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Carl Jung: You Can’t Solve Life’s Greatest Problems, You Outgrow Them
Think of life as a reality to experience daily
Life is full of unexpected twists, turns, and curve balls. They can be exciting or painful, joyful or heartbreaking. Challenges are guaranteed. Many of them cannot be solved. You will never conquer them.
So how should you deal with these curve balls? Acknowledge their existence and rise above them.
The idea that problems can be solved is nothing new. People have been trying to solve life’s biggest questions for centuries.
A good or meaningful life is a mindset job. As humans, our limitations are not in our intelligence but in our mindset and perception of experiences. We cannot handle the insoluble issues in life until we acknowledge, redefine or perceive them differently.
Carl Jung, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology, taught that life’s biggest problems are unanswerable.
He once observed, “The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.”
“We don’t so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems,” Jung said.
For most of human history, people believed that the world was inherently unstable and prone to sudden, catastrophic change; there was no way to force these changes in our favour but to sacrifice some of ourselves for the greater good occasionally.
This outlook naturally gave rise to philosophies like Stoicism and Buddhism that taught their followers how to cope with the inevitability of suffering rather than resist it.
There are many ways to look at life experiences and deal with challenging situations. Everything will look different depending on your personal experiences, beliefs, and values. Even so, there is always a way through that wall of despair.
Think of life as a reality to experience
Soren Kierkegaard was right when he said, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
