Who Am I When the Familiar Role Is No Longer Needed

The article is not about the experience of loss but about what the self-image stood on before a role departs: one role or several, merging with the role or performing it. To perform a role is to do the work fully, meeting its demands, while remembering that one is not reducible to it; to be the role is when the recognition given to the position is felt as recognition of oneself, and the successes of the work become the main measure of one's own worth. From the outside the two can look the same; the difference shows on the day the role ends. The article draws on traditional texts and on studies of retirement from work and from professional sport; the data concern only retirement and sport, and the article draws no conclusions about other roles.

Having given away his power and kept the name and honours of a king, Lear, no longer treated as a king in Goneril's house, asks: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (King Lear, I.4); the Fool answers: Lear's shadow. In the reading of the article's authors, the scene shows a self-image that stood on a single role: Lear gave up the work but counted on keeping the recognition the role had brought, and his question is addressed not to himself but to others. Jaques's speech in As You Like It (“one man in his time plays many parts”) gives another image: a role as one of many. Lear is the hero of a tragedy, and his collapse is bound up not only with the role but with decisions, blindness and betrayal; from these passages the article takes two images, not a teaching.

In the Essays (III.10) Montaigne, who held the office of mayor of Bordeaux for some years, writes that a mask and an outward appearance must not be made into real essence, and sees people who cannot distinguish the greetings addressed to themselves from those addressed to their office, their retinue or their mule. This distinction is not contempt for the role: the role is performed in earnest, but its faults and its honours do not become the content of the person. In the reading of the article's authors, this gives a simple test: can I distinguish the attention paid to me from the attention paid to my position? Montaigne writes about an elected office held by a private man who could leave it, and about his own character; this is not a rule for every role, nor data on how people experience a role's departure.

Montaigne's sentence (Essays, Book III, ch. X, tr. Charles Cotton) gathers the article's central distinction: the role is performed in earnest, but the performer is not reducible to it. It does not follow that the role is unimportant. In the reading of the article's authors, it suggests something else: if the distinction was drawn in advance, a role's departure may take the position, not the person. Montaigne himself says nothing in this sentence about leaving office, and this has not been tested on data.

In the Meditations (VI.30, tr. George Long) Marcus Aurelius writes to himself: “Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar, that thou art not dyed with this dye; for such things happen”, and takes as his model not the imperial office but a person, his predecessor Antoninus. In the reading of the article's authors, the warning matters because it is spoken from inside the role: the structure that will show at the exit is formed long before it. Marcus Aurelius never retired and does not describe leaving a role; he describes how to keep oneself inside it, so his words here are about preparation, not about the transition.

This is the strongest objection, and it has powerful allies: Epictetus (Enchiridion, 17) writes that one's business is “to act well the given part, but to choose it belongs to another”, and the Bhagavad Gita in Edwin Arnold's verse rendering (the passage corresponding to verse 2.47) urges acting for the right deed, not for its fruit. In the reading of the article's authors, both traditions do not refute the distinction but refine it: the role is performed wholly, but it does not become the person's property or the support of their self-esteem; the danger lies not in devotion to the role but in making what the role gives (recognition, results, a place in the hierarchy) the support of oneself. In Epictetus the Author of the play is providence; in the Gita the subject is the warrior Arjuna's duty within a particular teaching about action and its fruits; these are different metaphysics, and the article does not reduce them to one formula.

In the reading of the article's authors, the Tao Te Ching, the Analects and the Zhuangzi offer a view of a role's end not as defeat but as part of the form of the work itself. The Tao Te Ching (ch. 9) calls withdrawing into obscurity when the work is done the way of Heaven; Confucius says: “He who is not in any particular office, has nothing to do with plans for the administration of its duties” (Analects, VIII.14); in the Zhuangzi the hermit Hsü Yu declines the throne, explaining that reputation is only the shadow of reality (tr. James Legge and Herbert A. Giles). Confucius's saying does not speak of leaving office directly, and applying it to one who has left is the authors' own reading; Daoist withdrawal, the Confucian ordering of duties and Zhuangzi's sage are different things, and from three passages the article does not judge whole traditions.

The apostle Paul lists his former grounds for confidence and says: “But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ” (Philippians 3:7, King James Version); in the reading of the article's authors, this is not simply a loss of roles but their revaluation, and it leaves no emptiness: later in the same chapter Paul writes that he presses toward the mark (3:13–14). From the Book of Job the article takes only the formula “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither” (Job 1:21), a person before and after all roles, and does not touch the theme of suffering. These are religious texts, a letter of an apostle for whom the new ground is Christ and a book about God and the suffering of a righteous man; they yield no psychological recipe to “give up roles”.

In a cross-sectional survey of 171 retirees in Australia (Steffens and colleagues, 2016; on average 67 years old, about three and a half years into retirement), the more groups important to their sense of self (up to six were named) a person had after retiring, the more satisfied they were with retirement and the better they rated their health and quality of life; the association was statistically mediated by the support a person gave to others, not by the support they received. The models explained 6–9% of the differences; the authors write that the survey cannot establish causality and allow that part of the association may reflect characteristics of the people themselves; the paper's title says that multiple identities enhance health, while the article writes that they are associated with it. In an online survey of 194 former Major League Baseball players (2026), groups with weaker athletic identity rated the importance of athletics among their roles lower, but the importance of family, friendships, religion and romantic relationships did not differ; the survey is cross-sectional and the sample is small. In the reading of the article's authors, both studies are consistent with the idea of several supports for the self-image but do not prove it: these are associations, not results of experiments.

In a Swedish longitudinal study (Hed and colleagues, 2024), depressive symptoms were measured each year on a questionnaire scale, which is not a diagnosis, in 527 people who retired fully in 2016–2019; on average, symptoms decreased around retirement. The more self-esteem before retirement depended on success at work, the higher the depressive symptoms after retirement; the more meaningful the work, the lower the symptoms, and in men this association was stronger. In the reading of the article's authors, the two sides of work resemble “being the role” and “performing the role”, but this is the article authors' analogy, not a finding of the study. The cohort is relatively healthy and educated, the context is Swedish, only those who stopped working entirely were included, and the associations are observational and do not establish causes.

The article considers this formula too simple. In a survey of 158 retirees of one Chinese university aged 55 to 92 (Zhu and colleagues, 2021), who described themselves in five roles on forty traits, the more the descriptions differed across roles, the lower the psychological well-being and the higher the anxiety and depressive symptoms; this is a one-time survey of educated retirees from one university. In three surveys of Polish students and young graduates, Pilarska and Suchańska (2015) found that different ways of measuring the “complexity” of the self-image did not agree with one another, and they consider definite conclusions premature. In the reading of the article's authors, what matters is that there be several supports and that a person remain recognizable to themselves within them, but this is a hypothesis that the data the authors read support only in part; all the data on a role's departure here concern retirement and professional sport.

The article offers the authors' working criteria: list your supports and consider how many will remain when the main one ends; apply Montaigne's test, asking whether you can tell the attention paid to you from the attention paid to your position; separate self-esteem from the meaning of the work; prepare the exit as part of the work and, having left a position, do not meddle in its affairs; not only receive but give support to others. These criteria are drawn from the argument of the article: the steps have not been tested in research, the data show associations, not the effect of advice, and for roles other than retirement and sport they are only reasoning by analogy.

If leaving a role comes with a heavy and lasting distress that gets in the way of living and does not ease, the article says it is worth turning to a psychologist or a doctor; if thoughts of harming yourself appear, seek help at once, and in immediate danger contact the emergency services of your country. This is the authors' general safety caveat: the symptom questionnaires used in the studies are not a diagnosis, a specialist can help assess one's state, and no specific help services are named in the article.