Misquoting Jung, Telling the Truth

TikTok, borrowed authority, and the sound of a society in pain

By Cliff Potts, Editor-in-Chief, WPS News

A short video circulating on TikTok, posted by @magnusim3, frames a generational experience—roughly those born between the late 1950s and late 1970s—as a cohort trained to endure, adapt, and survive, only to be discarded by the systems they kept running. The video attributes its claims to Carl Gustav Jung. That attribution is wrong. Jung did not say these things, nor did he frame history or psychology in this way.

But dismissing the video on that basis alone would miss the point.

What matters here is not the accuracy of the citation, but the accuracy of the pain.

Jung, a deeply metaphysical thinker, wrote about alienation, loss of meaning, and the psychic toll of modernity. He did not analyze late-capitalist labor markets, corporate disposability, or generational economic betrayal. Those are contemporary realities. The video borrows Jung’s name not to engage his work, but to borrow his authority—a signal that what follows is meant to be read as something deeper than a rant, something closer to diagnosis.

That borrowing tells us something important about the moment we’re in.

When people feel that the social contract has collapsed—when work no longer leads to security, when adaptability is rewarded with exhaustion, and when resilience becomes a trap rather than a virtue—they reach for frameworks that promise meaning. Jung’s language of shadow, individuation, and psychic strain becomes a vessel into which modern anxieties are poured. The result is not scholarship. It is symptom.

TikTok, as a medium, accelerates this process. It compresses grief into aphorism, theory into vibe, and analysis into declaration. What @magnusim3 produced is not a Jungian argument; it is a cultural artifact. It captures a widely shared feeling: that many people were trained to survive instability, only to discover that survival itself is no longer valued once it ceases to be profitable.

Calling this “post-capitalism” may be premature. What is unmistakable, however, is systemic exhaustion. Institutions continue to function, but meaning has drained out of them. Skills are extracted, loyalty is unrewarded, and adaptability is treated as an endlessly renewable resource—until it isn’t.

The misquotation of Jung fits this landscape perfectly. In moments of structural breakdown, people often misattribute ideas to past thinkers not out of ignorance, but out of need. They are trying to anchor their experience to something that sounds enduring, authoritative, and explanatory. The mistake is factual. The impulse is human.

So no, this is not Jung. But it is something just as revealing: a snapshot of collective distress, rendered in the language available to it. To understand what is happening around us, we would do well to correct the record without dismissing the message. The citation is wrong. The suffering is real.

And TikTok—messy, unsourced, emotionally raw—has become one of the places where that suffering is now being spoken aloud.

---

magnusim3. (n.d.). If you were born between 1957 and 1977 [Video]. TikTok.