#598： Journeying From the First to the Second Half of Life
Episode Stats
Summary
Have you come to a point in your life where the pursuits of your younger years no longer seem meaningful or satisfying? Well, maybe it s time for you to transition from the first half of your life to the second. My guest today has spent decades helping people, particularly men, make this transition. His name is James Hollis, and he s the author of over a dozen books.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Have you come
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to a point in your life where the pursuits of your younger years no longer seem meaningful
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or satisfying? Well, maybe it's time for you to transition from the first half of your life
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to the second. My guest today has spent decades helping people, particularly men,
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make this passage. His name is James Hollis. He's a union analyst and the author of over
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a dozen books. We begin a conversation with a brief overview of what it makes union or
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depth psychology unique and how it helps individuals find meaning and deal with life's
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existential questions. Our discussion then explores the differences between the first and second
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halves of life and how the main question of the first is what is the world asking of me
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while the primary question of the second is what is my soul asking of me? Jim explains
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why you need to sort through the influence of your family and culture on who you've become
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and how the second half of life is about finding personal authority and sovereignty. We also
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discuss why the first half of life is always a gigantic unavoidable mistake and why that's
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perfectly okay. Jim explains what triggers the impetus to move from the first half to
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the second half of life, how it can happen at any age, how to make the transition from
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one face to the other, and why the journey to the second can be terrifying because it
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lacks the structure of the first. Jim then describes the internal systems you can use
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for guidance and moving forward in the absence of external structure. He then gets into the
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importance of continuing to grow in your profession or marriage throughout your life. We discuss
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the particular reasons men can get stuck in the first half of life and how men are more
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free to tend to the needs of their souls these days, but can still feel adrift. And we end
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our conversation on how you can know if you're on the right track in pursuing the task of the
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second half of life. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash second half.
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So you are a Jungian psychoanalyst, and you've written lots of books. And the one we're going
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to talk about today is Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, How to Finally Really Grow
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Up. Before we do that, let's give a little bit of background on Jungian psychology without getting
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too technical or theoretical about it. What were the big issues that Jung was trying to address
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Well, I think the thing that distinguished Jung perhaps most of all was his emphasis on the human
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being as a meaning-seeking, meaning-creating individual. And more individuals suffer when
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they're disconnected from meaning in their life than any other single cause, more than all the
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environmental wounds that life brings us. And he frequently emphasized that we remember that the
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word psyche really means soul. And most modern psychology fractionates human beings into behaviors,
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which of course we are, cognitive processes, which we do every moment, and biological processes,
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because we do have bodies. And all of that is useful and helpful, but it still doesn't sum the
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whole person. And the whole person is at heart a mystery. And there are so many autonomous processes
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in each of us that are constantly in some way critiquing our lives. And the real effort is to try to
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undertake a dialogue with those other elements that are making choices for us. And of course,
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you know, the problem with the unconscious is it's unconscious, so we can't say very much about it.
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And yet, so much of it keeps spilling into the world on a daily basis, harming our children,
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ourselves, or partners, or whomever. And so it's about a kind of accountability to one's own
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psychological reality and a responsibility for what spills into the world through us. And an effort
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to dialogue with the depths of the human soul and the psyche. And also to recognize that if we're in
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a meaningful relationship to our own souls, then we can go through difficult times, we can suffer,
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we can experience conflict and defeat, and still feel the rightness of our lives.
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But on the other hand, we can do all the right things as defined by our family of origin or our
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popular culture. And there's something empty and aching inside. And the internal satisfaction is
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registered symptomatically. So I could do all the right things, for example, and feel the emptiness
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of it or feel depressed or been self-medicating or whatever. So all of those are really reminders
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that we have to pay attention to something very deep within us that is our natural wisdom and is
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seeking to communicate with us. And on a daily basis is critiquing things. And it might make sense
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once in a while to stop and pay attention to that.
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So I think this is useful. So it sounds like what Jungian or depth psychology, these are answering
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existential questions about life itself. So I think the example of depression is a good one to sort of
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differentiate the different types of psychology because you've been talking about that. So
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depression, we do know that there's a physiological aspect to it and you can use medicine to treat it.
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There's also a cognitive aspect to it. So you can do things like cognitive behavioral therapy,
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where you change the way you think about an issue. So you're not thinking negatively all the time.
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But what you're saying with depth psychology or Jungian psychology is doing is looking at
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depression from an existential point of view and saying,
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maybe there's something more to that depression besides a cognitive or physiological thing. This
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is actually could be, you're just depressed because you feel existentially adrift and depth
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psychology addresses that. Sure. One of the ways to look at this is to ask the question,
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why is it that I in my best lights am still experiencing a depression? Why has my psyche autonomously
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withdrawn its approval and support? And I'll use a personal example myself. When I was in my early
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to mid thirties, I had achieved all my goals. I'd done all the things that I felt I was supposed to do
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and had been successful with them. And yet I felt this deep depression. And it's the thing that sent me
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into my first hour of personal therapy. It didn't sound to me like I was beginning the second half of life
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and it didn't feel like a great moment in my life. It felt rather like a defeat of some kind.
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And at the same time, it was the beginning of a different kind of journey and a different kind
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of question because I think I, as most people had sort of picked up from my culture, what my task was,
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what the assignments were, how to win approval, a chase that elusive goddess success. And it had led me
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further and further for myself. And it was really the beginning of the second half of life kind of
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journey, which is quite a different journey than the first half of life. So the real question is,
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if my psyche is not thrilled with the executive functions coming down from the top floor,
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what might the psyche ask of me? And frankly, we will avoid that kind of question.
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We will tend to ramp up our previous efforts and the depression will only get more pronounced.
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It's kind of like, again, digging yourself a hole and realize, oh my goodness, I'm in a hole. But the
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tool you have in your hand is a shovel. So you work harder and the hole gets deeper. And then you have
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to realize that this is not the way that I have to begin to reframe this situation. What is the soul
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asking of me? And I know soul is one of those words that can be sort of new agey or woo woo, but it's
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really a word that is trying to point to the essential mystery of the human personality.
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And it's something profoundly elusive and yet omnipresent in our lives. And as a result, again,
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is our constant companion. And the only question is, what kind of relationship do we have with that
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companion? Is it hostile, estranged, repressed, or is it conversational? And that makes a huge
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So it sounds like if anyone's had that moment where they're lying in bed at night, staring at the
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ceiling, wondering, what am I doing with my life? They are doing death. They're on the steps of death
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Absolutely. They're asking the right question. Because in the first half of life, one could say,
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and this is somewhat of an overgeneralization, but I think it's true. We all have to sort of
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address, what is the world asking of me? You know, what do my parents want? What do the school
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teachers want? What does the employer want? What does your partner want? I mean, what is the task
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that my environment is speaking to me? And we throw ourselves into it in good faith. And that's
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important. It helps build enough ego strength. And it builds enough sort of maturation and hopefully
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personal accountability that allows us to ask those questions later when the bottom seems to fall
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out. So you're right. It's at three in the morning, the hour of the wolf is called, that one often is
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stricken with the sense of futility or sense of emptiness or basic fear. And out of that can come
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a different life. It's not necessarily something we want to do. It's something that life is asking of us.
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So in my own case, I think I probably just worked harder to avoid that encounter. So the depression
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had to intensify until it finally got my attention. So let's talk about this, go into detail about the
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first half and second half of life. So you just mentioned first half of life. This is when we're
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building up. This is when we do the things we think we're supposed to be doing. Go to school,
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get a job, get married, have a family, buy a house, etc. Yes, yes. Yeah. And it's about ego building. I
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don't mean egotism. I mean, building your sense of your conscious identity. You know, we have to leave
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our parents. We have to step in the world. We have to take on the tasks. And the person who doesn't do
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that, who's avoiding that, is going to pay the piper down the line sooner or later. But we have to step
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into the world. And it has been suggested by others that it's a kind of ego world axis. What is the
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world asking of me? And can I mobilize my resources, my sense of discipline, or my willingness to pay my
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dues legitimately in order to meet those tasks? And that's part of growing up. And if a truck ran over
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us on our 25th or our 30th birthday, we could say, well, the person died young. But they sort of did
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what they were supposed to do. They entered the world. But then again, the autonomy of the psyche
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begins to manifest later. And we have to remember, first of all, we're living so much longer than any
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time in human history. And Jung asked the question, a very obvious question, if we have served our social
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function, perhaps reproduce the species, etc., why are we still here? What's the task in the rest of that
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journey? And that's a different kind of agenda. And then the axis of conversation in some way has to
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turn just from ego to world, but ego to the self, capital S, meaning that interior intelligence that is
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seeking our developmental agendas. And to ask another kind of question, and what is wanting expression
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through me? That's quite different than what does the world want? And then the question is,
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all right, what is it that my own soul is asking of me? And that can lead to some very difficult choices
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in life. It can lead to new directions in life. It can lead to the ending of something and the beginning of
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something else. And that in-between time is very difficult. One of the first books I wrote was called
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The Middle Passage, because I realized that the folks I was seeing after I'd returned from training
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in Zurich had different presenting situations, different life histories, different sort of
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ways of seeing their lives. But one thing was in common, and that was their understanding of self
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and world, their psychological roadmap, if you will, had played out. It was exhausted and wasn't working.
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And something better hadn't appeared on the horizon. And so I thought, well, you know,
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that's what a passage is. A passage is where something dies, and something else is wishing
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expression, but you're in that terrible in-between. And part of the task of therapy, certainly,
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is to hold together the fragments. In other words, you still go to your job, you still take care of
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your children. You still tend to the tasks of legitimate summons of the outer world. And at the
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same time say, but I also have to start turning within and saying, all right, what is calling me
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here? What is beckoning me? Or why this internal discord? And so the whole notion of a passage in
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the middle of our lives, we know something about the adolescent passage of leaving home and getting a
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big body and stepping into big roles. Assuming I've left my parents and their mistakes behind,
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I'm only out there unconsciously repeating them or running from them or trying to fix them, but I'm
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never free of them. And again, that tends to dominate the first half of life chronologically,
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but then the second half is where I have to ask, all right, where do I go now? Whither goest I?
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You know, and that can be a very humbling and frightening encounter because for a while we
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don't know. And not everybody's in therapy, of course, and people may say, oh, well, well, this
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hasn't occurred to me, but it often does in ways of which they're unaware. And this is not necessarily
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to be tied to one's chronological age, for example. Sometimes it hits people full in the face when their
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marriage breaks up or when they're forcibly downsized at work or when they're aging and have
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to face an illness or they've lost a partner or forced to retire. And then you realize how much
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that other relationship or that job was carrying their sense of self for them. And now that that
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is no longer there to carry it for them on behalf of them, where does it go? It falls back into
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one's own psyche, either as a depression or as a kind of panic. So the passage occurs when it occurs.
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And I've seen people go through it in their 60s and 70s, for example. Again, not tied chronologically,
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but it's whenever we are obliged to take our life seriously in a new way and set off in a new direction.
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So I know that many of our listeners are in their 20s, so they're like in the middle of this
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first half of life. And something that I thought was very useful in your book is that you describe
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the influence that one's family, peers, and culture have on you in this first half of life.
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And I guess this is what Jung would call complexes, right?
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Sure, sure. Complexes are not necessarily bad things. Complexes are expressions of the fact that we have a history.
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So, for example, to choose the literal, let's say when you start to cross a street, there's a
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reflexive response in you that looks left and right. You might be thinking about something else,
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but you tend to do that. That's a protective complex. It's designed by your history to be
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protective to you. We have other clusters of history. And think of complexes as clusters of our history.
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When triggered, they have the power to come up and take over the ego structure and enact their
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old program. That's why we have these repetitions in our lives. And so we think when we're young
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and setting, let's say if I'm a 21-year-old or 22-year-old, I just graduated from college and so
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forth, and I'm setting off in my life and I'm doing all the things I'm supposed to do,
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I think, well, I've left that world behind. And yet, we know upon visioning it later,
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we were either repeating those patterns or we were running from them. Whenever a person says,
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oh, I don't want to be like my mother or I don't want to repeat my father's life,
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you know, we're still living reactively rather than out of some directive core. Or thirdly,
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we'll be out there trying to fix it somehow, trying to stay busy, trying to stay unconscious,
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self-medicating, whatever. Those are the kinds of recognitions that we have that, you know,
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in some way, we're still in some way captive to whatever the messages are. Not to even forget for
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a moment the powers of popular culture to define what does it mean to be successful? What does success
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mean? Well, we have all kinds of definitions in our exterior environment, but what if they're not
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in accord with, you know, what if your idea of being successful is to make a lot of money? So go
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ahead and do that and see if that really works. Because we know tons of people who've made tons
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of money and they're often very emptied souls or they're often people who are doing a lot of
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self-medicating or always wills the risk and always looking for some new distraction.
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So it's in those moments that you begin to realize, all right, sooner or later, in other words,
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if I were 2021 listening to this, I would say, well, what do I do to avoid this? I don't know,
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to tell you the truth. It's like, go out, make your choices, live your life, but once in a while
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surface and say, you know, where am I really? What does this really feel like inside of me?
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What's going on here? Does this feel like it's really about me or is it about me still trying to
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prove something? And, you know, when you're young, you have to go out and I've said to people,
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you know, look, the first half of life, speaking very loosely, is pretty much a gigantic, unavoidable
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mistake. And they laugh because they think I'm making fun of it, but I'm not. It's like, go live
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your life, create a life, make mistakes, but then try to figure them out and then realize, okay,
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life is to some degree experimentation. But then you realize, okay, I tried this job. I mean,
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many times people worked very hard in school or to prepare for a certain profession or something.
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And I mean, I've worked with so many very unhappy lawyers, for example, or a number of frazzled
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doctors or a number of other people who worked hard to achieve a professional identity. And then in
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the end, they find themselves burnt out or they find themselves utterly bored with what they're doing.
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And it's not that they did something wrong. It's that they were serving an agenda that was not
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appropriate for the rest of their journey. And rather than see this as a huge disappointment
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and defeat, one has to say, all right, it is what it is. It was what it was. And now I have to figure
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out what the next journey is about. And that could be a tremendous opportunity for redefining oneself
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and for taking new directions. And the biggest project, frankly, the second half of life is the
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recovery of personal authority. You know, we have it when we're children. It's called instinct.
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But we're tiny, dependent, vulnerable, afraid, have to sort of fit into the circumstances of our
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family or the world around us. And, you know, we trade it away every day. And the second half of life is
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finding personal authority and living it. And personal authority means sorting through
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an extraordinary amount of traffic that flows through us at any given moment. I mean, it's
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busier in there than LAX at rush hour. And the question is, all right, where are those voices
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coming from? And which one's coming from my own soul? And which ones are coming from my family origin?
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Where is it coming from my popular culture? I mean, that's a sorting process that goes on.
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And the entire length of one's life, because the day I don't pay attention to that,
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then there's a good chance that I'm on automatic pilot again. And I'm serving one of those inherited
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voices. And then secondly, having discerned something that really you feel is right for you,
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then have the courage to live it and to live it over time with whatever costs come to you.
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Because that's how you get your life back again. I think the second half of life is sort of
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getting your life back again. Meaning taking some ownership of it and achieving a greater sense of
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Well, as you're describing, when you said that the first half of life is,
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you can kind of sum it up as an unavoidable big mistake we all have to go through.
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I know Jung was, he uses myth a lot. And when you talked about that, it reminded me of the Buddha,
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the story of the Siddhartha, where he tried the life of gluttony and whatever, and that didn't work
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out. And then he tried extreme asceticism. That didn't work. And then he finally reached enlightenment.
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Sure. And it's very interesting, if I remember correctly, he was living in this pleasure palace
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that his very indulgent parents created for him until he was 28. And one day he wandered out into
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the world for the first time, and he saw what I think they call the four passing sites. And he saw
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a beggar, and he realized for the first time there's want. He saw a person who was afflicted with pain,
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and he realized for the first time the body could be a source of suffering. He saw a wandering monk,
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and he realized for the first time there was potentially a life of the spirit in addition to
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that of the body. And he saw a corpse, and he realized for the first time that there's such a thing
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as mortality. And it absolutely overwhelmed his system, as we know. And then he wandered for seven
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days, seven years, rather, as you just mentioned, exploring all kinds of options until he reached
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some kind of enlightenment. And his basic enlightenment was, you know, the chief cause
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of human suffering is the management system the ego has achieved. Maybe it worked hard to achieve,
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but it's that that gets one into trouble over and over and over. In Jung's memoir,
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Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, he frequently says in his own self-exploration of midlife,
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well, here's another thing I didn't know about myself, and it felt like a defeat.
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Well, why would it feel like a defeat if you've learned something important about yourself? Well,
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it's because the ego's invested in its own fantasy of sovereignty. I know who I am. I have enough
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knowledge to make proper choices. I'm doing the right things. I'm a smart guy, et cetera, et cetera.
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And then, you know, life shows up and pokes a hole in that. And those humbling experiences are the
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ones where we most begin to learn and find different directions.
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We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. So you mentioned this passage from the first half to second half. There's
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no chronological age to it, but rather it's usually an event that draws them to that passage. Does it
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have to be, does there have to be an event? Like you have to lose a job, you have to lose a loved
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one for that to happen? Okay. No. Well, let me just mention, for example, in, I think it was 1884,
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85, Tolstoy published a novella called The Death of Ivan Ilyich. And that's a name in Russian that
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means something like John Johnson. So it was meant to be an everyman sort of story. And this is a guy
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who, it's worth your reading. It's a story of a guy who did all the right things. He went to the
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right school, lived in the right neighborhood, married the right person, espoused the right social and
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political values, was a lawyer and then became a judge and was rising the system and everything.
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And he was just following the script as faithful as he could. Then one day there's a pain in his
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side that just doesn't go away. And to shorten the story, it basically, he finds that he has a terminal
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illness. And for the first time in his life, he begins to question things. So in that story,
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it's an event, it's an illness of substantial proportions. Sometimes for people, it's just a
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growing sense of the exhaustion of the game plan of the first half of life. I mean, look, in fairness,
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we set off thinking we could do this particular job for 50 years. Well, human psyche is mobile and
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fluid. And it very quickly, I think, wants to move on. The human psyche wants two things.
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It wants a fuller expression of its own possibilities and it wants self-healing. And to serve those
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functions, it's going to, again, withdraw approval and energy. It's very rare that you can find a person
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truly excited about his work after many years. And those who do are lucky they found a particular
00:24:53.780
passion. Henry Moore, the sculptor, was still sculpting into his eighth decade. And he said,
00:25:00.640
well, I just found a passion so great I couldn't ship it all the way. And that's wonderful. But we
00:25:06.080
have to remember, passion comes from the Latin passio. That means to suffer. So he was saying,
00:25:11.000
I'm right, this is something that I feel so deeply that it actually hurts to do it and hurts not to do
00:25:17.520
it. But the experience of doing it is profoundly meaningful. I spend my life with a hammer and
00:25:24.620
chisel and pounding stone. That's not an easy life, but it's meaningful for me. And so underneath all of
00:25:33.000
that is really the question, what is the psyche's opinion about this? And that's what sooner or later
00:25:39.280
has to knock on the door loudly enough, which is why typically we get these intimations all along
00:25:45.800
the way. We even have them in the first half of life, but we're so busy serving the external agendas
00:25:52.840
and our goals, and often quite legitimately in doing that. But also, there's a certain kind of vested
00:26:00.080
interest in not stopping very long to look. Satchel Paige said once, don't look back, something might be
00:26:05.680
gaining on you. Well, something is always gaining on us. And that's a certain kind of accountability to our
00:26:14.540
One of the things when you describe the first half of life, one of the nice things about it is that there is a
00:26:18.640
structure, there's a framework, like you know what to do, right? There are things you can do, and you know that
00:26:23.180
you are doing the thing you're supposed to do. The second half of life doesn't seem there's that same sort of
00:26:30.500
So how do you go about navigating that second half of life when you have no clue on what you're
00:26:36.660
That's right. Yeah. And that can be terrifying. It's also known as freedom. It's an opportunity for
00:26:44.220
new exploration, new trial and error. But also, I mean, I've had so many people say to me something
00:26:51.780
like, well, I always want to do this or that. And there's always a but, you know, I had to pay for
00:26:58.340
this, had to go do that, had the kids to deal with, this kind of thing. They're all good reasons.
00:27:04.680
But in the end, they serve as excuses for not having been faithful to what was looking for
00:27:11.140
expression through us. That's why I said the central question of the second half of life is not what
00:27:15.820
does the world want? It's what does the soul want? And another way of looking at that is what is
00:27:20.600
looking for expression in the world through me? That can be a career, for example, or a line of
00:27:27.820
employment. But that's not, it's usually not that narrow. It's like stepping into your own
00:27:33.980
personhood because that's the person. This is not self-indulgence. This is serving yourself.
00:27:39.340
There's a difference. That's the person you will share with your partner. That's the person you
00:27:43.780
share with your children, your neighbors, your society. You know, Jung said, you know,
00:27:49.440
individuation, which he didn't mean narcissism or individualism. He said it's about serving what's
00:27:56.460
wanting expression through you. And he says that that means at times withdrawing from the
00:28:01.800
collective, which creates a kind of debt, he said. And that debt is paid for by returning
00:28:08.720
a more evolved person to your relationships and to your society. And that's why, in a sense,
00:28:14.920
it's the greatest gift to our society for you to become who you are. Again, not in service
00:28:21.160
to narcissistic interests or self-absorption, it usually will call for sacrifice, courage,
00:28:27.300
and persistence over time. But that's who you become. And that's something that's, frankly,
00:28:34.500
rolling fewer problems into the next generation.
00:28:38.800
Well, you mentioned, you know, freedom is terrifying. I think Eric Fromm, he wrote that book,
00:28:42.380
Escape from Freedom, right? Whenever you actually have the chance to be freed, I think a lot of people
00:28:46.920
have that tendency to, oh, I'm going to go back to that first half of life structure because that's,
00:28:53.360
So, how do you manage that? Like, when you deal with patients who, you know, they're asking those
00:28:57.280
questions and they're on that precipice, but then they want to retreat, like, how do you move forward?
00:29:05.140
Well, there has to be, again, enough internal discord. People don't just come into my office because
00:29:10.900
they were in the neighborhood, thought they'd talk to a total stranger. It's, there has to be some
00:29:15.740
bug inside of them, some irritation in the membrane that's trying to become the pearl here.
00:29:23.580
There has to be some suffering of some kind. And then you have to say, all right, now let's pay
00:29:30.660
attention to the systems that you do have, the systems we all learned necessarily to override.
00:29:37.600
First of all is the feeling function. You say, well, everybody knows about their feelings, right?
00:29:42.000
Well, stop and think for a moment. Feelings are not something we create. Feelings are autonomous,
00:29:49.520
qualitative evaluations of how our life is going by the psyche. What we do from an ego standpoint is
00:29:57.540
we pay no attention to them. We anesthetize them. We project them onto other people. Feelings are not
00:30:03.740
created by us. They occur. So, you stop and pay attention. If you really at times stop and ask,
00:30:10.640
how do I really feel about this? And I have to say really, because you can't trust the first
00:30:16.600
responses. They're going to be filtered through the complexes. They're going to be protective or
00:30:21.240
avoidant or deflective. How do I, I mean, you sit with that. How do I really feel about that?
00:30:27.460
Then you realize your feeling function draws you toward certain directions or courses in your life.
00:30:34.220
You know, secondly is energy systems. We can mobilize our energy and we do, and we have to,
00:30:40.300
and that's fortunate. But if you keep expending energy in the wrong direction, it's going to lead
00:30:47.200
to that boredom and then to burnout. You remember Joseph Campbell said, once you spend your life
00:30:52.060
trying to climb the ladder and then you realize you placed your ladder against the wrong wall. Well,
00:30:56.120
you spend a lot of energy going up the ladder, but, you know, then you realize, oh, this is not
00:31:01.140
where I was supposed to be going. So, energy systems ultimately are clues. When we're doing what's
00:31:07.240
right for us, this, the energy systems are there. In other words, when, when I'm doing what is right
00:31:14.520
for me, I am flooded with that supportive energy. And when I'm doing what's wrong, I, I have to be
00:31:20.900
working against my own grain. My wife has been a painter, for example, and, and I've seen her lost,
00:31:27.140
so to speak, in the canvas. And it's almost like she doesn't know where she is. And that's good,
00:31:31.720
because she's, she's in the grip of that energy and it can carry her. Or there are times when I've
00:31:37.760
been doing something like writing or, or working with someone. I have no sense of time because the
00:31:42.980
energy is there. The flow is there. Thirdly, we have dreams. We average six dreams per night,
00:31:48.220
which is a lot of activity. Nature doesn't waste energy. It's trying to communicate with us. And I
00:31:53.420
know most people are going to say, well, I don't listen, pay attention to my dreams, or I don't remember
00:31:57.400
and what, well, if you pay attention, you'd be surprised if we live to be 80 years old, six years
00:32:03.540
of our lives, six years will be spent dreaming. That's an extraordinary amount of activity. And I'll
00:32:10.100
guarantee you over time, if a person really pays attention to dreams and, and is humble enough to,
00:32:17.460
to be open to them, they, they offer critiques, they offer correctives, and I can be doing all the
00:32:24.120
right things. And then my dream life is, is telling me the opposite. And then I'd better start paying
00:32:28.860
attention to, to something else that I've, I've discarded up to that point. And then of course,
00:32:33.800
fourthly is that, that issue that we touched on before, and that's meaning. If what I'm doing
00:32:38.800
is, is perhaps difficult, but I experienced it as meaningful, you know, that's the payoff.
00:32:45.600
I've often thought, you know, happiness is not the goal of life. We're, we're told that you're
00:32:50.600
supposed to be happy. Well, who said you're supposed to be happy? You're, you're, you're
00:32:54.200
here to be here as, as a, as yourself, as a, as authentic a person as you could be. And, and
00:33:01.420
that sometimes is not going to fit into the world, or that's, that's not going to be pleasing
00:33:06.120
to everybody, maybe not even pleasing to you, but it also feels right. It feels authentic so
00:33:12.600
that your, your identity, your standpoint, your, your activities, your investments, your choices
00:33:18.900
are in some way, experiences meaningful. In other words, I, I can't imagine anything more
00:33:25.440
meaningful than sharing people's personal journeys in the way in which I'm privileged to do it as an
00:33:31.180
analyst. I don't find it enjoyable. I, I find it painful. I find it the sort of thing that can wake
00:33:38.720
me in the middle of the night as, as I continue to process it. But I, I find it so meaningful
00:33:43.600
that, that I, that I, I'm privileged to do it. And the day that arrives when it's no longer
00:33:48.700
meaningful, I'll, I'll do something else with my life. There's different aspects of your life
00:33:52.920
that are going to be affected as you make that transition to the second half. One you talk about
00:33:56.680
in your book is your career. Some people, they reach their fifties towards the end of their career
00:34:01.380
and they realize I've been doing the wrong thing my entire life. How do you, how does someone deal
00:34:07.140
with that? And how do they make that transition to have the courage to like do what the thing that
00:34:11.060
their soul says they need to do? Well, again, I want to emphasize the first half of life isn't
00:34:17.780
wrong. It's what seemed to be best at the time. So we need to, uh, accept ourselves and forgive
00:34:24.320
ourselves perhaps. But, but then the real question is what, what, what is the path of growth for me?
00:34:31.520
You know, uh, you said, once we all walk in shoes too small for us, which is his way of saying we,
00:34:37.340
we live cautious and timid lives and lives defined by our histories, where is your developmental
00:34:43.880
agenda? Where do you need to grow? What's going to be challenging to you? What's going to take you
00:34:49.980
to a different place in your own psyche that could be within the same work, let's say, but looked at
00:34:56.240
or approached from a completely different angle. And sometimes it needs to go in an entirely different
00:35:01.600
direction altogether. My first of half of life, I was a college professor and I enjoyed it very much.
00:35:07.420
What was, what was still appealing to me was teaching. So I've continued teaching, but I left
00:35:12.680
behind teaching 18 year olds and it wasn't anything wrong with being 18. It's just that there was a
00:35:18.440
conversation that's a possible at 40 to 70 or 80 that is not necessarily possible at 18. So I realized
00:35:25.060
I was spending my time teaching and conversing with people that was not necessarily appropriate
00:35:31.540
for the second half of life, which is one of the reasons I made the transition to being a therapist.
00:35:36.260
I still teach, I still write and, and, and so forth. And at the same time, you know, it's,
00:35:42.780
it's a different kind of conversation. So sometimes it calls for a radical change. Sometimes it's simply
00:35:48.920
adjustments within the system. We also have to raise that question, which you may or may not want to
00:35:54.440
talk about, but that is relationships. People will often make commitments out of their particular
00:35:59.640
psychology and say at 20 or 25. And then of course, as they evolve and change, then, then they'll ask
00:36:06.380
themselves, why am I with this person or how well is this working out? And that can lead to some very
00:36:12.400
painful conversations as we all know. In the old days, I used to do a lot of couples work. And
00:36:18.700
the real question is, can a couple evolve in a direction that is mutually growing and developing?
00:36:27.380
Because if it isn't, it's going to be miserable for both of them. And are both parties capable of
00:36:33.980
that? Rather than serve a kind of fusion model, like, all right, you and I will just fuse and become
00:36:40.480
a whole person. The model for the second half of life is kind of an open-ended structure, almost like a
00:36:46.300
Japanese wok that you would cook in. You know, it's open-ended that supports the growth and
00:36:51.060
development of both parties. And when that's there, it's terrific. It's wonderful. Everybody's
00:36:56.620
developmental process is served. And, and, and when one person is stuck and it blocks the other
00:37:03.800
person, it can be very, very difficult as we all know. So I know you've written about men before
00:37:08.500
specifically, and the way you described the first half of life about ego building, seems like men would
00:37:13.220
be really into this sort of thing, success, career, family, like, I mean, what is, what does that first
00:37:18.880
half of life look like for men and the people you've dealt with, the clients you've had?
00:37:24.320
Well, you know, I've, I've focused primarily on the, well, let me just mention when I first started
00:37:30.040
my practice back in the 1970s, the ratio of clients that I saw was nine women to one man. Today,
00:37:38.220
it's the reverse, nine men to one woman. And it's not because I advertise as such, it's, it's, that's
00:37:45.600
who's showing up. And I, I think it's indicative for men that more and more men realize, you know,
00:37:52.280
we're in trouble. This is a species in trouble and, and it's more acceptable today to, to in some way
00:38:00.500
undertake that kind of inquiry with a therapist than, than it seemed to be decades ago. But, but for men,
00:38:06.820
that's right, many men are stuck. And when you see a man still stuck in the second half of life with
00:38:12.920
thinking it's about making more money or being, you know, having more ribbons on your chest or
00:38:16.920
whatever it is, that's a person who's still caught in a delusion. And he's going to have some serious
00:38:21.940
appointments with his own mortality and aging when the time comes. One of the ways I I've put it when
00:38:27.780
I've spoken with women's groups who have on occasion asked me to talk about, well, tell us about those
00:38:33.860
crazy people called men. I say, try to imagine three things. First of all, cut away from your
00:38:41.000
life, your close friends. Women always have close friends with whom they can share their deepest
00:38:46.580
concerns and desires and fears and what's going on in their marriage and their body and their
00:38:51.820
children and so forth. Those people are gone. They're banished forever. Secondly, sever your
00:38:57.860
connection to whatever is your source of guidance and insight within you, call it your instinct or
00:39:05.300
call it your intuition, whatever you call it, that that's severed. And thirdly, your worth as a person
00:39:11.720
will be defined by meeting external standards of productivity, productivity standards created by
00:39:19.000
total strangers you'll never meet. And when women hear that, they're horrified. And I say, if you could
00:39:24.200
imagine those three things, first of all, try to imagine how isolating that is. Try to imagine how
00:39:31.140
lonely that is. Try to imagine how self-estranging that is. And that's the condition of most men.
00:39:38.260
And invariably, their attitude softens and most of them have said, well, how can we help? And the answer
00:39:43.540
is they can't. It's up to us as men to begin to challenge some of the things that we live with
00:39:51.100
or some of our own attitudes. So, you know, in looking with men, I think when I wrote a book
00:39:57.420
years ago called Under Saturn's Shadow, and it was a reference to the mythological history of fathers
00:40:04.020
and sons in which the fathers were devouring the sons and the sons were trying to kill the father.
00:40:08.660
It was all about competition and winners and losers. And there was nothing there about support and love
00:40:14.740
and cooperation and true mentoring. And so, when I wrote that and put it out there, I was touched, astonished,
00:40:24.120
humbled by the number of men who wrote from around the world, the Australian Outback and Japan and places
00:40:32.060
like that, saying, I always thought there was something wrong with me, but in a sense, this helps me understand
00:40:38.800
myself as a man. And I was just impressed again with the incredible loneliness of most men. Most men may have a
00:40:47.700
drinking buddy or a tennis buddy or a bowling buddy or a guy at work they will have lunch with or something like
00:40:54.020
that. But by and large, men don't tend to risk true intimacy of sharing the experience that goes on within that
00:41:04.620
sack of skin that they live. And so, that isolation is pathologizing. It makes them too dependent on
00:41:13.240
sexuality for connection, for example, on food, on alcohol, and on external prizes like success and promotion
00:41:23.620
and so forth that might actually be killing them rather than supporting them.
00:41:29.100
So, I know every person's second half of life is going to look different because every person's different
00:41:33.760
and the soul, every person's soul is going to be asking something different for them. But for
00:41:36.940
men generally, when you work with men, sort of what's like the tenor, you know, sort of the mood
00:41:42.080
or sort of the broad view of what that looks like for a man as they transition? Like, what does the
00:41:47.320
second half look like or feel like for a man? Well, first of all, I think there are ideas out there.
00:41:53.540
I mean, your program is one of those contributions that were not available, frankly, 50 years ago
00:41:59.280
when I was in that transitional stage myself. I'm, you know, in a month or so going to be 80,
00:42:05.960
so I've been around a while. And by and large, for my father's era and my youth, you are defined by
00:42:12.780
your roles. You know, as I said, the man is defined by how he meets standards of productivity in whatever
00:42:18.960
field he winds up. And today, I think far more men are able to look at that and critique it
00:42:26.340
and to say, okay, but that doesn't necessarily work for me. And I think that's a certain kind
00:42:33.220
of, this is not true for everyone by any means. Some men are so, you know, conditioned by economic
00:42:39.000
hardship or lack of cultural awareness, no fault of their own, that this is not an option for them.
00:42:46.520
And I grieve for those men. But I think for many men, there's a permission for self-examination
00:42:52.800
and to perhaps, as Thoreau said, to march the tune of your own drummer, because, you know, that's why
00:42:59.540
I find more men coming into therapy and more men in the audiences when I speak around the world here.
00:43:05.860
So I think a lot has changed. The sentence I most heard as a child, basically, and many other people
00:43:13.060
have heard, was, well, what will people think? Well, you know, it's still out there. And we should not
00:43:19.540
ignore the impact of our decisions on people around us. That's not the point. But to say,
00:43:25.180
is my life defined by fitting in? Does that mean I'm supposed to become a chameleon and fit in with
00:43:32.380
my environmental demands all my life? When we're children, we're often forced to. But at some point,
00:43:38.220
you know, you become a man by sort of figuring out, well, who are you and what do you really want
00:43:44.980
with your life? And now, how do I go about doing that? Respectfully to the well-being of others,
00:43:50.700
but you also have to serve that in a way that may take you away from those collective definitions that
00:43:57.840
were so, so powerful. We realize, okay, no, I'm here to serve my soul, not popular assumptions.
00:44:06.600
And the power of those popular assumptions has so significantly waned. I think men are freer today,
00:44:12.280
by and large, but they're also adrift. Because for the average man, you know, he knows he doesn't
00:44:19.160
fit in, but he tends to internalize that as a sense of failure or shame. And that's a common
00:44:26.520
experience. Most men walk around feeling shame and then trying to hide it from everybody else.
00:44:31.680
But in fact, it's a time for tremendous opening of possibilities. And that includes the risk of
00:44:39.260
sharing that with another man. I mean, every man has to say at some level, do I have a man friend
00:44:45.480
with whom I can share what's really going on in my life, really going on, including the really
00:44:51.200
difficult and painful parts? And if not, that's part of my accountability. That's something that
00:44:58.340
I'm going to have to address. And if I'm ever going to get a richer life.
00:45:03.420
So this might be a first half of life question. So it might be the wrong question. But let's say
00:45:09.880
you're asking those questions, you started to grapple with those second half of life questions.
00:45:13.940
How do you know if you're like on the right path?
00:45:17.960
Well, what I was suggesting before is you don't know. And that's why I'm saying first half of life
00:45:23.900
is often a big mistake, but it's unavoidable. I say that with no judgment whatsoever. I'm just
00:45:28.600
saying, all right, leave home, learn how to support yourself, form friendships and relationships.
00:45:35.420
That's what you should be doing. That builds your sense of conscious self, creates ego strength. It
00:45:41.760
creates a sense of accountability and relatedness. That's good. But is that the right path for you?
00:45:47.440
Well, we're going to find that out. We don't know yet. And that's why I said I had achieved all my
00:45:53.940
goals by my 30s. And all I knew for a while as I began to feel the sort of energy slip away from
00:46:00.580
them. All I knew to do is ramp them up. And that's when the depression hit. Now, I didn't know that the
00:46:08.680
depression was my friend. That's kind of a peculiar sentence. But I didn't know that that was, again,
00:46:14.740
my encounter with my own soul. My soul was speaking. I thought, well, like anybody, how quickly do I get
00:46:20.240
rid of this? Rather than ask this very fundamental question, why has it come? What is it wanting from
00:46:27.200
me? That's a different question. So the truth is, you don't know. And even the second half of life,
00:46:33.560
you don't know often. You have to explore. You have to put yourself out there. You have to be willing to
00:46:39.360
try things. Because again, if it's right for you, your systems, as I mentioned, the feeling systems,
00:46:46.100
the energy systems, the dreams, the sense of purpose and meaning, those things will support
00:46:52.500
you. They'll rise to be there for you. Jung said once, we all have to find what supports us when
00:47:00.020
nothing supports us. So sometimes you really have to have the courage or the desperation to set off
00:47:06.400
on your own and say, this is what I'm going to risk and so forth. So when I traveled to Switzerland
00:47:13.020
for retraining at midlife, I mean, there was nothing in my environment that was supportive of
00:47:18.800
that per se. It was prohibitive in terms of income and everything else. But I felt this is something I
00:47:27.920
have to do. If I don't do this, I die, so to speak. The body would continue, but something in the soul
00:47:33.480
would die. But did I know where it was going? No. Did I plan to change my career? No. That's what
00:47:40.640
was disclosed by being on the road. And you have to be on the road, so to speak, to find out where
00:47:47.520
your directions are. Right. We live life forward. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And as I said, forgive yourself
00:47:54.200
for mistakes. Because if you learn from it, there's no such thing as a mistake. You say,
00:47:59.840
what do I need to learn from that? Now I know that. That I'll factor into my decisions in the future.
00:48:06.600
Well, Jim, this has been a great conversation. Is there some place people can go to learn more
00:48:09.500
about your book and your work? Well, I have a website, simply jameshollis.net.
00:48:15.360
And certainly books are on Amazon and other places like that. So I hope those books... I've always
00:48:20.940
thought of books as trying to share this kind of conversation with people I haven't met out there.
00:48:27.660
And so, you know, I never wrote books to make money. You don't make a lot of money from this. But I
00:48:33.100
certainly think of it as serving that teaching vocation, which I've always experienced. And if
00:48:39.340
people read it and find something of value there, then I feel deeply grateful to be any part of
00:48:43.820
that. Well, Jim, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. You're welcome, sir. And good
00:48:47.700
luck to you. My guest name is Dr. James Hollis. He's the author of the book, Finding Meaning in the
00:48:53.060
Second Half of Life, How to Finally Really Grow Up. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:48:57.300
everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at his website, jameshollis.net. Also check
00:49:02.160
our show notes at aom.is slash second half, where you find links to resources, where you delve deeper
00:49:06.660
into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. And I wanted to let
00:49:17.560
you know that right now, we've got an enrollment going on for the Strenuous Life, strenuouslife.co.
00:49:21.980
Talked about it. It's an online platform that we created to help you put your intentions into
00:49:25.620
actions. We've done that by creating a series of 50 different badges based around 50 different skills.
00:49:29.800
We also have accountability for fitness, doing a good deed, thinking outside of yourself,
00:49:33.960
and we provide weekly challenges that are going to push you outside of your comfort zone in different
00:49:37.580
ways. So go check it out, strenuouslife.co. Hope to see you there. And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free
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episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher Premium. Head over to stitcherpremium.com,
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sign up, use code manliness at checkout to get a free month trial of Stitcher Premium. Once you're
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signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android or iOS, and you can start enjoying ad-free episodes of the
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AOM podcast. And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us your view on
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Apple podcast or Stitcher. It helps out a lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please
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consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think will get something out of
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it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay reminding
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all you to listen to AOM podcast. Put what you've heard into action.