The Promise of Individuation
Recently I’ve been re-reading a classic from one of my favorite Jungian authors, Sacred Selfishness by Bud Harris. The author outlines the quest for an authentic life in response to a crisis sometime in mid-life. The process of embracing meaningful change in midlife entails releasing patterns of thinking and behaving we inherited as part of our cultural conditioning. Coming into our full potential as individuals entails becoming aware of our inherited beliefs and allowing them to be transformed: “Every time we take a step toward becoming aware of and transforming one of these past influences, we become less of a prisoner of the forces in our histories and ensure that our future actions will express more of who we really are” (Sacred Selfishness p. 23).
Of course, this sounds great. Who doesn’t want to become ‘who they really are’? Well, a lot of us, it turns out. There are myriad reasons for not wanting to go deeper, so to speak, or look at ourselves with anything like objectivity. One big factor is that introspection and self-honesty are simply not valued by our modern western culture. As a consequence, we no longer have the support structures in place to help us move from a conventional path in life to a more authentic self-expression.
The Influence of Modern Culture
While we celebrate the advances in information technology, particularly with the advent of AI large language models like ChatGPT and others, the support structures that have guided the growth and development of human societies for millennia are in decline. These include churches and synagogues, as well as the mentoring and bonding that are part of growing up in an engaged and supportive community.
Harris talks about the cost of that decline: “As churches and temples have declined in use as community centers, we’ve also lost a forum and support for questioning social values and for trying out other values and ideas. We’re left alone to face the gods of commerce, the fire and brimstone of media advertising and image-making that mandates like Moses on the Mount who we should be and how we should live” (Pg. 97). No one really thinks it’s a good idea to have a value system dictated to us by marketing teams that don’t have our best interests at heart, but here we are, for better or worse.
I am not necessarily advocating for a return to religious worship. However, as attendance has fallen off at our places of worship, it is clear that we have not found a suitable replacement for the sense of community and safe space for the exploration of ideas and values these institutions offer. I can recall the hopefulness at the birth of the world wide web. Everyone thought the internet would be a catalyst for a renewed sense of connectedness and understanding, but there’s no one online today that shares that optimism. While we’re never bored from the seemingly endless supply of new and novel information on our screens, no one is arguing that we are more connected and compassionate towards one another.
The dominant paradigm in our culture today is materialism. That is, if we get the right set of things, we’ll be okay. I know for myself, I always thought that if I got into a good school, and then got a good job so I could get a nice house and a wife, everything would work out. Thus I believed that life was a series of straightforward steps that could be more or less easily managed with a lot of hard work and the right set of tips and tricks. Of course, as anyone who’s ever been in a relationship can attest, getting a partner is only the beginning of an unpredictable daily challenge of maintaining a relationship with another human being. Life is not so simple and predictable as my logical mind would like it to be.
Arthur Brooks in The Meaning of Your Life distinguishes two types of mental processing: “The left side of the brain manages what is clear and straightforward in life-the necessary but prosaic tasks you do all day. The right side deals with what is spiritual, mysterious, and awe inspiring in life. A good word for this is numinous, which means a feeling of wonder with a touch of the unknown” (p. 44). For most of us in the Western world, we rely on the left side of our brain with scant attention given to the right side. Mostly, we tend to see the world around us as an engineering problem that can be solved. It’s becoming increasingly clear that modern life, because of its preoccupation with left-brained activity, is creating a pervasive crisis of meaning. Brooks enumerates the grim statistics that all of us feel: “According to the American Psychological Association, the percentage of American adolescents with symptoms of major depression nearly tripled from 2005 to 2019, while anxiety almost doubled” (p. 3).
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that our culture has conformed around technologies keeping us unaware of the deficiencies in our materialist approach to life until we encounter a crisis of meaning. Brooks describes what he calls the Doom Loop like this: we spend all our time in left brain processing (E.g. in technical work that does not inspire us or following a linear script to life), we encounter a crisis of meaning such as a relationship failure, an illness, loss of a loved one, or career setback (for example), move into a state of depression and anxiety, and finally, instead of processing our losses in a supportive environment, we numb our pain with addictive technology like our gadgets and computer screens (p. 53). This cycle of modern life keeps us from looking deeper into what is happening with us.
What Do We Do Now?
So where does that leave us? Our culture, for better or worse, has lost many of the institutional supports that once helped previous generations find purpose and meaning beyond the conventional milestones of adulthood. At some point, we have to recognize that the commercial interests powering our screens are not particularly concerned with our personal growth. Their job is to capture our attention, not to help us become more fully ourselves.
But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless. In fact, we have more access to resources for personal growth and development that previous generations could have imagined. Books, teachers, communities, courses, podcasts, videos, and even AI tools can introduce us to ideas and practices that might otherwise have remained out of reach. The same technological culture that has created some of the conditions for our crisis of meaning can also give us tools for addressing it. But there is an important catch: having access to resources is not the same thing as doing the work.
We have to become agents of our own transformation. If our culture does not tell us that personal transformation is important, we have to decide that it is important to us. We have to determine what we value and then look for ways to live those values more fully. Someone might decide, for example, that they want to become less angry about what they see in the news, less reactive toward a difficult co-worker, or more present with their family. Those may sound like modest goals, but becoming less reactive, more compassionate, or more present can fundamentally change one’s lived experience.
There is no shortage of information about how to begin. A search of Google, YouTube, or an AI chatbot can point us toward books, practices, teachers, and communities that address almost any aspect of personal development. But finding the resource is the easy part. The difficult part is paying attention to ourselves long enough to recognize what needs to change, having the courage to question the patterns we’ve inherited, and then practicing something different when our old patterns inevitably reassert themselves.
Personal transformation is not a convenient self-improvement project. It is a process of becoming more honest about who we are and more intentional about who we are becoming. There is no five-step formula that can guarantee the outcome. In fact, part of the process may be learning to tolerate not knowing exactly where we’re going.
We also need places where transformation is valued and supported. We need people with whom we can talk honestly about what is happening inside us, people who can challenge us without shaming us, and communities where questions about meaning and purpose are not treated as distractions from “real life.” This is one of the things that traditional religious communities provided for a long time, but now we need to find our own communities.
I’ve been fortunate to find a non-denominational spiritual community where people come together not simply to hear ideas, but to study and practice them together. Exploring spirituality in this context has become a tremendous resource for making my own life more meaningful and purposeful in the second half of life.
I don’t think we need to return to the institutions of the past. But I do think we need to recover something they understood: human beings need places where the deeper questions of life can be explored together. Perhaps that is how we begin to build a culture within the culture that values not only what we accomplish, acquire, and produce, but also who we are becoming.
