This Roundtable session takes as its focus the processes and vicissitudes in transitioning from being primarily salaried professionals to inhabiting an identity misleadingly designated ‘retired’. Questions of where one might go, metaphorically and literally, and what one might use in the slow process of rebuilding some kind of durable identity will be considered here. Is it the case that we use the same methods and processes – unconscious and otherwise – that we relied on to navigate our previous life-changes (e.g. becoming parents, becoming middle-aged, becoming academics). Alternatively, does life after work require something new? How we grieve and requite past selves and past contexts, and then what happens, are central concerns.

The session will offer a forum in which we can examine post-work life as a psychosocial phenomenon, considering structural contexts and individual experiences. We hope to share reflections on the meaning of work for us, and the particular resonances this creates for renouncing it. There will be space here for reflection on some of the struggles present in forming this ambivalent identity. This stage has death as its endpoint (however distant), which, consequently, involves reorienting to (and/or defending against) this reality as well as that of an ageing body and declining intellectual powers. Increasing exposure to ageism may compound our discomfort, while even seemingly benign notions such as ‘ageing well’ may come to feel like another individual-blaming, socially constructed platitude. More positively, post-work life may be a potential ‘space’, providing an opportunity for creativity and growth. Consequently, the possibilities for reimagining new ways of being in the post work stage, trusting that we can mourn the past and reconnect to life differently, in modes and roles previously unimaginable or indeed longed for, will also form a significant element of the roundtable’s discussion.