The title, "Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life" promises some hope but the book does not deliver. This book contains very few good insights, is hard to understand, full of psycho-bable, and technical jargon, and implies that everone needs a therapist just to get through life. It is a wast of time for the most readers.

This book was a big disappointment. Rather than providing insight, information, or inspiration about how people have come to find meaning in the second half of life, this book is one long harangue about the illusions and problems people have. There are many invocations of fancy metaphors (Greek tragedy, psychological lingo), but they serve more to show what a fancy education the writer has than to offer meaningful inspiration or guidance to the reader. The author goes on and on about how people ruin their lives and fool themselves, but never seems to get around to describing how to break out of these illusions and lead an authentic or meaningful life, besides "abandoning illusions". Of course everyone's path is unique, and so a pure "how to" approach won't work to untangle each person's uniquely tangled web, but providing concrete examples of successes, not just problems from his supposedly successful decades of work as a therapist would provide hope and some sort of guidance for those of us who realize we've reached a dead end and need to do something about it. That is what I was expecting from the title - this book definitely has not delivered.