Imagining the Future in the Neoliberal Era

Abstract

In the aftermath of the 2008 global economic crisis, the future of young people is often presented in a negative light. Despite the recent difficult circumstances, our mixed-method study found that young people in Britain were still optimistic about their personal future. In this article, we explore the tension between this optimism and the (often less positive) actual circumstances of young people. Our findings suggest that young people’s views of the future were shaped by their deep-seated faith in the transformative power of hard work. We shall argue that this faith results from young people’s psychological adjustments to neoliberal beliefs about the potential of human agency to forge the future, with implications for views of others and society more generally.