When Depth Gets Simplified
An Olderhood Unfolding Essay (Number 3)
What happens when ancient wisdom is reshaped for a modern life
We seem to be living through a renewed hunger for depth.
Jung is everywhere now. His ideas circulate through Instagram posts and Substack essays, his shadow work trending in simplified form, his archetypes reshaped into personality frameworks. Complex engagements with the unconscious are often reduced to familiar refrains about “looking inward” or “doing the work”.
Alongside this sits a growing fascination with ancient life stages, elderhood pathways, rites of passage, and spiritual frameworks borrowed from cultures far removed from our own. The Hindu ashramas, once rigid social prescriptions embedded in caste, patriarchy, and obligation, are re-presented as “four stages of meaningful living”.
The Japanese word ikigai, which in everyday use once meant little more than “reason for being”, is now rendered as a neat Venn diagram promising fulfilment and self-actualisation.
Buddhist practices developed over centuries within monastic communities become mindfulness apps, offering calm and stress reduction in eight weeks.
At first glance, this all looks encouraging. A sign, perhaps, that people are tired of shallow answers and endless productivity narratives. That we’re reaching for something older, wiser, and more grounded to help us make sense of midlife and beyond.
But I’ve found myself increasingly uneasy as I read these pieces.
Not because they’re “wrong”, exactly.
More because something important gets lost in the translation.
When wisdom becomes portable
Depth traditions were never designed to travel lightly.
Jung’s work emerged from a very particular historical and clinical context. He resisted neat summaries and universal formulas, and repeatedly warned about the dangers of simplification. His ideas were meant to be lived with over years, often in analysis, often painfully.
The shadow, for Jung, was not simply “the parts of yourself you repress”. It included personal and collective unconscious material, charged with what he called numinous power, capable of overwhelming consciousness rather than gently integrating into it.
Individuation was not a goal to be achieved through reflection exercises. It was a lifelong process of psychological differentiation, and Jung was never convinced that everyone could, or should, complete it.
His work was steeped in alchemy, Gnosticism, and his own encounters with the unconscious. He wrestled seriously with religious symbolism, the problem of evil, and what he described as the God-image in the psyche.
Psychological development, as he understood it, involved genuine suffering, what he called the “torment of the opposites”.
To extract “shadow work” from this context and present it as simple emotional honesty is not just to simplify Jung’s ideas. It is to change their meaning.
The transcendent function, the synthesis of conscious and unconscious material, does not arise through insight alone. It emerges through prolonged psychological tension, uncertainty, and often destabilisation. Jung was acutely aware of the risks involved, which is why he insisted on the importance of ego strength and containment.
Something similar happens with traditional life-stage models.
The Indian ashramas, so often cited in contemporary writing on ageing, were not personal development frameworks. They were social structures, embedded in religion, economics, gender roles, and obligation.
The four stages: brahmacharya (student), grihastha (householder), vanaprastha (forest-dweller), and sannyasa (renunciate), were prescriptive rather than descriptive. They applied only to upper-caste men. Women had no equivalent pathway; their lives were defined through relationships to fathers, husbands, and sons.
More critically, movement between stages involved real and material loss.
The householder who entered vanaprastha did not “find himself”. He withdrew from authority, from economic productivity, and from centrality within the household.
The sannyasi became socially invisible, owning nothing, stepping outside the caste system entirely, with no claims on family or community.
These transitions were enacted through ritual, witnessed by others, and accompanied by concrete changes in living arrangements and social standing. You could not simply feel like a forest-dweller while continuing to live as a householder.
Yet in modern adaptations, these traditions are often reshaped into:
stages we can move through by insight alone
inner shifts rather than social or material ones
reassuring maps rather than demanding transitions
individual journeys rather than collective arrangements
choices we make rather than obligations we fulfil
What was once slow, situated, and costly becomes tidy, motivational, and oddly frictionless.
Why this appeals to us now
I understand why this happens.
We live in a culture that offers very few shared ways of understanding later life beyond “stay young”, “stay useful”, or “stay busy”.
The dominant narratives tend to oscillate between decline and denial: ageing as loss of relevance, or ageing as something to be overcome through optimism, fitness, and mindset.
Between these poles, there is remarkably little language for what actually unfolds in the second half of life: the psychological reckoning, the spiritual questioning, the confrontation with mortality, the gradual reordering of what matters.
In that absence, older wisdom traditions can feel like lifelines. They offer orientation where there is confusion, and meaning where there is drift. They provide scripts when we no longer have reliable ones of our own.
But the difficulty begins when we treat these traditions as if they were simply waiting for us, ready-made for modern lives, stripped of their original constraints. When we assume that by reading about Jung’s individuation or ancient life stages, we have accessed a form of timeless wisdom that transfers cleanly across cultures, centuries, and social arrangements.
When depth is made too easy, it stops doing the work it was meant to do.
This is where the deeper question begins:
What exactly gets lost when depth is simplified for a modern audience, and why does that matter so much in later life?
What simplification removes
When ancient or psychological frameworks are smoothed into modern self-help language, several essential elements tend to disappear. These aren’t decorative features that can be edited out without consequence. They are structural to how these traditions actually functioned.
Limitation
Older wisdom traditions assumed that not everything was possible, not everything was chosen, and not everything was reversible. They were built on limits: biological, social, economic, spiritual.
The ashrama system assumed constraint as a given. Brahmacharya ended. You could not remain a student indefinitely. Grihastha came with duties that could not be declined: economic provision, ritual responsibility, generational continuity. These were not lifestyle preferences. They were obligations embedded in a moral and cosmic order, dharma, that was not negotiable.
In later life, these assumptions about limitation are no longer theoretical. They arrive in the body, in time, and in the narrowing of what remains possible.
I wanted to provide an extended preview, and, there are almost 2000 words below. It reflects my intention, at this stage of life, to stay with complexity rather than reach for quick resolution.