Att bli någon annan, eller att äntligen bli sig själv? : En hermeneutisk studie om identitet, vardagsliv och sociala relationer i övergången till pension

Sammanfattning

This study explores how individuals experience and make meaning of the transition from working life to retirement, with particular focus on how identity, everyday routines, and social relations are renegotiated during this life phase. Drawing on a hermeneutic approach and qualitative semi-structured interviews with ten recently retired individuals in a Swedish context, Anthony Giddens' concepts of self-identity, the reflexive life project, ontological security, and disembedding and re-embedding are applied as analytical tools. The findings show that the retirement transition cannot be understood as a bounded event but as an ongoing process of reorientation, in which individuals actively construct new forms of meaning, structure, and social belonging under changed conditions. For several participants, retirement is experienced not as an identity crisis but as a liberation, an opportunity to finally live in accordance with a sense of self that has long existed but been given little room for expression. The study further shows that the freedom retirement offers is not self-generating but requires active effort to avoid disorientation, and that re-embedding in new social contexts occurs through both planned engagement and more organic everyday practices. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research and the theoretical framework, and the study contributes with an experience-near and contextually grounded understanding of the retirement transition in a Swedish context.