“There’s No Way of Growing”: Subjective Dimensions of Precarity Among Young Spanish Adults

Abstract This article analyses the subjective dimension of the experience of precarity among young Spanish adults, a group particularly affected by the 2008 crisis and the austerity policies that followed. Based on qualitative research, we analyse how precarity affects the ideas that young people construct of themselves and their situation. The results show their assumption of the normative aspects of the idea of transition to adulthood and their feeling of inadequacy with their own present. In interpreting their situation, two opposing discourses are revealed: one involving self-blame and the other pointing to social and structural factors as the cause of their malaise. Finally, the young people make some positive re-readings of their circumstances, which involve subjective work to cope with their situation of vulnerability and which is based on valuing the expressive aspects of work and a lifestyle that is more flexible and less standardised than that of past generations.