Carl Jung: The Mindset That Brings You Back to Life

Carl Jung explains why you stopped feeling anything, and how to reverse it. This is not about depression and it is not about laziness. Carl Jung described a state he called the provisional life: a rehearsal that never ends, where you perform competence instead of living. In this essay we take apart three mechanisms — the overcorrection Jung described through the Greek idea of enantiodromia, the persona that costs you the energy you would need to want anything, and the shadow, the locked room that holds not only what is ugly but the appetite and edge you buried to be acceptable. Carl Jung insisted that what irritates you in other people is a measurement of yourself. If your life works on paper and tastes like nothing, this is the structure behind it, named without comfort.