RETRO FILES / THOUGHTS ON AGING FROM A LONG GONE SHRINK. CHANNELING CARL JUNG.

Every generation believes it invented anxiety about aging. The young fear becoming irrelevant; the middle-aged fear becoming tired; the old fear becoming invisible. Yet the older philosophical tradition — the one that predates self-help aisles and longevity supplements — treats age not as a failure of youth but as its final achievement.  

The essay we almost lost belongs to that earlier lineage. Its author does not promise eternal vitality, nor surrender to decline. Instead he proposes a harder idea: vigor is not energy. Vigor is orientation. A man in his seventies walking slowly toward the horizon may possess more vitality than a thirty-year-old sprinting away from time.  

Carl Jung would have recognized the argument immediately. He believed the first half of life builds the ego, but the second half integrates the person. And integration requires the cooperation of four faculties we spend youth using separately: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.  

Youth trusts sensation. It lives through the body — speed, appetite, attraction, reaction. Everything is immediate and therefore urgent. Later comes thinking, the architecture of careers and plans, the belief that life can be engineered forward like a bridge. Feeling follows more slowly, often painfully, when consequences arrive and relationships outlast ambitions. But intuition — the last and most unsettling faculty — only awakens when time becomes visible. Only when one knows the road is finite does one begin to ask what the road means.  

Modern culture tries to keep us in the first two stages forever: sensation and planning. Stay young, stay productive, stay expanding. Death becomes a medical failure rather than a human certainty. 

But Jung understood that a life lived only outward never becomes whole. The psyche, like a courtroom, eventually calls its missing witnesses.  

The retro philosopher treats death not as an adversary but as the judge’s gavel — the sound that brings testimony into order. Without an ending, experience would not accumulate into wisdom; it would scatter into endless activity. Mortality does not steal meaning from life. It concentrates it.  

This is why aging can feel calmer rather than smaller. Sensation quiets but becomes sharper: a single cup of coffee replaces a night of restless pleasures. Thinking softens into perspective rather than strategy. Feeling deepens because relationships outlive roles. And intuition — long ignored — begins connecting the story backward. Events once random begin to form a pattern, not imposed but discovered.  

The essay rejects the sentimental lie that old age is merely decline. It describes subtraction as revelation. When speed leaves, character becomes audible. When ambition narrows, attention widens. Youth asks what it can still become. Age asks what it has always been.  

There is freedom in accepting the boundary. Once death is no longer treated as a stalking enemy, life stops resembling a siege. Days regain proportion. Conversations lengthen. Urgency shifts from accumulation to presence. You stop trying to outrun time and start accompanying it.  

Jung’s final insight fits perfectly here: the goal of later life is not survival but wholeness. The psyche does not want endless extension; it wants completion. A good old age is not youth preserved but youth understood.  

Death, then, is not defeated. It is acknowledged — and in that acknowledgment loses its terror. The last chapter is written not to avoid the ending, but to justify it.  

Strangely, that may be the most youthful idea of all. 

SUNDAY REVIEW / SHORT STORY: MILLION WAYS TO DIE

SHORT FICTION.

By Thomas Shess.

Morning didn’t arrive. 

It intruded. 

 It came in sideways, with the sound first. A sound that didn’t belong to weather or traffic or anything living. A tearing noise, metallic and wrong, as if the day itself had split a seam and couldn’t be stitched back together. 

 The sky was already awake when people noticed—awake and burning in a way skies aren’t supposed to burn. There is only one way to be born. There are a million ways to die. That morning chose one. 

*** 

The Madrid runway--perhaps it was Orly in Paris or Rio--it didn't matter because it was supposed to be clean. And supposed was the word they used later. So, too: swept. Certified. Signed off in triplicate. Men in reflective vests had walked it at dawn, boots crunching softly, eyes down, looking for the obvious things: bolts, birds, shrapnel from yesterday’s carelessness. They missed a strip of metal no longer than a man’s forearm. Titanium. Tough. Patient. Waiting. It lay there without intent, which is how most disasters begin. 

 The aircraft that dropped it had already gone. Lifted cleanly. Continued its day. Passengers settling into their seats, adjusting belts, thinking about meetings, dinners, hotel rooms. The metal had no passport. No manifest. No reason to be noticed. 

 Then came the other plane. White. Elegant. Too fast for forgiveness. A machine built to outrun time itself, skimming the edge of what metal and fuel would allow. Its wheels were doing what wheels have done since the first man decided to roll instead of walk—bearing weight, trusting the ground. 

 One of its tires hit the strip. 

 At that speed, there is no such thing as impact. There is only transformation. Rubber ceased to be rubber. It became violence. A shock wave tore through the wheel well like a fist through paper. Fragments flew with the precision of shrapnel, obedient to physics and indifferent to prayers. 

 One piece struck the fuel tank. Fuel does not explode the way movies insist. It spills. It atomizes. It looks, briefly, like mist. And mist, when introduced to heat and friction and fate, becomes fire. 

 Someone in the cabin smelled it first. Not fear—fear comes later—but something chemical, sharp, unfamiliar. A smell with no context. A man glanced up from his newspaper. A woman tightened her grip on an armrest she hadn’t noticed holding. The engines were still roaring. The ground was still rushing by. The math was already finished. 

 In the cockpit, they knew. Of course, pilots always know before anyone else. Instruments speak their own language, one learned over years and paid for in nights away from home. The words came in lights and needles and numbers dropping where numbers should not drop. They did what pilots do. They tried. Which is to say, they fought the inevitable with checklists and muscle memory and will. 

 Fire climbed the fuselage. People on the ground would later say it was beautiful in a terrible way. A long arc of flame against the morning sky. A sound that didn’t fade when it should have. A silence afterward that pressed down on the chest. 

 The aircraft never made it out of the neighborhood. It did not disappear into abstraction. It fell among houses, among kitchens and backyards a small hotel and ordinary lives that had not signed up to be part of the story. Four people on the ground would learn that proximity is sometimes enough. 

 Afterward comes the sorting. Investigators arrive with notebooks and calm voices. They kneel. They photograph. They tag. They draw lines backward from the wreckage, following cause the way a hunter follows blood. 

They will say “chain of events.” 

They will say “contributing factors.” 

They will say “runway debris,” because language, like liability, prefers distance. 

 They will eventually find the guilty strip of jet age metal. They will note its composition. Titanium. They will trace it to an aircraft that departed earlier, to a design decision made years before, to a maintenance shortcut signed off with a pen that has long since run dry. 

They will debate whether the metal should have been there, whether anyone could have known, whether the risk was acceptable at the time. Acceptable to whom is never written down. 

 Families will gather in rooms that smell faintly of coffee and disinfectant. Names will be read aloud. 

Lives will be compressed into dates and occupations and the gentle lies of eulogy. 

Someone will say it was fate. Someone else will say it was nobody’s fault. 

Both will be wrong in ways that matter.

 Because this was not an act of God. It was an act of accumulation. A decision here. A cheaper part substituted there. A tolerance widened. A warning softened. A piece of metal freed from its purpose and left to wait. 

 Only one way to be born. 

 A million ways to die. 

 The morning--that morning chose metal over mercy.

The End.

Thomas Shess is the author of gritty noir novel "Cantina Psalms: available on online book outlets and soon to be released [Spring 2026]"Tough Love."