Generally, however, retreatism seems to occur in response to acute anomie, involving an abrupt break in the familiar and accepted normative framework and in established social relations, particularly when it appears to individuals subjected to it that the condition will continue indefinitely.  As Durkheim noted with characteristic insight, such disruptions may be found in the ‘anomie of prosperity,’ when Fortune smiles and many experience radical upward shifts from their accustomed status, and not only in the ‘anomie of depression,’ when Fortune frowns and apparently exits for good.  Much the same anomic condition often obtains in those patterned situations which ‘exempt’ individuals from a wide array of role-obligations, as, for example, in the case of ‘retirement’ from the job being imposed upon people without their consent and in the case of widowhood (1968, p. 242).