Carl Jung: You Can’t Solve Life’s Greatest Problems, You Outgrow Them

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.

Life offers many challenges along with its delights. When you face stress, temptation, disappointment or conflict in life, the feeling may leave you helpless.

How do you deal with such situations? Do you allow them to consume your peace and happiness, or do you take a stand and move forward?

Carl Jung encourages us to outgrow them. But what does that even mean?

Relationships, career, health, money and personal growth problems can be paralysing under the best circumstances, but what if you put on a different lens? What if you stepped away from the “problem mode” and assumed “growth mode”?

For example, rethink your definition of wealth instead of obsessing about how much you can make to live a good life. Expand your perception of what it means to be rich.

Don’t focus on just how much money you need to thrive; think about the value of peace of mind, freedom of time, and pursuing the creative projects you deeply care about.

“We can’t solve our problems from the level of thinking which created them,” Albert Einstein said.

If you’re feeling stuck, ask yourself: How is this problem outgrowing me? Is there more than one way to look at the situation?

Expand your frame of reference

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” ― Arthur Schopenhauer

The solution to the many life challenges may lie outside our narrow frame of reference. If you have trouble seeing beyond your problems, step ways from them for a moment and rethink.

Learn new ways to improve yourself to handle life’s obstacles better. Focus more on things in your control. And most importantly, learn to separate the unessential from the most essential things in life.

Learning how to accept and appreciate the things you cannot change can help you grow and make wiser decisions in your future.

If a problem persists, try to decide whether it is something you need to learn how to solve or something you need to outgrow.

Once you have decided what to work on, it is time to start working towards your goal. The only way you will ever overcome a problem is by being willing to change yourself.

Maybe you don’t like your current situation, but if you keep trying new things and making small changes, eventually, things will improve.

If you can find a way to outgrow your problems before they become an issue for you, you can prevent or minimise many issues in the future. You can save your sanity in the process.

This may mean changing plans, finding another way to do something or even just leaving the situation altogether. “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change,” argues Wayne W. Dyer.

All experiences are subject to interpretation

Seneca said, “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”

Every day presents us with new opportunities to see things in a different light or look at life through a different lens.

So start confronting your biggest problems related to money, relationship, career, health, purpose, and growth. For every area, think of expanding your perception or exploring growth opportunities.

Or better still, how can you redefine yourself to rise above them? Instead of thinking of your personal challenges as stumbling blocks to a good life, think of them as opportunities to become a better version of yourself.

It’s easy to get caught up in the tiny and sometimes unnecessary details of life, but if we genuinely want to live meaningful lives or improve the world around us, then it’s time we step back and look at things from a higher perspective.

Life is an experience. It’s not about solving the many problems we will continue to face for the rest of our lives. It’s about embracing the opportunity to grow and reframing our perceptions of difficult experiences.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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