Rebirth—Dying with Life

Jung’s last task of aging, “Rebirth — dying with life," is a familiar theme throughout the religious genre, but he was not thinking religion when he framed that task.

There is a welcome levity in Jung’s idea about rebirth that curtails fear of life and death alike. Rebirth in the Jungian sense takes a person into the timeless domains of an artist or a child absorbed in play when living in the time of a delicious moment is all that matters.

Shakespeare poignantly captures this view of rebirth in King Lear’s description of the walled prison of age to his daughter Cordelia in the time of their dying as though it were the time of their living for the first time:

…Come, Let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in , who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by th’moon.

—The Tragedy of King Lear, Act V/Scene 3

So what do these immortal words of Shakespeare and the Jungian seventh task of aging have to do with marketing?
Perhaps the most important take-away is that once our fear of life and death subside to be no more than being an occasional nuisance, the intellectual fraud that is the common fodder of marketing becomes boundlessly less tolerable.

And so it is that as the average age in the consumer universe continues irising, consumer resistance to traditional marketing will only increase unless a wave of professional rebirths takes place in the world of marketing.