Retirement, identity and the self beneath the role Retirement is supposed to feel like arrival. You have worked toward it, planned for it, perhaps counted down to it. And then it happens, and something unexpected follows. Not relief, or not only relief. A quieter, more unsettling question begins to form. If you are no longer the job, the role, perhaps…

Retirement changes your relationship with time, with identity, with purpose. What is less often talked about is how comprehensively it changes your relationships with other people. The structures that held your social world in place for decades, the rhythm of work, the colleagues you saw daily, the clarity of roles at home built around competing schedules, quietly dissolve. What remains…