Carl Jung on How to Live and the Origins of His Famous Theory of Navigating Uncertainty – The Marginalian

In recent seasons of existence, I have had the opportunity to reflect on the trajectory of my life, not planned by planning but by living.

We yearn to be given the next step and a path to the horizon, easing our anxiety about the illusion of a destination somewhere beyond the vista of our current life.

But the hardest truth we have to bear is that death is the end of the horizon, with countless ways to get there – none unanswerable, all uncertain in their path, all certain to arrive. That is why there are so many infinite types of good lives. And that is why each of them, even those that seem so real, tremble with an incredible degree of doubt and confusion. Uncertainty is the value of beauty, and integrity is the only compass of the uncertainty that forms the ground of any life.

And so the best we can do is go step by step precisely until one day, pausing to catch our breath, turn and pant along the way. If we've been lucky enough, if we've been willing enough to face uncertainty, it's our only path, uncharted by our anxious young men, untrodden by anyone else.

The recovery community has a shorthand for keeping this at the center of awareness in times of inner turmoil: “Do the next right thing.” The concept, in fact, began two years before the founding of Alcoholics Anonymous, with a clear and heartfelt letter by a Swiss psychiatrist. Carl Jung (July 26, 1875–June 6, 1961) wrote to an anonymous reporter, posted in Selected Writings of CG Jung, 1909-1961 (public library).

On December 15, 1933, Jung responded to a woman who had asked for his guidance on how to live. Two generations after the young Nietzsche admonished that “no one can build a bridge for you, and you alone, over which you must cross the river of life,” Jung wrote:

Hello Frau V.,

Your questions are not answered because you want to know how you are it should life. A person lives as a single person it can be. There is no one, specific path for a person that is destined for him or will be the right one. If that is what you want you would be better off joining the Catholic Church, where they tell you what. In addition, this method is compatible with the common method of humanity as a whole. But if you want to go your own way, it's the way you make yourself, it's never decided, you don't know in advance, and it just becomes itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will walk safely and confidently with your foot on the path determined by your unconscious. Then naturally it is not at all useful to speculate about how you should live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. If you think you still don't know what this is, you still have a lot of money to spend on idle speculation. But if you confidently do the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and purposeful. Sincerely and best wishes,

Sincerely,

CG Jung

Two months later, in another act of generosity and wisdom, Jung expresses his feelings in a letter to a man who had reached the point of great anxiety and depression, feeling that he was, quite simply, living his life badly. Jung writes:

Hello Herr N.,

No one can fix a mismanaged life with a few words. But there is no hole you can't get out of as long as you put in the right effort in the right place.

If a person is in trouble like you, he has no right to worry about the stupidity of his mind, but he should do the following with diligence and dedication and win the admiration of others. In every little thing you do this way you will find yourself. [Everyone has] doing it the hard way, and always next, the smallest, and the hardest things.

Sincerely,

CG Jung

Complete with a sad, poetic lens on how to live and how to die and Darwin's deathbed meditations on what makes life worth living, then revisit Jung on life and death, his rare BBC interview on human nature, and the story of how he and his unlikely physicist friend Wolfgang Pauli invented the concept of synchronicity.