There is a lie we are quietly taught early in life:

That if we try hard enough, live correctly enough, endure patiently enough, life will eventually soften.

Carl Jung knew better.

Life, Jung argued, is not moral. It does not reward virtue. It does not care about fairness. And it does not become gentler simply because you have suffered long enough.

This is not pessimism. It is psychological realism.

And once you truly understand this, something unsettling happens: you stop begging life to be kind—and start asking a far more dangerous question.

What if the real damage isn’t that life is cruel… but that we join it in being cruel to ourselves?