The Midlife Transition: Confronting Mortality and Rebirth

A journey through liminality

Liminality (from Latin limen 'a threshold') is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete. During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold" between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes).

This is a post about the midlife crisis. I have a number of other posts queue’d up for publication, but this one spoke to me as the right topic to start 2025.

As a preamble, I’m not an old man yet, but I’m no longer young either. Our society exclusively celebrates youth and wealth, leaving those who are aging or struggling with illness to the margins. As a result, most men face aging without proper guidance, perspective or role models. Instead of embracing memento mori (remember death) which leads to living more fully in the moment, we practice oblivisci mori (forget death) with a focus on making money and the hopes of tomorrow. This fear of mortality, rooted in an almost ubiquitous secular materialism - despite pretensions by some to religion - leads us to avoid confronting the realities of aging and death until it hits us in the form of a now cliche midlife crisis. When this crisis manifests usually around 35-40 years old (the Wiki states 40-64, but I think that’s too broad) it has an especially difficult impact. This crisis occurs as men start their decline from their peak sexual market value which for most men (so long as you’re not balding, obese, or jobless, all of which impact SMV) occurs around this period of time:

Notice how the decline of male SMV corresponds to the period of midlife crisis

Approaching middle age introduces an unavoidable reality: the body’s decline. Weight slowly piles on and becomes harder to keep off, one develops wrinkles and higher Norwood levels, perhaps one’s sight declines and you need “reader” glasses for books. Maybe you start developing serious health issues which can come up suddenly. The passage of time takes on a new urgency and people make life-altering decisions: this can result in new wives, fancy cars, mental or emotional breakdowns, career changes.

Nassim Talib wrote, "The first part of life is spent worrying about what women think of us; the second part about what other men think of us; and the third part about what we think of ourselves”, or to put it another way: the first third of life is spent worrying about women, the second part about money, and the third part about health (mental and physical). During this period the older generations are dying off, perhaps one has growing children, time is speeding up (the older you get the faster time passes) and one begins to understand that their turn “up to deck” to death is approaching. As Schopenhauer wrote, “Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed” and “A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.” While Jung was in touch with his unconscious from a very young age (unlike other luminaries such as Nietzsche¹), he still experienced a midlife crisis from age 35-43.

Jung argues that men spend the first half of their lives living for others — for their parents and for society, to meet their expectations - but in midlife circumstances arise that shake them out of their worldview, forcing a gut-check, an assessment of one’s limitations and looming mortality, and he realizes he has to start living for himself. It is a time when one’s ego and persona - the image one presents to the world - is shaken by losses outside of one’s control (death in the family, health scares, children leaving the nest, divorces) and the unconscious - the neglected, suppressed, discarded parts of ourselves that don’t correspond to society’s expectations and demands - starts to manifest itself in urgent ways. According to a Jungian website,

Crudely put, the first half of life is the stage in which we receive our education, choose our careers, begin a family, acquire the trappings of success such as a home, a car, and establish our persona(s). Jungians may also refer to this stage as Ego-Self Separation, i.e. we focus on developing a strong ego, and in so doing, slowly lose touch with the rest of the psyche. It is for this reason that when we reach mid-life, things may be going wrong.

The second half of life is less about acquiring things and knowledge, and more about finding meaning. We are faced with questions such as ‘What is the point of my life?’ or ‘What makes me feel I am useful in this world?’ As we ponder these questions we often realize that life has not turned out the way we expected it to.

At mid-life we may experience alarm messages from the psyche – often in the form of affective disorders or somatic symptoms – we may become anxious or depressed and begin to suffer many physical ailments. At first, most of us go to our physician and get something for the anxiety or depression, or something for our blood pressure or poor digestion. But, it is seldom enough.

In other words, mid-life is when the strong ego we developed to get through the first half of life is pierced: we can and will actually die, we are not superheroes with egos that will save us, and we start wrestling with how to react to this information.

Sean Lannin

wrote in a Note pertaining to this (emphasis added in #1):

A hospice nurse compiled a list of hundreds of hospice patients regrets who were dying.

Top 5 Regrets of dying people:

1. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not what others expected of me.

2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard

3. I wish I had the courage to express my feelings

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with friends

5. I wish I had let myself be happier

Do you see yourself on that list?

“The courage to life a life true to myself” is the individuation process, which is not a given: plenty of people suppress who they really are and who they are meant to become because they are too afraid to face it. But there is a price to pay for everything: avoiding self-reflection and staying attached to societal expectations leads to these common deathbed realizations. Contrary to popular belief, one does not usually get wiser or more moral with age - you just get older, as the great pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran wrote in his A Short History of Decay: “One doesn’t become better on the moral plane with old age. Nor wiser. Contrary to what people think. One gains nothing in getting old. But as one is more tired, one gives the impression of wisdom….There is no progress in life. There are small changes.” If you are unwilling to listen to your unconscious, to integrate it in order to become a more whole person, to be who you were intended to be, that is going to manifest in your life in very negative ways, greatly disrupting your life balance.

Wisdom comes from subsuming one’s ego and listening (but not blindly) to one’s intuition and following it, leading to surprising and creative results. This is why one becomes more introspective with age, as Schopenhauer argues: “In youth it is the outward aspect of things that most engages us; while in age, thought or reflection is the predominating quality of the mind. Hence, youth is the time for poetry, and age is more inclined to philosophy. In practical affairs it is the same: a man shapes his resolutions in youth more by the impression that the outward world makes upon him; whereas, when he is old, it is thought that determines his actions.” And time is short: “... everyone desires to achieve old age, that is to say a condition in which one can say: "Today is bad, and day by day it will get worse - until at last the worst of all arrives.”

This brings us to the concept of liminality. For this I picked up Jungian psychologist Murray Stein’s book In Midlife (1983)², which used mythology - specifically focusing on the Olympic deity Hermes, the God of transitions (“Hermes’ presence is sudden gain, a stroke of luck, but the accent is also strongly on the element of fear and the feeling of the uncanny”) - as well as ancient literature such as the Iliad and the Odyssey to demonstrate the trials and tribulations, the challenges and possibilities inherent in this transformative period. Stein defines liminality as follows:

Liminality is created whenever the ego is unable any longer to identify fully with a former self-image, which it had formed by selective attachments to specific internal images and embodied in certain roles accepted and performed. It had been embedded in a context created and supported by an archetypal pattern of self-organization, and now, since this matrix has dissolved or broken down, there is a sense of an amputated past and a vague future. Yet while this ego hangs there in suspension, still it remembers the ghost of a former self whose home has been furnished with the presence of persons and objects now absent and had been placed in a psychological landscape now bare and uninhabitable without them.

According to Stein there are three phases of the midlife transition: separation, liminality and re-integration. This process occurs for other things, too, of course, but in the midlife transition it occurs due to increased knowledge of one’s mortality - that time is running out: “The pivotal experience of the psychological change that unfolds at midlife, and the element that most unmistakably declares its uniqueness and brings it to its deepest meaning, is the lucid realization of death as life’s personal, fated conclusion. The chilling awareness of this fact grips a person’s consciousness at midlife as it has not gripped it before, and the sense of an absolute limit to personal extension in time spreads into every corner of consciousness and affects everything it touches.” If the path is followed properly, “clues begin to appear for what will become a person’s sense of core and for the life tasks that remain to be carried out.”

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The First Phase: Separation

In the first phase, that of separation, there is a feeling of loss which can be hard to pin down:

As the midlife transition begins, whether it begins gradually or abruptly, persons generally feel gripped by a sense of loss and all of its emotional attendants: moody and nostalgic periods of grieving for some vaguely felt absence, a keen and growing sense of life’s limits, attacks of panic about one’s own death, and exercises in rationalization and denial….From an intrapsychic point of view, what needs to be separated from in the first phase of the midlife transition is an earlier identity, the persona. The ego needs to let go of this attachment before it can float through the necessary period of liminality that is preliminary to a deeper discovery fo the Self. To do this thoroughly and decisively, the person needs to “find the corpse” and then to bury it: to identify the source of pain and then to put the past to rest by grieving, mourning, and burying it. But the nature of the loss needs to be understood and worked through before a person can go on.

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The Second Phase: Liminality

The second phase, liminality, does not begin until one accepts that one’s earlier identity has died, which can involve a heavy mourning period of grief over the loss of who one used to be. This comes about from loss that one’s ego/persona cannot properly deal with, hence the rising fear of death and loss (especially of loss of control): “When life is no longer seen from a perspective of beginnings through a fantasy of continuous expansion and growth, but rather from the perspective of ends and of death through a fantasy of fate and limitations, midlife has arrived….What will come of all this? What will become of me? These are wrenching questions as the soul comes free of its attachments and identifications”. There is always a danger that such loss is not accepted that one retreats into egoism, using self-repression and denial to suppress the necessary psychological changes. To participate in this process requires one’s full attention and use of one’s skills; cut free from one’s persona, one is adrift, “floating freely, by associate wandering, by apercu, by backtracking and rhetorical repetition, by stealth and thievery. Brainstorms, insights, lucky finds, intuitions, the play of dreams - if these are threaded together and held somewhat loosely in hand, will we not have a style that belongs to Hermes?” This process cannot be half-assed if one is to benefit from it:

There is one additional feature to this Hermetic method, however, and this must be recognized and consciously incorporated if the method is to be exploited to greatest advantage. This pertains to what is done with the lucky find, the thieved thought, the sudden psychological insight once it is in hand, and to the attitude that informs this action. Hermes is not just a collector, and the Hermetic method, if true to its master practitioner, cannot simply pile up random collections of interesting and loosely related observations. The ‘find’ must be taken up and craftily transformed in a characteristic Hermetic manner….

Like the methods of the social sciences, the Hermetic method is empirical in that it begins with and constantly adverts to ‘facts,’ but for the collection of data relevant for the discussion of these facts it relies largely on loose associations and synchronistic occurrences (‘finds’), and then it employs craftiness and even what might be called distortions in working over these materials and transforming them to its own ends. The test of this method must be strictly pragmatic - is the interpretation that results from it useful because it succeeds in portraying the quality and the dimensions of midlife liminality and elucidating its meanings? or is it too idiosyncratic and therefore without cash value to anyone but perhaps the user of it?

So, for example, my separation process from my persona was a drawn-out and very painful process; when I eventually entered my period of liminality, my instincts combined with my intellect, feelings, and senses and eventually compelled me to write a 137,000 word Substack essay on how this world is organized, followed by my current regular Substack writing here. This is a listening process and not an ego derived one; when a thought pops into my head I check it with my intellect, and if it appears insightful I have to immediately write it down for future use. This process propels me forward. I cannot let ideas disappear and they will if I am not ready and willing to grab the idea as soon as it comes to me. I am still in the process of liminality; I still feel unstructured, adrift, acutely aware of my mortality and with a regular sense of fear. I have not exited this stage at this time. And this process is being played for keeps:

To be in true liminality, or in liminality truly, however , is to be in for keeps. This belongs to the nature of the experience. It is absolute, and there is no way back to pre-liminal existence. The soul senses that this passage is one-way and that this condition will endure through all time, or until perhaps it fades away.

Interesting, looking at my astrological transits which show one’s current astrological influences (you can see yours here if you plug in your info and for today’s date³), I’ve had the following strong influence impacting my chart for a number of years now:

Opposition Pluto - Sun

Challenging aspect: This is a long-lasting transit that suggests a period of great transformation and change. It marks an important stage in the development of the ego. You are intense and passionate, but you need to avoid holding on tightly to that which has outgrown its purpose in your life. Changes in your life's direction are in order, and you may initially do everything you can to resist them. It is best to go with the flow at this point in time, although it can be very hard to do so, as you may be lacking in objectivity for the time being. It can be hard for you to see that the changes taking place now will benefit you down the road….

Pluto transits to the Sun challenge us to face up to unexpressed or poorly expressed traits of our Sun sign and house, as well as Sun aspects. We discover our own power and strength, and we re-work our very sense of identity, which invariably affects our life path. How we have defined ourselves to date is now challenged. In some cases, people live this transit through key figures in their lives. These transits force us to confront our will, power, assertion, and authority. Sometimes, a relationship comes into focus. We face the need to be more independent, assertive, and autonomous. Perhaps most importantly, Pluto transiting our Sun puts us face to face with exactly what it is that has been holding us back from living life more fully and meaningfully.

This transit calls you to redefine your value system and life attitudes, and generates intense energy in your life. You are likely to experience events that highlight the need to trust, let go, and have faith. You may have to deal with willfulness and issues of power and competition this year--in others and in yourself. There is an inner drama taking place, and a feeling that external circumstances are undermining your own feeling of powerfulness. In the process, you may be able to get in touch with your internal motivations.

A tendency to want to control your life through some form of manipulation is strong during this influence. You may act in a more selfish or ambitious manner, and this intensity might even surprise you. Meeting with obstacles in your path, however, can force you into the position of using all of your resources to fight back, and you can discover resources you never knew you had in the process. You are likely to emerge from this cycle perhaps feeling a little battered but certainly more in touch with your deeper needs. You may have learned to stand up for yourself or to have faith in your strength. You most likely have experienced some form of psychological transformation or rebirth of sorts.

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The Third Phase: Re-Integration

The third phase of Stein’s process of dealing with midlife is that of re-integration, which first requires dealing with one’s anima (for a man, one’s suppressed feminine side; for a woman, the animus as one’s suppressed male side). The anima is a trickster; it tries to lure the unweary to it’s doom unless one is prepared for it, in which case it can be used in a positive manner. For example, I feel a bit of a call toward exploring becoming a Jungian analyst myself, but I also don’t feel that is the right direction for me (at least not at this time) - that pull is from my anima. Many years ago I was highly tempted to abandon a career to pursue something that, looking back, would have led to total ruination - that was also a call by the anima. But identifying the call, being suspicious of it but not denying it, perhaps working with it, may further one’s individuation process: “It seems necessary to go through an encounter with the anima at midlife if the individuation journey is to continue and if the midlife transition is to move from liminality into the next stage of integrating the personality around a new core. To shy away, to repress, to run from the [anima] and declare it hostile and unsafe territory…is to abort the process.”

If one comes through the process of separation, liminality and re-integration successfully, “negatively, he acquires a precise knowledge of limits; positively, he receives a long-range life task. This combination, the knowledge of limits and the conviction of a future life task, constitutes the essence of a meaningful recovery from the experience of midlife liminality. It is a product of this initiation, and a person’s future sense of identity and purpose is based on it.” But there is no guarantee of a successful transition: “Ambiguity and complexity define the Hermetic journey, and the qualities of it and its outcome are largely unpredictable. We may think we are being led home when we are actually only being taken for a ride.”

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Conclusion

This long-range life task creates an ethical obligation to shape life according to the limitations and challenges imposed by the insights won during the initiatory ascent, producing an inner sense of direction and meaning. Jung commented in his autobiography on what he gleaned from his long-term midlife crisis:

When I look back upon it all today and consider what happened to me during the period of my work on the fantasies, it seems as though a message had come to me with overwhelming force. There were things in the images which concerned not only myself but many others also. It was then that I ceased to belong to myself alone, ceased to have the right to do so. From then on, my life belonged to the generality. The knowledge I was concerned with, or was seeking, still could not be found in the science of those days. I myself had to undergo the original experience, and, moreover, try to plant the results of my experience in the soil of reality; otherwise they would have remained subjective assumptions without validity. It was then that I dedicated myself to service of the psyche. I loved it and hated it, but it was my greatest wealth. My delivering myself over to it, as it were, was the only way by which I could endure my existence and live it as fully as possible.

I, too, feel an obligation with my writing here pertaining to my own particular skillset and outlook, which is very different from others’, including Jung’s, and I am doing what I can to honor it, give it expression, and symbolize it for others, although we will see how it develops further. In some ways, it is a heavy and scary weight; seen from a certain perspective, it would have been easier to have been a normie, abdicating my personal responsibility and critical thinking to the herd. The individuation journey is an uncharted balancing act above a void; but as

L.P. Koch

has argued, some of us will be satisfied with nothing less.

Thanks for reading.

1. Jung noticed that Nietzsche only came in contact with his unconscious later in life, which Nietzsche misunderstood and misinterpreted, as stated in Jung’s autobiography:

Zarathustra was Nietzsche's Faust, his No. 2 [i.e. his unexplored subconscious], and my No. 2 now corresponded to Zarathustra--though this was rather like comparing a molehill with Mount Blanc….Nietzsche had discovered his No. 2 only late in life, when he was already past middle age, whereas I had known mine ever since boyhood….He was moved by the childish hope of finding people who would be able to share his ecstasies and could grasp his "transvaluation of all values." But he found only educated Philistines--tragi-comically, he was one himself. Like the rest of them, he did not understand himself when he fell head first into the unutterable mystery and wanted to sing its praises to the dull, godforsaken masses. That was the reason for the bombastic language, the piling up of metaphors, the hymnlike raptures--all a vain attempt to catch the ear of a world which had sold its soul for a mass of disconnected facts. And he fell - tightrope-walker that he proclaimed himself to be - into depths far beyond himself. He did not know his way about in this world and was like a man possessed, one who could be handled only with the utmost caution….

Just as Faust had opened a door for me, Zarathustra slammed one shut, and it remained shut for a long time to come. I felt like the old peasant who discovered that two of his cows had evidently been bewitched and had got their heads in the same halter. "How did that happen?" asked his small son. "Boy, one doesn't talk about such things," replied his father.

2. I have other books coming to read on midlife that havn’t arrived as of this post’s publication date: Midlife: Humanity's Secret Weapon (2022) by Andrew Jamieson, Jung And Aging: Possibilities And Potentials For The Second Half Of Life (2021) edited by Leslie Sawin, and Weird Wisdom for the Second Half of Life: A Book for Men (and those who value them) (2023) by James Hazelwood. Depending on how these books speak to me there may eventually be a follow-up post or perhaps just Note reviews.

3. Note that sometimes astrological influences conflict, and that some are weak, short-term influences while others can be medium -term or long-term, varying in intensity and influence. I find it helpful to look at when I have unarticulated feelings or influences that I want to bring to conscious awareness but, like anything, it should be taken with a grain of salt.