Introduction

One of the groups which was most affected by the 2008 crisis in Spain is young people (Alonso et al. 2017). Before the crisis, it had already been noted how young people’s transition to adult life had become difficult due to the growth of risks in society and awareness of them (Furlong and Cartmel 1997). However, although the difficulties they experience in emancipation and the precarious situation of this segment of the population in the Spanish labour market predate the crisis and are intrinsic to the era of flexibility (Santos 2003), it is undeniable that the consequences of the crisis and of the resulting austerity policies aggravated the situation.

In the studies on transition to adult life, there have been arguments about the extension of the phase of life corresponding to youth (Wyn 2009). In fact, there is growing use of a discourse that refers to late youth or youths, linked to the term “young adults”. The interpretations that connect this fact most directly to vulnerability or precarity highlight the extension of youth as leading to the increasing precarity of adult individuals (Carbajo 2014).

This research was carried out between the years 2018 and 2019, that is, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and after a decade of economic crisis in which the work experience of young Spanish people was characterised by instability, temporariness, low wages, and the deterioration of labour rights (Artegui 2017; Strecker et al. 2021). Although the situation had improved compared to the toughest years of the crisis in Spain (2012 and 2013), unemployment rates were still high: 18.9% among young people aged 25 to 29, and 13.9% for those in the 30 to 35 age group.Footnote 1 Social discontent had crystallised at the beginning of the decade in the 15 M Indignados movement, which achieved a high degree of consensus among the population and played a very relevant role in Spanish political arena in the following years (Sampedro and Lobera 2014).

A number of authors have pointed out that the processes of increased precarity include processes of subjectification. In other words, the specific organisation of work that creates precarity also constructs specific subjectivities associated with it (Armano and Murgia 2017; López Calle 2018). However, the subjective processes related to precarity have been studied less than its material dimensions (Worth 2016).

In this work, we deal with these subjective aspects of the experience of precarity, in a segment of the population that is strongly affected by the processes of labour market deregulation. However, we are not interested so much in analysing subjectivity in the area of employment, as in the life worlds making up the life of young people, which are marked by uncertainty. We will therefore examine the interpretations that young adults in a situation of precarity make of their own lives and themselves. To do so, we will analyse their discourses on their biographical projects and on the reasons for their unease, as well as the reinterpretations they make of their own circumstances to deal with them. To avoid a uniform vision of the “youth” category, we deal with the discourses of young people with different class backgrounds.

Youth, Precarity, and Subjectivity

In his influential work on “emerging adulthood”, Arnett (2000) describes a new life stage between adolescence and adulthood that implies a prolongation of the youth phase caused by a series of social changes that have affected industrial societies. The concept of emerging adulthood has been criticised because, by referring to a developmental phase, it tends to homogenise the experience of young people and to underestimate structural elements that influence their biographies (Bynner 2005). Among these structural elements, of particular relevance in the Spanish context is the precarity that has affected young people before and, more deeply, after the 2008 crisis (Urraco 2017).

In recent years, a great deal has been written about precarity, particularly in relation to how young people experience life. In fact, the growth of uncertainty inherent to the flexible society has made it necessary to rethink even the sociological category of “transition to adult life” (Furlong, Wing and Woodman 2011), due to the biographical destandardisation that characterises youth realities at the present time (Leccardi 2017). The transitions to adulthood for precarious youth are not linear processes but are characterised by their discontinuity (Urraco 2017) and their reversibility (Mitchell 2017; Du Bois and López Blasco 2003).

Wyn and Woodman (2006) argue that the very notion of transition to adult life should be abandoned, as it is a normative concept that describes the reality of young people at a specific moment in history (prior to the neoliberal shift that began in the 1970s) that cannot be applied to today’s reality. These authors propose, instead, the use of the concept of generation, as it enables a better understanding of the social, political, and economic contexts that frame the trajectories of young people. In this study, we will be interested in analysing whether the idea of transition to adulthood is present in the subjectivity of young people with precarious trajectories.

Precarity has a very clear objective dimension related to the processes of deteriorating employment and increased job insecurity (Castel 2002), and it affects not only relations with others, but also with oneself and one’s future. This more existential dimension of precarity is exacerbated due to the processes of social individualisation, which demand private management of social contradictions (Laval and Dardot 2013). Among these social tensions, it is increased instability and uncertainty with respect to the future that is perhaps the most outstanding characteristic of precarity in contemporary society, in which insecurity has become the norm (Lorey 2015). It is therefore to be expected that the experience of precarity affects plans and projects for the future (Bone 2019). In this respect, it has been noted that at the subjective level, one of the forms of dissipating precarity as experienced in life is making the future disappear, so that long-term plans are replaced by more immediate and episodic projects (Worth 2018).

A number of studies have dealt with the subjective aspects of precarious employment. Armano and Murgia (2017) analyse the different devices that are deployed in the subjectivity of freelancers and project workers and point to the identification with the job that may generate processes of interweaving between life and work. Along similar lines, Morini et al. (2014) analyse cognitive work in the sectors of journalism and publishing, identifying the willingness of workers to become involved emotionally, but also processes of distancing from work due to the loss of autonomy. Farrugia et al. (2018) study how youth subjectivities arise through work, so that different labour experiences shape different youth experiences.

Other works have pointed to some of the effects of labour precarity in other aspects of subjectivity, beyond the scope of labour. In this respect, Furlong et al. (2018) have noted the normalisation of insecurities as one of the consequences of the interiorisation of precarity. Among precarious young Spanish people, Valls (2015) finds elements of subjective work used as a relief with respect to the situation itself, as the relativisation of precarity or the positivisation of it. Elsewhere, Worth (2016; 2018) also discusses some of these mechanisms of coping with precarity at a subjective level which, paradoxically, could be interpreted as a kind of interiorisation of neoliberal discourses.

In this work, we aim to examine in depth the subjective dimension of the experience of precarity; in other words, how labour precarity affects the lives of young people beyond the strictly labour sphere, with respect to the interpretation of their own situation and themselves. We will focus on the experience of Spanish young adults strongly affected by the 2008 crisis, a segment of the population which has in general not known a non-precarious phase in its employment history.

Methods

This work is based on qualitative research carried out within the framework of a research project which analyses different forms of social and existential vulnerability in Spain and the supports and care used to address them.

In this article, we will focus on young people in a situation of precarity. To set a limit to precarious youth, we made use of the work of Standing (2011) and the three factors considered by this author: low wages, unstable employment, and limited institutional protection. The young people selected have income of less than 1000 euros per month, are in a situation of labour instability (with frequent job changes, entering and leaving the labour market within the last year and contracts lasting no more than one year), and without social insurance protection (or if they have protection, their total monthly income does not exceed the above amount).

Three focus groups were created and fourteen interviews were held with young people who meet these conditions and who are between 25 and 35 years old. The people in this age group began their employment lives in the period marked by the economic crisis and the subsequent austerity policies. Focus groups enable us to capture the crystallised discourses activated by different social groups, in this case, precarious young people. Interviews, on the other hand, grant access to the lived experiences of these young individuals and the subjective meaning they themselves attribute to these experiences. Moreover, interviews allow access to the self-conceptions that the young people activate (Alonso 1998). The combination of both techniques enables access to the subjective dimension of experiences, framed within social discourses with varying degrees of consensus. To recruit the participants, initially the informal networks of the research project members were activated. Subsequently, in the case of interviews, the snowball sampling method was employed. The topics covered both in the interviews and in the focus groups revolved around several axes: daily life, work trajectories, emotions associated with these trajectories, representations of the crisis, sources of security and insecurity, and activated supports.

As has been noted, precarity affects groups that were once privileged and extends to different social backgrounds. However, it does not affect all these strata equally (Lorey 2012). That is why in selecting our participants, we have taken into account gender, original social class, the level of education, and geographical scope. Our participants are young men and women who have been divided into three groups according to their class of origin and educational level. To determine the social class of origin, we have taken into account the income of the original family nucleus and the parents’ jobs.

The field work has been carried out in three Spanish regions with different sociodemographic structures. One of them, Madrid, is the country’s capital and the region with the highest GDP per capita, but with significant income inequalities among social groups and geographical areas. A focus group was carried out in this region made up of men and women from middle- and upper-class families with a university education. The participants included children of parents with jobs in the liberal professions and the world of art and culture, with prestige and economic stability (doctors, lawyers, judges, university professors, writers, etc.). The Basque Country, also among the richest regions in Spain, is among the territories with the highest levels of social protection. A focus group was carried out in the region made up of women from lower-class families with only secondary or vocational education. The aim in this case was to record vulnerability in a context of greater wellbeing, where the comparative harm may be greater. Finally, Andalusia is among the regions with the lowest GDP per capita and the highest rate of unemployment. In this region, the education levels of the general population are lower; hence, the group included young people with university studies but from families without higher education. Both in this case and the previous one, the participants are children of industrial workers and workers in the service sector, generally stable, although with modest incomes. Furthermore, in these same regions, 14 interviews were conducted with participants from outside of the focus groups, but with similar profiles. The fieldwork was carried out between 2018 and 2019.

We will carry out a socio-hermeneutic analysis, in other words an analysis that takes into account the representation, significance, and understanding of the discourses linked to the social and historical context where they are expressed (Alonso et al. 2017: 161). Discourses are understood here not as a simply an enunciation of representations and practices, but as practices in themselves (Fairclough and Wodak 1997) which involve certain negotiation of the actual identity in the conversational situation (Wodak 2014). The interpretations made by young people of their own circumstances bring into play their own subjectivity, making use of the cultural repertoires (Swidler 2001) available and combining them creatively to give sense and explain to themselves their trajectories and experiences.

The Impossibility of Recognising Themselves as Adults

One of the most obvious points of agreement we have found in the discourses of young adults in situations of precarity when speaking about their own situations is the inability to make plans for the future. The prolonged periods of temporary employment and precarity place our participants in a situation that we could call “stabilisation in instability”, as most of the young people are in a situation of labour uncertainty characterised by the lack of job security and bad working conditions, which they see no way of overcoming in the short or medium term. This leads to a break in their ability to generate their own and autonomous plans for life.

A project is an outlook on the future, but based on the present, on which it is founded. In the case of young precarious adults, the break with the biographical projects is in fact based on unease about their own situation in the present. In fact, among our participants, there is a strong feeling of inadequacy with the present itself. Young people are aware of the normative expectations associated socially with each stage of life. Their incapacity to comply with them places them in a situation of vulnerability:

My depressions and my downs had more to do with the pressure of: you’re 26, 28 or 29 years old and you're in a place you shouldn’t be. This pressure from outside you, of your being at a stage that you should already have overcome. (Madrid)

For young people, the feeling of inadequacy with the present biographical movement implies not being able to feel like real adults. As has also been pointed out by other authors (Pitti 2017), a key component of being recognised (by others, and by themselves) as adults is related to economic independence. A significant proportion of young people strongly affected by the crisis are in situations of intermittent dependence/independence. They may need some financial assistance from their parents for specific or occasional periods, due to the intermittent or temporary nature of their work. In other words, they are not completely dependent, but they are also not completely independent. Not being able to fend for themselves leads to a feeling of lack and dispossession covering a variety of dimensions, which is encompassed in the feeling of “not having anything”.

You are at the age you are and you don’t have stability, you don’t have your own flat, you don’t have children, you don’t have... but time is passing you by; so it’s like, like time is passing and I’m barely starting to become independent (Basque Country).

Despite being of an age that places them biographically in the category of “adults”, they are materially and subjectively in a situation in which they do not feel a complete discontinuity with their childhood. This leads to feelings of fear and shame, which are reflected in their discourses, such as the following fragment, in which a room in their parents’ house represents the symbolic space of childhood, thereby losing the attributes of an adult person:

That’s what my fear is, in my case, it’s not having my life, right? Having to rely on my room, my... from when I was little, my bed, right, in my parents’ house, not having, shit, money to have my own life, you know? (Basque Country).

Although the emphasis with respect to uncertainty is located (for both young women and men) in the area of employment, it is important to note as well in the case of young women the important role of and malaise generated by the delay in maternity as a result of this situation of prolonged precarity. For many young women, the idea of a fully adult person that we have mentioned above also includes maternity. In fact, the impossibility of having children when wanting to accentuates in many young women the features we have been referring to that characterise the break of the biographical project: the inadequacy of the present and the feeling of not living how they should be according to their age. Both issues can be heightened by the painful ideas associated with the real possibility of not having children due to the contrast between biographical and biological rhythms.

Getting on with our partner? Will I be able to be a mother? (…) How am I going to have children? I can’t even buy myself a packet of crisps, how am I going to have children? (Basque Country).

The comparisons made by these young people who have difficulty in considering themselves as full adults between their own situation and that of the adults they see as a reference makes clear their nostalgia for a past in which it was considered that individual biographical projects were possible, even for those groups with financial problems.

I’d like to have the stability to say... I have a stable contract, I don’t have this anxiety about whether they’re going to call me, or they’re not going to call me (...) because you like to have... the stability that people had once when they told you: I've already found my position... I've found my position means I’m going to retire here, right? That, unfortunately no longer exists, everything’s changed a lot (Madrid)

In the discussions comparing themselves with previous generations, there is a strong desire for stability; instability and uncertainty are seen as the most pronounced malaise. Young people are aware that their great difficulties in terms of stability, and thus in terms of creating a project and constructing an autonomous adult life, are related to a general social change, which implies a strong contrast between past and present generations, although their discourses about this social change are not particularly elaborate or articulate.

Spoiled Generation or Mistreated Generation? Explanations by the Young People of Their Subjective Malaise

Our participants have developed different interpretations that attempt to explain the reasons for the malaise experienced in their situation: it is not so much a case of explanations on the causes of their objective conditions as a subjective malaise they have to deal with in their life of precarity.

With respect to this, an initial positioning which appears among young people with a university education from middle- and upper-class families tends to place some responsibility on the young people themselves. It is a case of the discourse, to use their own terminology, of the “spoiled generation”. According to this interpretation, the source of this malaise is not to be found in structural factors related to the labour market, but to some elements of the subjectivity of a generation, and in particular the segments of this generation who grew in context of material welfare and at a time of economic growth in the country. The following fragment illustrates this discourse particularly well:

What frustrates me a little is that I have the feeling I’m not doing that badly, it’s simply that I’ve been educated for something else: we were the kings of the world, we were the spoilt kids of the 1980s. So I think about my life when I get depressed and I go to my mother’s house and say: “Mum, I’m not going to get anywhere.” And she says: “But let’s see, you can pay your way, you do what you like, don’t be silly.” You have aspirations and say: “I’m not going to get anywhere.” And that’s not because we were the spoilt kids of the 1980s, I’m quite clear about that. (Madrid)

According to this discourse, the material conditions faced by young people cannot be considered so negative. The problem, the malaise, would rather be a case of excessive expectations created by the fact that they had grown up during a boom period. It is a discourse that in some way triggers self-blame and deactivates political criticism, as stable jobs and decent wages appear as an exception rather than as a right. This exceptional character of favourable material conditions clashes with the excessive aspirations that were previously taken for granted, which a segment of young people attributes to themselves.

Within this discourse on the “spoilt generation”, we also find allusions to vocation. As we said, this interpretation is found among young people from the middle classes, who have been to university and for whom these studies had an expressive content that was equally or more important than the instrumental content. The instrumental dimension of these studies was in fact to a certain extent taken as given. In the crisis situation they have had to face, this vocation forms part of what they consider excessive aspirations, and thus live with a certain degree of culpability. In some way, it becomes considered a privilege of class which they had for a time, but which is now disappearing:

It’s also that we are the generation they told could do whatever they wanted

(…)

They get you out of the house quickly so that you don’t live in a protective bubble; this protective bubble at the end of the day generates expectations and you believe that you will reach Jupiter, and then when you don’t reach Jupiter you begin to strike out blindly to one side and another, and as we also don’t have tools to manage this frustration, well there are people... I had to go to therapy, I’ve been a number of times

(…)

We had to say that marvellous phrase: “Well... I don’t know, maybe our life isn’t stable.

.” And now I hate this (Madrid).

As we see reflected in the above fragments, the emotions associated with these constructions of feelings about precarity are blame, frustration, and melancholy, emotions that have to do with this experience and interpretation of the difficulties that place individuals and their subjectivity at the core of the explanation.

Together with this discourse on the “spoilt generation”, there is the contrary one on the “mistreated generation”. This interpretation is not specific to university-educated young people from middle- and upper-class backgrounds; we also find it cuts across different social groups. In this case, the reasons for the malaise are clearly rooted in external and structural factors: the generation of young people who have had to face the crisis of 2008 is a generation that has been forced into infantilisation, unable to construct their own lives and access the milestones that mark the transition into adult life:

I have a teacher in my degree course who recommended me for a job. It’s an internship of 40 hours for €700. I say, it’s not a job for adults, I can’t live an adult life with that, I can’t decide to do things. It’s as if we were being infantilised into a state in which they can say: “No, we’ve decided that the interns in this company should have holidays.” Ah, so interns don’t have holidays? It’s a little like that feeling that there’s no way of growing. (Madrid)

Unlike the previous discourse, according to this interpretation, the problem of young people is not excessive expectations, but rather the contrary: the excessive and permanent precarity forces young people to normalise their situation in order to live with it. The emotion that stands out in this case is not so much blame or sadness, but anger and irritation, as the causes of the malaise are not the subjectivity itself, but an unfair social situation and in a labour market that mistreats young people.

P6. Spoilt is not really the word.

P1. Quite the reverse, I believe I am happy with less than I should be with.

P2. Really.

P7. It obliges you to make a change in your mental structure. Suddenly you see that your parents still have to help you whenever you have a worse-paid job again, or when you are self-employed, a “false self-employed”, or things like that. At one moment you’re independent and at another moment you’re not. Well, linked to what you asked before about anger and all that, I was extremely angry with life, very frustrated and very angry. As I said, I felt like burning ATMs, saying: “To hell with the system.” (Madrid)

Unlike the previous one, this discourse leaves more room for political criticism. However, the criticism is not particularly developed or organised. Rather, it’s a diffuse social criticism, according to which society is getting worse rather than better:

And I blame politics most, right? Because they are the first who should do something, so... because of the politicians we have and continue to have... they don’t do anything for us and... and of course, they also help the big companies to do that, continue doing it, they even make the situation worse, so it’s a frustration that is created in you... (Andalusia)

The common elements of this social discourse are reflected in the above fragment and revolve around the feeling of injustice, worsening job conditions and a general and not too precise criticism of political and economic sectors.

Positive Reinterpretations as a Subjective Support Against Precarity

Among the discourses that young people activate to give sense to their situation of precarity, there are some positive reinterpretations of this situation that are triggered as a subjective support to deal with the difficulties. Within these discourses, which are a positive way of looking at the situation, we observe differences related to educational level and social background.

The first of these reinterpretations once more brings vocation into play. We have seen that among young people with university education from middle-upper class backgrounds, vocation is experienced with a degree of culpability. However, it continues to act as a form of support to cope with adversity, to the extent that it is handled as an element that gives a positive sense to the situation itself. Vocation is invoked in these positive reinterpretations in at least two different ways. First, as a form of subjective mitigation of the most negative aspects of labour exploitation. In the face of some extremely precarious labour conditions, vocation (or at least the most expressive aspects of the job) acts as a symbolic buffer. In fact, there are situations of exploitation or self-exploitation among young people with a university education who experience them with joy, due to the affective bond with their own profession. This joy clashes with the alienation experienced in other jobs, which may have better labour conditions, but nowhere near the same identification with the job:

P1 [Precarity] helps you define yourself because you discover intolerance to things; I have an intolerance to souvenir shops (laughter), to providing customer service... Yes, and it makes you a little more radical in your... For example, I am now very happy, I believe I am in the best employment period of my life, but I work more hours than ever in my life and I don’t earn that much, but I work in something I like.

P8: I also exploit myself a lot.

P1: Of course, I earned more and worked fewer hours but I became completely lobotomised, shifting money from one place to another, taking money and giving change. Crazy. (Madrid)

The second way in which vocation is invoked in these constructions of meaning by young university-educated people is by way of a symbolic distinction. If some of the people in the person’s own environment have labour conditions and income that allow them to access goods and services that the situation itself makes difficult to acquire, vocation once more acts as a symbolic element that not only attenuates or qualifies the malaise with respect to these material inequalities, but allows a certain claim in favour of the person’s own choices and employment history:

I have a twin brother who is in... customs; he’s a civil servant, he has his own car, his own house, his own whatever; and I have a lot of military friends and [...] they all have a regular income and so on. My philosophy is different. I consider myself fortunate because the large or small amount of money (…)I earn doing what I really like, and my philosophy is that I have to save because I don’t know when it will come. (Andalusia).

To give a positive sense to their own situation, as well as their vocation, young people make use of a reinterpretation of their way of life. There is a characteristic turn in the elements that we could consider “conditions of life” towards the story on the “lifestyle”. The frequent comparison with past generations is significant; complaining about the loss of stability and the impossibility of constructing one’s own biographical project is the most significant problem facing this generation. But at the same time, in this comparison with past generations, the same young people propose a different discursive construction, which highlights experiences as opposed stability. In this reinterpretation of biography, the value before granted to stability is qualified to claim a lifestyle considered more attractive than that of past generations:

Well, many would say: that’s the automatic in life, you know what I mean, it’s the automatic and I think that having to work to live... I mean, I have my work, but apart from that I have plenty of experiences, you know, in life and, and... if we compare my parents, my grandparents and me, my range of experiences is much broader, you know what I mean, I’m sure that I’m a worse butcher than you, but my range is much broader, there’s that as well... (Andalusia).

Compared with the security of the Fordist society, which appears as a yearning at other points of the discourse, other repertoires of a rather neoliberal tendency are at play here, in which a certain “liquidity”, “flexibility”, and diversification of life experiences are called on.

In these reinterpretations on their own situation, precarity may become “creative”. Changing your job frequently, living with little, not having high expectations in terms of income and resources but dedicating yourself to something that you are interested in and that forms part of your identity, become a way of understanding a lifestyle. In this discursive construction, uncertainty and low income do not appear so much the result of structural factors as a life choice:

So, I believe we have an option of generating a new way of life which, perhaps in the eyes of our parents’ generation, is a struggle, but for us it is living. And then I feel that what is to come is new, and does not have to be bad (Madrid).

It is important to note that these positive re-readings of their own situation of precarity appear in the discourses of young people with a university education, although they may come from a middle- or lower-class family background, while among the young people with a lower-class background who have a secondary education, there is no sign of these interpretations. This does not mean that they do not in turn construct other positive stories to support their situation, but these are not so much based on creativity or flexibility of the lifestyle, but rather on austerity and the capacity to live with what they have. So there appears to be a component which is more of resignation rather than making claims on certain symbolic aspects of work and type of life. The following fragment illustrates this contrast:

So, I don’t need much wealth to know how to survive, and I believe that that this, well, bad experience I have had, is something I can feel proud of. (Basque Country)

This contrast in the discourses of young people with different class backgrounds is not a coincidence, as a large part of the discourses we have analysed on vocation and creativity in the way of life form part of the emotional attachment to work and the dynamics that put life at the service of work (Morini and Fumagalli 2010). They frequently occur in creative or intellectual jobs, where the creation of value is particularly linked to immaterial and symbolic aspects and are typical in sectors where cultural capital is required in its institutional form (university degrees).

Discussion

In this work, we have examined different subjective aspects in experiences of precarity among the segment of young adults in Spain, a population group that is particularly affected by the economic crisis which began in 2008. Among these dimensions, of particular importance in the discourse of our participants is their relation with the future, in other words, their own biographical projects, which are closely associated with the achievement of the status of adult.

Before the crisis, some authors had already argued about Spanish youth in the era of flexibility as “youth in a stationary state” (Santos 2003), noting a stage that prevents strategic acts that configure a project, and even leading to a “disappearance of the future”. The 2008 crisis and the austerity policies that followed extended the uncertainties, and also exacerbated this difficulty in generating prospects for life in the medium and long term (Alonso et al. 2017). As a result of this, young adults in a situation of precarity are forced to live in what has been called a “continuous present” (Bone 2019), without the ability to project their own lives as adult individuals. This situation has also been noted in other Southern European countries such as Greece and Italy (Figgou et al. 2021) or Portugal (Ferreira 2018).

Reaching the “status” of adult implies processes of negotiation and recognition as such (Pitti 2017) both socially and as oneself. In this socioeconomic context, precarious young people in Spain have difficulties in recognising themselves and being recognised as autonomous people, as capable workers, as socially valuable citizens. They feel a strong inadequacy with respect to the biographical phase that is standardly associated with their age and encounter many difficulties in projecting the achievement of the milestones (job, home, family) that are linked to the traditional sociological category of “transition to adult life”. Despite the individualisation of their life course and thus of the diversification of the transitions between youth and adulthood (Allan and Crow 2001), the traditional vision of transition to adult life with its implicit linearity and coherence appears to be strongly present in the subjective feelings of young people. In the case of women, we have to add what has been called the “motherload” (Villalobos 2014), meaning the doubts and uncertainties about whether, when and how they can form a family (Leccardi 2012), which is significantly more present for them, thus extending the uncertainty and the feeling of inadequacy we have described.

The internalisation of these ideas about the transition to adulthood and the discomfort generated by instability appear transversally in all the groups analysed. Other elements of the young people’s discourses, however, present certain nuances and differences among them, which, as we have argued, respond to social class and not to other factors that could be considered, such as territorial ones.

One of these elements is self-culpability. The self-criticism that normally accompanies the feeling of lack and dispossession has been noted in previous works (Bone 2019). In the Spanish context, it has been shown how the feeling of blame associated with the rhetoric of austerity, which points to individuals as responsible for “having lived beyond their means” (Alonso et al. 2011) forms part of the processes of subjectivation of precarious youth (López Calle 2018). In our work, we have noted a particular form of self-culpabilisation, which occurs between young people from families of middle-upper social classes, who interiorise a widely extended discourse on young generations as generations who have had everything easier and reinterpret their vocations and their desires to develop them as excessive aspirations. But these processes of subjectivation in precarity also find resistance among young people. In fact, as against this discursive position, we have seen another that cuts across backgrounds of social class and educational levels, which resists this psychologisation of the conflict, and which is capable of pointing to the structural causes of the situation and to the mistreatment suffered by young people in the labour market.

In this work, we have also argued that young people deploy a variety of discourses that become subjective supports: they are positive reworkings of their situation that help them support the circumstances of extreme precarity. We have seen how vocations and the emotional attachment to one’s profession can help mitigate (symbolically, at least) bad working conditions, making them more bearable. Particularly for students with a university education, doing a merely “breadwinning” job that does not coincide at all with their own interests results in a greater “degradation” than precarious labour conditions. In this context, working in something that fits one’s job identity becomes a way of highlighting one’s own relationship with the job, even though this job may be extremely precarious. However, this form of support is somewhat ambivalent. This mechanism has in fact been identified in the literature as a “passion trap” (Armano and Murgia. 2017): an identification with the job may lead to processes of self-exploitation that are not identified as such. In fact, in the area of what has been called the “political economy of promise” (Bascetta 2015), working for free or nearly for free does not only respond to an intended “investment” in the future (the hope of a contract, or an improvement in working conditions), but also a need for an identity by belonging to a symbolically valued professional sector.

Another way of the young Spanish adults reinterpreting positively their situation is to appeal to a form of life that is more flexible, more creative, and less rigid than in the past. As we have argued, in these discourses, the conditions of life are subsumed or confused with rhetoric on lifestyle. Previous works have found discourses that can be interpreted as neo-liberal among young women in precarious situations, but which in fact respond to an attempt to negate their own precarious position (Worth 2016). In addition, it has been pointed out how neoliberalism and therapeutic culture combine in the “imperative of positivity” in relation to youth (Brunila et al. 2021).

Here, we argue that these discourses respond to a type of subjective pre-reflexive work, particularly in the case of young people with a university education. However, these discourses coexist with others (which appear both among these same young people with a university education and the rest) which particularly value the security of the Fordist society. In fact, stable employment that allows the construction of an autonomous biographical project cuts across our participants as their strongest desire. Previous research, such as that of Mrozowicki and Trappmann (2020) divides young precarious workers between those who emphasise the biographical importance of a stable job and those who assume to a large extent the positive aspects of flexibility. In our study, however, we found components of both discourses in a large part of our (middle-class) participants.

There is no need to find the “true” version of the discourse in this apparent contradiction, but rather it manifests the expectations and legitimacies in conflict (Martín Criado 2014) between a desire for stability that allows full independence, on the one hand, and on the other a lifestyle that has been assumed and claimed, in which a certain “flexibility” is welcome. In other words, it demonstrates the coexistence of repertoires of sense that are more appropriate to Fordist society and other more post-modern and “liquid” ones in the subjectivities of the precarious young adults. In addition, these repertoires that are more properly postmodern are mobilised as a means of support—subjective in this case—to face situations of vulnerability. They are supports that show a certain ambivalence: although they reduce the intense malaise in situations of prolonged insecurity, at the same time, they individualise the strategies for dealing with precarity and to a certain extent neutralise the formation of a discourse that is more critical of their own situation and that of a whole generation.