achievement and not for personality," he writes. "Achievement, usefulness and so forth are the ideals which appear to guide us out of the confusion of crowding problems."

I grew up inside that sentence. In Singapore, doing well in school isn't one option among many. It's the main road, and the system is built around the idea that results are earned and earned results should be rewarded. As an immigrant kid, I felt there was even less room for error. As the older child, I learned early that doing well was not something I did once. It was who I had to keep being.

So I always chose the practical path, not because I loved it, but because it would be useful. It would feel secure. Every step made sense.

Jung doesn't call this a mistake. "In the period of youth, at any rate, this course is the normal one." He is honest about the price. "We limit ourselves to the attainable, and this means the renunciation of all other potentialities." The rewards society hands out "are won at the cost of a diminution of personality."

What gets renounced doesn't vanish. Too many "aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber room among dusty memories. Sometimes, even, they are glowing coals under grey ashes."

My lumber room was the creative part of me. In my circumstances it didn't lead anywhere useful, so it went to the side.

The afternoon is for everything else

Jung doesn't think the second half is for more achievement, or for swapping the old ambition for a new one. Achievement and usefulness, he writes, help us strike "our roots in the world," but they "cannot guide us in the development of that wider consciousness to which we give the name of culture." After the aim of nature, "there begins another phase, namely, that of culture."

The afternoon is for going back into the lumber room.

Stein put it precisely. The second half's work "involves uniting the opposites that became separated as a consequence of ego development in the first half of life. The final goal of individuation is wholeness."

The parts left behind are specific, and you can probably name yours. The friends you stopped making time for. The sport you quit once work got serious. The job you wanted before you took the safe one. The hours you used to spend on something that didn't lead anywhere. These aren't childish leftovers. They're the parts of you the useful path had no room for.

If that is what you feel in your thirties or forties, Jung's scheme doesn't call it failure. The afternoon is asking for its turn.

He is just as clear about what individuation isn't. It isn't a new identity. He separates it from individualism, "a purposeful attempt to stress and make conspicuous some ostensible peculiarity." Individuation runs the other way: it "does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself" (Collected Works 8, para. 432).

Nor is it a dramatic break. At midlife, he writes, "not a few throw overboard everything that had previously seemed to them valuable." He lists "changes of profession, divorces, religious conversions and apostasies of every sort." The problem is that "the previous life now suffers repression." Quit the job to become a potter and you haven't emptied the lumber room. You've started a new one, with the old career in it.

In an ordinary life it is quieter. Jung's own version was physical. In the winter of 1913, at 38, he began writing down his fantasies, the work that became The Red Book. He spent 16 years on it and filled it with paintings, decorated initials and borders, like a medieval manuscript. A current exhibition in Amsterdam calls the book "the quiet engine" behind his idea of individuation.

Modern research points the same way, modestly. A 2024 study of 7,182 adults in England found that people who had done arts or crafts in the past year reported higher life satisfaction and a stronger sense that life is worthwhile. On that last measure, the link with crafts was stronger than the link with having a job. The effects were small, and the study can't show cause. Still, it's a striking comparison for anyone who has only measured their life by work.

Stein added one more thing. Jung, he said, "advised people in the second half of life to keep mortality in mind," like "the Stoic philosophers who kept a human skull in clear sight." The point isn't gloom. Remembering that time runs out is what makes you stop postponing the things you keep saying you'll get to.

The afternoon is arriving early

Jung had a warning for people my age. "For a young person it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself." The young are supposed to be out building things.

The timing he assumed has shifted. For decades, studies found unhappiness peaked in middle age, which fit his picture of a crisis around noon. In 2025, three economists reported in PLOS One that the pattern has broken. Across 44 countries, "ill-being is no longer hump-shaped in age but now decreases in age." In the US, the share of women aged 18 to 24 in despair rose from 5.6 percent in 2009 to 9.3 percent in 2023/24. Despair isn't individuation. It does suggest the morning's programme is wearing thin sooner than it used to.

Young people are also reaching for Jung directly. By late 2025, Psychology Today reported, videos tagged #shadowwork had passed 2.3 billion views on TikTok, and The Shadow Work Journal had been the top-selling book on Amazon in September 2023. Some of that is real self-examination. Some of it turns his ideas into one more identity to perform, which is the individualism he warned about.

So is starting early a mistake? Jung's rule was looser than it sounds. Stein called the age line "only statistical. Every individual [is] unique," and described 40 as "a convenient way of thinking." Jung "prefers to stick to empirical evidence," Stein said, and his clinical experience "was mostly with people in the second half of life." The rule came from who was in his consulting room. Some later Jungians went further and argued that individuation begins in infancy.

What may matter more than age is attention. A small 2025 study of 406 people aged 18 to 90 found that appreciating the time they had left helped explain why older people reported better emotional wellbeing. That kind of appreciation isn't reserved for the old.

Stein's very first line to me was that "individuation is a lifelong process." The afternoon is when it gets urgent. It doesn't have to be when it starts.

I didn't want to wait

I noticed the lumber room early. Somewhere along the useful path, I realised the things that actually drove me were the ones I kept on the side, and that "on the side" was slowly turning into "someday."

So I spent a long time thinking about what I actually care about, as opposed to what I'd been rewarded for. Then I started doing more of it. Not instead of the useful work, alongside it.

None of this was a reinvention. I didn't quit anything or announce a new self. It was closer to what Jung describes: picking things back up and letting them belong to the same life as everything else.

I don't think I've finished. By his clock I haven't even started. But I'd rather blow on the coals now than wait until 40 and see how much has cooled.

It isn't too late, and it isn't too early

The title says life splits into two halves. The longer I spent with Jung, the more that sounded like a description of the morning only. The morning keeps the useful part and leaves the rest. Maybe for a while, that has to be how things go. But the afternoon begins whenever you go back for the rest.

Which is why I don't think it is really about age. If you're 25 and already restless, you're not being self-indulgent. If you're 45 and successful and strangely empty, you're not broken and you're not late. You're hearing the same soft question, at the time it reached you.

Jung said the things we put away can stay glowing under the ash for years. The second half doesn't have to start at 40. It starts the day you go and look.