Michael Bury's concept of biographical disruption — the way chronic illness interrupts the taken-for-granted assumptions and behaviours of everyday life — is one of the most productive concepts in medical sociology. Living Value Theory extends it in a specific direction.
What chronic illness disrupts is not merely biography in the narrative sense, but the value trajectory that gives a biography its shape. A value trajectory is the implicit path along which a person expects their life's value to accumulate: career, relationships, projects, reputation. Chronic illness does not merely interrupt this trajectory; it forces a fundamental renegotiation of what counts as a valuable life.