Chronic disease is commonly organized clinically around diagnoses, symptoms, treatments, and measurable outcomes, yet its consequences also unfold through biography, identity, relationships, social recognition, everyday participation, and repeated encounters with healthcare. This article develops a social-life account of chronic disease in which these domains are treated as interacting but analytically distinct processes. The central argument is that long-term illness does not simply impose a stable psychosocial burden. Rather, it repeatedly changes what people can do, how they understand themselves, how responsibilities are distributed across relationships, which aspects of illness become socially recognizable, and what forms of healthcare engagement remain feasible. Adaptation is therefore conceptualized as a changing fit among embodied illness, identity continuity, relational resources, material conditions, and care environments rather than as a final psychological state. The article distinguishes subjective experience from behaviour, relational processes from institutional conditions, and healthcare participation from adherence or clinical outcome. It then develops the Social-Life-of-Chronic-Disease Model and derives bounded comparative and longitudinal predictions for subsequent testing. The proposed theory does not assume universal disruption, linear adaptation, or uniformly beneficial support. Instead, it foregrounds temporal change, reciprocal influence, unequal resources, cultural conditions, diagnostic legitimacy, digital accessibility, and the organizational production of opportunities for engagement.
