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Life today moves too fast to stop and look back. We rarely ask: What were we? What did we want to become? In youth, we are too busy studying, working, and keeping up. But in midlife, or at the doorstep of old age, looking back becomes urgent. Because if we don’t, we may reach the end with nothing but regret.
We have heard stories of dying people who said the same thing: they had spent their precious lives on empty goals.
When death comes close, we see the truth, but too late.
A doctor once told me about a late night at his clinic. He was about to close when a friend called, a wealthy developer who built famous skyscrapers. The developer brought in a companion for examination. The man who was with him had no serious problem, and after prescribing something simple, the rich man asked the doctor: “Since I’m here, could you check this stiffness on the right side of my belly? It doesn’t hurt.”
The doctor examined him. His liver was severely enlarged. Tests and scans that same night at the nearby hospital revealed a large malignant tumor spreading through his liver and digestive system. The developer asked the doctor for the truth, and he gave it to him: even with the best treatment in the world, he had only months. The scared man walked to the window, visibly shaken. “Half of those towers you see out there, I built them,” he said. “But is this all life was?”
What Jung Did at 38
Carl Jung was at the peak of his early fame, Freud’s star student, well-placed in the psychoanalytic world, when he suddenly turned inward. He began to doubt Freud’s method. He felt Freud’s psychoanalysis was not science, but he did not know what it was. In one of those difficult days, he asked himself: “What am I really doing?” Then a female voice from inside answered: “It is art.”
He could have ignored it or called it madness. Instead, he talked back. For years, 1913–1928, he wrote down whatever came from his unconscious, dialogues with inner figures, dreams, fantasies. In that period, he made no big professional decisions. He just recorded. The result was an illustrated manuscript of over 200 pages: The Red Book [1].
Jung later wrote: “We step into the second half of life completely unprepared. We assume that our truths and ideals will serve us as before. But what was great in the morning becomes small by evening, and what was true in the morning becomes a lie by evening.”
He turned his inner practice into a method he called active imagination, and built his theory of individuation from it—the idea that instead of wearing a social mask (persona), we must confront our shadow, our inner opposite, and the deeper archetypes. However, life today gives us almost no room for such inner reckoning. We are too fast, too connected, too busy [2].
War and What It Woke in Me
Over the past year, my country has seen two wars, the biggest economic crisis, and long internet blackouts. Our normal lives and professional routines broke apart. During the war, some people left their homes, hoping the disruption was temporary and they would be back soon. Others stayed. Either way, none of us remained unchanged.
I used to wake in the middle of the night to the roar of warplanes. I would step into the alley. Then the bombs would fall, a terrifying sound, and all the frightened dogs in the neighborhood would start howling. I felt that any moment could be our turn. That there might be no tomorrow.
The internet blackout cut me off from others. It also cut me off from my academic routines—teaching, lab work, and writing. All of it collapsed. I had nothing left but time to think. And slowly, unwillingly, I began to look back at the life I had lived.
I had always thought I knew what I wanted: to leave a small mark in the noisy world of science. But lying there, night after night, facing a death that felt very close, I began to doubt. Was all of this effort—the research, the teaching, and the writing—just a way to be seen? In a world where everyone is fighting for attention, was I just another voice saying, “Look at me, I exist?”
Personal Perspectives Essential Reads
If a bomb had erased me that night, no one would remember me for long. The few readers I had would not ask why my voice had gone silent. This period, dark as it was, forced on me from the outside, became an unwanted opportunity. It pushed me, at the doorstep of 60, to reconsider everything. Was my old passion real? Or was I just carried by the current of my time?
What I Learned from Jung’s Long Crisis
Jung’s crisis lasted about 10 years. He lost his professional reputation. But out of that long breakdown, “analytical psychology” was born. He lived in a time when he could afford to stop and look back. We do not have that luxury today. Our only chance to pause may come from a crisis: an external shock that forces us to ask whether we have spent our one precious life on goals that were never truly ours. Here I am, without internet, without my old tools. But with a question that will not leave me alone:
If I reach the end, will I regret living the life I was told to want?
