From cruel optimism to foreclosed futures: The emotional and temporal dimensions of enduring precarity among young adults in Barcelona

This paper contributes to geographical research on precarity by exploring how emotional responses to enduring insecurity shape young people's temporal horizons, spatial belonging, and sense of possibility. Drawing on qualitative research in Barcelona, I advance multi-dimensional perspectives on precarity by showing how precarious entanglements – where the material, affective, temporal, and spatial become embodied – shape the contours of potentiality and futurity. I conceptualise ‘foreclosed futures’ as a temporal–affective structure that emerges from, yet unsettles, the logic of Lauren Berlant's ‘cruel optimism’. For a generation shaped by austerity, the projection of present structural barriers to upward mobility into the future precludes the imagination of prosperous futures, fostering hopelessness, disillusionment, and nostalgia for lost stability. To unpack this dynamic, I illuminate how persistent precarity resignifies the urban – not as a site of potentiality, but as one of constraint leading to foreclosure of potentiality. I then demonstrate how a sense of inevitable downward mobility and social decline alters the emotions and temporalities tied to post-war ideals of security woven into cruel optimism. Finally, I show how apprehension towards insecure futures anchors young people in present-oriented survival, fostering pragmatic and pessimistic attitudes, concluding with an analysis of the socio-political implications of foreclosed futures.