Jung’s Five Pillars of a Good Life
The great Swiss psychoanalyst left us a surprisingly practical guide to being happier.
In the world of popular psychology, the work of one giant figure is hard to avoid: Carl Jung, the onetime associate of Sigmund Freud who died more than 60 years ago. If you think you have a complex about something, the Swiss psychiatrist invented that term. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Those are his coinages, too. Persona, archetype, synchronicity: Jung, Jung, Jung.
When it comes to happiness, though, Jung can seem a bit of a downer. “‘Happiness,’” he wrote, “is such a remarkable reality that there is nobody who does not long for it.” So far, so good. But he does not leave it there: “And yet there is not a single objective criterion which would prove beyond all doubt that this condition necessarily exists.”
Clearly, this observation should not discourage any serious student of happiness. On the contrary, Jung is stating the manifest truth that we cannot lay hold of any blissful end state of pure happiness, because every human life is bound to involve negative emotions, which in fact arose to alert us to threats and keep us safe. Rather, the objective should be progress—or, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, my co-author on our recent book, Build the Life You Want, “happierness.”
If Jung was a happiness skeptic in some sense, however, he was by no means a denialist. In 1960, as he neared the end of his long life, Jung shared his own strategy for realizing that goal of progress. Refined with the aid of modern social science, Jung’s precepts might be just what you’re looking for in your life.
Jung believed that making progress toward happiness was built on five pillars.
1. Good physical and mental health
Jung believed that getting happier required soundness of mind and body. His thesis is supported by plenty of research. For example, the longest-running study of happiness—the Harvard Study of Adult Development—has shown that four of the biggest predictors of a senior citizen’s well-being are not smoking excessively, drinking alcohol moderately if at all, maintaining a healthy body weight, and exercising. Even more important for well-being is good mental health. Indeed, one study from 2013 showed that poor mental health among Britons, Germans, and Australians predicted nearly two to roughly six times as much misery as poor physical health did.
This raises what might seem like a nitpick with Jung’s contention: Good health practices seem not to raise happiness, but rather to lower unhappiness. Today, many emotion researchers have uncovered evidence of a phenomenon that Jung did not conceive of: Negative and positive emotions appear to be separable phenomena and not opposites; well-being requires a focus on each. Furthermore, researchers have identified how activities such as physical exercise can interrupt the cycle of negative emotion during moments of heightened stress, by helping moderate cortisol-hormone levels. I have found in my own work that this helps explain why people with naturally low levels of negative emotion tend to struggle with staying on a regular exercise regimen: They may feel less benefit to their well-being from going to the gym than people naturally higher in negative feelings do.
2. Good personal and intimate relations, such as those of marriage, family, and friendships
The intertwined notions that close relationships are at the heart of well-being and that cultivating them will reliably increase happiness are unambiguously true. Indeed, of the four best life investments for increasing personal satisfaction, two involve family and friendships (the others are in faith or philosophy, and meaningful work; more on these in a moment). And as for marriage, an institution that has taken a beating over recent decades, more and more evidence is piling up from scholars that being wed makes the majority of people happier than they otherwise would be, as the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox has argued. This research seemed so conclusive to Wilcox that he titled his recent book, simply, Get Married. Jung himself was married to his wife, Emma, for 52 years, until her death at the age of 73.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development comes to one conclusion more definitively than any other. In the words of my Harvard colleague Robert Waldinger, who has directed the project for nearly two decades, and his co-author, Marc Schulz, “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.” Waldinger’s predecessor running the study, George Vaillant, was just as unequivocal about the evidence: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”
3. Seeing beauty in art and in nature
Jung believed that happiness required one to cultivate an appreciation for beautiful things and experiences. Although this might sound intuitively obvious, the actuality is more complicated.
Long before I focused my scholarly life on happiness, I was dedicated to art and beauty. My earliest memories are of painting with my artist mother; I learned to read music before written language; I made my living as a classical musician from ages 19 to 31. News flash: Artists are generally not the world’s most blissfully satisfied people. In a 1992 study from Britain, researchers found that performing artists reported depression at higher rates than the control group. At some point, I will write a book not on the art of happiness but on the very troublesome happiness of art.
Among nonartists, however, the issue is somewhat simpler and in line with Jung’s thinking. First, a big difference exists between beauty in nature and beauty in art. Specifically, engagement with nature’s beauty is known, across different cultures, to enhance well-being. Second, with aesthetic experience, happiness depends on the artistic mood. For example, experiments have shown that if you listen to happy music on your own, it makes you feel happier; if you listen to sad music while alone, it makes you feel sadder.
4. A reasonable standard of living and satisfactory work
As with physical and mental health, employment and income seem tied more to eliminating unhappiness than to raising happiness. For one thing, scholars have long shown that unemployment is a reliable source of misery: Depressive symptoms typically rise when people, both men and women, are unemployed. This cannot be explained simply by the lack of material and social resources that typically accompanies joblessness; rather, work itself helps protect mental health.
But if we can upgrade “satisfactory work” in Jung’s list to “meaningful work,” then positive gains in happiness do come into play. The two elements that make work meaningful for most people are earned success (a sense of accomplishing something valuable) and service to others. These can be achieved in almost any job.
The relationship between money and happiness is a hotly contested topic; older studies show that well-being tops out at relatively low income levels, but more recent studies show that such contentment continues to rise for much higher incomes. My own assessment of the evidence is that money alone cannot buy happiness, nor can spending money to acquire possessions make one happy; but having the money to pay for experiences with loved ones, to free up time to spend on meaningful activities, and to support good causes does enhance happiness.
5. A philosophical or religious outlook that fosters resilience
Jung argued that a good life requires a way of understanding why things happen the way they do, being able to zoom out from the tedious quotidian travails of life, and put events—including inevitable suffering—into perspective. The son of a pastor, Jung was deeply Christian in his worldview, as his own words published many years ago in The Atlantic make clear: “For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.” He did not insist that his spiritual path was the only one—“I do not imagine that in my reflections,” he wrote, “I have uttered a final truth”—and allowed that even a nonreligious, purely philosophical attitude could do. But everyone, he thought, should have some sense of transcendent belief or higher purpose.
Research clearly backs up Jung’s contention. Religious belief has been noted as strongly predictive of finding meaning in life, and spirituality is positively correlated with better mental health; both faith and spiritual practice seem protective against depression. Secular philosophies can provide this benefit as well. Recent papers on Stoicism, for example, have demonstrated that this ancient way of thinking and acting can yield well-being benefits. Many books have been written on the subject, including the psychotherapist Donald Robertson’s Stoicism and the Art of Happiness.
Taken together, Jung’s ideas about happiness and his five pillars of well-being stand up solidly to modern research findings. I propose this practical seven-point summary:
1. Do not fall prey to seeking pure happiness. Instead, seek lifelong progress toward happierness.
2. Manage as best you can the main sources of misery in your life by attending to your physical and mental health, maintaining employment, and ensuring an adequate income.
3. If you’re earning enough to take care of your principal needs, remember that happiness at work comes not from chasing higher income but from pursuing a sense of accomplishment and service to others.
4. Cultivate deep relationships through marriage, family, and real friendships. Remember that happiness is love.
5. If you have discretionary income left over, use it to invest in your relationships with family and friends.
6. Spend time in nature, surround yourself with beauty that uplifts you, and consume the art and music that nourish your spirit.
7. Find a path of transcendence—one that explains the big picture in life and helps you comprehend suffering and the purpose of your existence.
Beyond the scientific research that supports this strategy, we also have evidence of its effectiveness in the example of Jung’s life. He made his list to mark his 85th birthday, which was to be the last one he celebrated. By all accounts, he made progress toward happiness over his life, had a long and devoted marriage, died surrounded by the people he loved, and was satisfied that he had used his abilities in a meaningful way that served others. In this world, that sounds pretty good to me.
=============================================================
Why So Many People Are Unhappy in Retirement
Too often, we imagine life to be like the hero’s journey, and leave out its crucial last step: letting go.
There is a script to life that most of us have internalized, whether consciously or not. It’s in many of the most beloved fictional stories, and—from the outside, at least—it looks like the lives of successful people tend to follow it as well. It is often called the hero’s journey, or the monomyth.
The 19th-century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor was the first to identify the hero’s journey in literature. As he showed, many great adventure stories throughout history follow the basic formula. This is true from the Bible’s story of King David to Star Wars today. You can think of it as having three parts. The first is the call to adventure, where the hero-to-be is stimulated to act in some bold way, usually to meet a daunting task—say, fighting Goliath, or the Empire. The second is the ordeal, in which the hero is brutally tested and has to beat long odds—such as vanquishing a giant in battle or blowing up the Death Star. The third is victory, where the hero wins against these odds and returns home, triumphant.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that successful people tend to see their own lives through the lens of this myth. “He is no hero who never met the dragon,” Jung wrote. “Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard…He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself.” Jung sounds like an egg-headed Tony Robbins there: Want to be a winner in your career? Then live your own hero’s journey—set your goals, struggle, suffer, sacrifice, win, and return victorious! The End.
It’s a nice narrative, especially if you’ve worked hard and done pretty well in life. The problem is the real-life ending, after the triumphant return. People have no script for that part. There’s no Star Wars sequel where Luke Skywalker hangs around the house all day, yelling because someone touched the thermostat and telling his grandkids about blowing up the Death Star for the thousandth time while they roll their eyes.
Of course, some people enjoy retirement, but since I have been writing about happiness later in life, many people who were successful earlier in life have reached out to me to say that retirement has been brutal: They feel unhappy, aimless, and bored. In search of—well, they’re not quite sure what—some have made bad choices, tanking their marriages (leading to what social scientists call “gray divorce,” which doubled in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015) or making stupid business decisions they don’t think they would have made when they were still employed. One person told me, “Since I quit working, I feel like a stranger to myself.”
The hero’s journey is great when you’re in the middle of it. The trouble comes when your strengths start to wane, because now you’re off script. People rarely change the story they’ve constructed for their lives; they rage, instead, trying to pound their lives back into the story line, often with sad results.
But this rage is born from a misunderstanding of the hero’s journey. Defining it in terms of three phases, as I did above, makes the mistake of leaving out one last, critical phase. The literary scholar Joseph Campbell, author of the book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, notes that many great myths involve a subtle twist after the triumph in battle. He calls it “The Crossing of the Return Threshold.” “The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world,” Campbell writes. “The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life.” In other words, the end of the true hero’s journey is coming home and finding a battle to be waged not with an external enemy, but with one’s own demons. Win that final battle—the hardest one of all—and true victory is yours.
Consider the case of King David. He kills the lion; he beats Goliath; he vanquishes Israel’s foes and unites the nation’s twelve tribes. From shepherd boy to supreme ruler of his nation, David’s journey is the hero’s journey. But the story doesn’t stop there—it continues in the second book of Samuel, where we find the exalted King David in his post-victory life, hanging around his palace with a lot of time on his hands. He wakes up from a nap, goes for a walk on the roof of his palace, and spies a neighbor’s beautiful wife, Bathsheba, taking a bath. Famous long story short: David pursues an adulterous relationship with Bathsheba and impregnates her. Then he sends her husband off to die in battle to cover his disgraceful misdeed.
Ancient Israel’s greatest leader, a man of impeccable valor and discipline, comes home from his triumph, and then falls prey to his own petty lust. Heroism turns to villainous rot not from anything on the battlefield, but precisely because of the “banalities and noisy obscenities of life,” in Campbell’s words. In failing to live an ordinary life, David failed in the last, hardest phase of the journey: being the master of himself.
On a much smaller scale, successful people sometimes behave more or less like David, hurting others and ruining their well-earned reputations later in life by giving in to their vanity, desires, and insecurities. I’m talking about the CEO who, even in the face of deteriorating performance, won’t turn over control of the company until she gets shoved out by the board, or the politician who, rather than cultivating a successor, makes one last run for office in his 80s and loses badly. Or, closer to home, my own beloved father-in-law, who after a lifetime running his own successful business put all his savings in a dodgy online investment company that suddenly went poof.
Though few lives will take the straightforward path of the hero’s journey, that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful framework for thinking about your goals. First, have a dream, and go for it. Second, remember that reaching your goals is going to hurt if they’re worth anything. You’ll suffer in your quest. Lean in to the sacrifice. Third, if you achieve your goals, savor your victory.
But don’t forget part four—the personal crucible. Unless you keel over in the prime of life, your victories will fade, your skills will decline, and life’s problems will intrude. If you try to hang on to glory, or lash out when it fades, it will squander your victories and mark an unhappy end to your journey. If you’re still in the middle of your hero’s journey, it would behoove you to make tangible plans now to show true strength and character in the final phase. Plan to spend the last part of your life serving others, loving your family and friends, and being a good example to those still in the first three stages of their own hero’s journey. Happiness in retirement depends on your choice of narrative.
How Retirement Was Invented
The earliest schemes for financial support in old age were pegged to life expectancy.