What future do young people envision?
The social contract according to which each new generation will live better than the previous one is broken. Young people live in a context of hyper-demand, precarious jobs, and exhaustion, with little certainty about their future. This overwhelming pressure plunges them into a perpetual present that weakens the possibility of building collective experiences.
Among the many transformations that young people are experiencing in this era of change, two stand out: the increase in inequality and precarity, and the reconfiguration of temporalities. The first has been analyzed by various authors ( 1 ). The second remains less explored, even though it has effects on the modes of sociability, daily experience, and meaning-making of new generations.
There was a time when the future—even though it wasn't a certainty or a promise fulfilled for everyone—functioned as a shared horizon. Studying allowed one to aspire to, or achieve, a better job. Working and developing a career made independence possible. Saving could be the path to owning one's own home. Effort—or even more so, sacrifice—had meaning because there was a more or less certain expectation that time would, sooner or later, return what was invested in the present.
These certainties eroded in the heat of capitalist transformations, both in Argentina and in the rest of the Western world. Recurring crises, material precarity and subjective deterioration, the degradation of territories and living conditions, and the increasing digitalization of life weakened one of modernity's most persistent beliefs: that the next generation would live better than the previous one. This encapsulates the breakdown of a tacit pact that sustained intergenerational ties for years: faith in progress.
Argentine youth are experiencing this rupture, exacerbated by instability, stagnation, institutional collapse, and recurring crises. Those who can be considered young today (under 35) came of age and were socialized after the promise of a better future had already begun to fade. This reshapes their understanding of work, education, consumption, politics, and collective life.
Youth disputes over time
For years we have studied and discussed persistent inequalities—income, gender and diversity, ethnic and racial, among others—along with new ones—digital, environmental, and climate inequality. Recently, another, less visible and understood inequality has begun to take shape: temporal inequality.
Not all young people have the same amount of free time, nor can they make the same decisions about how they spend it. Not all have the same opportunity to plan for the future. While some have time to study, rest, socialize, or envision long-term projects, large segments of young people are trapped in a constant struggle with the immediate: long and fragmented workdays (with precarious jobs), long commutes (on inadequate or overcrowded public transportation), multiple responsibilities (paid work, studies, caregiving), hyper-connectivity, difficulties accessing housing, emotional overload, interpersonal and relational difficulties, and the loss of the right to rest. Thus, precarity is not only expressed in work or in living spaces. It also shapes how time is structured. And when time becomes precarious, it transforms how we live and how we perceive daily life. This is particularly evident among young people in Argentina today.
René Ramírez argues that contemporary societies are not merely tired. They are being dispossessed of their time ( 2 ). The problem is no longer just working too many hours or living at a frantic pace. The issue is deeper: young people are losing the ability to decide how they want to live their time. Between the time they have lived and the time they would like to live (desired time), a gap appears that produces frustration, anxiety, and a feeling that life is passing them by without ever truly belonging to them. Young people experience this dispossession with particular intensity because it is a stage of life associated with building their future.
Therefore, in addition to asking ourselves how wealth is produced and redistributed, understanding contemporary youth dynamics requires examining how time is appropriated and distributed. Therein lies one of the keys to understanding current transformations. As we have noted, a culture of effort, even sacrifice, prevailed for much of the 20th century. Studying meant postponing gratification. Working meant delaying present enjoyment to achieve greater well-being in the future. Activism, too, rested on a sacrificial conviction. Waiting made sense because there was confidence that time would repay, in the form of a better future, what was sacrificed in the present. What happens when, as is happening today, that confidence is eroded?
The meanings of work
Young Argentinians work, study, start businesses, juggle multiple jobs, participate in politics, and demonstrate remarkable abilities to support themselves. But they do so with a different sense of time. While in the past, working harder or studying harder guaranteed a better future, today it barely suffices to manage the immediate demands of daily life.
This profoundly alters young people's experience of work. Previously, work not only provided income but also allowed them to plan their career path, become independent, build an identity, and participate in a shared experience with other workers. Work connected the present with the future; it was a bridge between different stages of life.
This dynamic has weakened. For today's youth, the problem is not only finding a job, but also the growing precarity of employment ( 3 ). Even formal employment can be precarious, and the income may not be enough to lift them above the poverty line. Most young people who work cannot afford their own home (sometimes not even to rent one), nor can they save for the medium term; often they cannot become independent. They cannot imagine a stable future. When the promise of progress is broken, the relationship between time and hope also breaks down.
This transforms how we organize our lives. In the past, young people's trajectories seemed to follow a stable sequence: study, enter the job market, gain independence, build a career, and create their own projects. This path was never the same for everyone, but it functioned as a shared vision. Today, trajectories are increasingly discontinuous. We move in and out of studies, work, entrepreneurial ventures, the digital world, and the analog world. Interruption is part of everyday experience.
The generational experience of time
This experience also alters the meaning of education. High school and university were built on the fundamental premise of dedicating time in the present to improving future prospects. More education meant greater social recognition, better working conditions, and career advancement opportunities. That promise has weakened. Increasingly, young people are finishing high school or university only to discover that their degrees no longer guarantee a good job. Education remains a tool for expanding opportunities, but it no longer offers certainty.
The problem is that educational institutions continue to be organized in the same way as in the past, around long, cumulative, and sequential processes, while the daily experience of young people unfolds according to different timescales. Simultaneity and instantaneity replace sequence. Acceleration displaces waiting. Urgency and the ephemeral take the place of planning.
The digital world intensifies this transformation, but it doesn't create it. It's often said that social media has made younger generations anxious. Here, we argue that social media is effective because it captures a social logic in which long-term thinking and sequential time have become blurred. Hyper-connectivity and the digitization of life make the boundaries between work, study—the time spent commuting—and leisure and rest more porous. This creates time to build a life that isn't completely consumed by urgency.
For a significant portion of young people, time is scarce. The workday doesn't end when work is over. It continues with commuting, the search for other jobs, constant connectivity, the worry of making ends meet, and the need to maintain increasingly fragile relationships. Rest ceases to be free time and becomes recovery time. Even entertainment is increasingly captured by platforms that manage attention and monetize every available moment. This raises a crucial question: what experience of time do young people produce and perceive when almost all their energy is consumed navigating an uncertain and precarious present?
We return, then, to the issue of time inequality. Much of today's inequality hinges on the ability to manage one's own time. Time to study while being required to work twelve hours a day. Time to rest. Time spent commuting, whether in the city or the suburbs. Time to meet with friends, serve in the military, play sports, read, listen to music, care for others, or simply do nothing.
Acceleration displaces waiting. Urgency and the ephemeral take the place of planning.
Precarity is, therefore, a form of social time organization. Uncertainty ceases to be an exception and becomes the logic under which daily life unfolds. What is at stake is the very possibility of imagining a future capable of organizing the present. And when the long term ceases to offer guarantees, improvement shifts to the present.
In this sense, Pablo Semán's notion of "improvement-minded youth" is suggestive for characterizing young people who are committed to improving their living conditions but who have stopped placing that expectation in a distant future ( 4 ). Improvement is valuable if it is immediate, incremental, and everyday. It needs to be verifiable immediately and visible in the material reality of daily life, however precarious that reality may be.
This disconnect also exists between aspiration and material reality. According to various studies, many young people aspire to become influencers , produce content for digital platforms, start their own businesses, invest in cryptocurrencies, learn digital skills, or gamble online. However, their daily experience condemns them to precarious jobs in delivery apps or other forms of the platform economy.
This contradiction sometimes reinforces feelings of frustration and disillusionment, leading to a search for strategies to bridge the gap between effort and reward. Thus, consumption becomes a way to make daily effort visible. Traveling, experiencing something (like a concert), or acquiring certain goods (a new phone, sneakers) are small proofs that it's possible to improve in the present.
The public and the collective
For decades, many improvements in living conditions resulted from collective institutions—schools, universities, hospitals, labor agreements, social security—that shared a common logic: to produce well-being through long-term collective processes. When these institutions lose effectiveness, the value of these rights does not necessarily disappear. What begins to erode is confidence in their capacity to transform daily life. The experience of the public sphere weakens because it ceases to produce visible results.
Waiting no longer offers any reward. This is one of the most profound political consequences of the intergenerational temporal inequality we've been discussing. When a significant portion of daily energy is consumed managing emergencies, the availability for building shared projects also diminishes. Collective experience begins to recede in the face of the need to resolve one's own life, incorporated—and reinforced by dominant discourses—as an individual responsibility. Therefore, today's hyper-individualism is first and foremost a social experience.
A society that forces individuals to solve collectively produced problems individually ends up generating individualized subjectivities. This erodes the everyday experience of the common good. Collective and public spaces are no longer experienced by large segments of young people as environments capable of effectively improving their lives.
What happens to a democracy when a generation no longer believes that time is on its side? In an increasingly demanding present and an uncertain future, proposals that promise to quickly solve problems acquire greater symbolic power.
Contesting the future
One of the most widespread problems among young people is exhaustion. According to fieldwork we accessed within the framework of the Gino Germani Institute's Youth and Policy Studies Group ( 5 ), this is a " managed exhaustion . " It's an exhaustion that doesn't paralyze them, because life compels them to keep going, and it stems from the enormous amount of energy required to sustain daily life. Managing uncertainty ends up occupying a significant portion of the time available for imagining the future, which weakens confidence that this future can be achieved through the paths established as mandates by previous generations.
We have once again arrived at the breakdown of the implicit intergenerational pact that sustained the social dynamics of recent decades. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, René Ramírez argues that history is not always forged in grand events, but rather in the moments when, amidst alienated routine, someone stops, recognizes the fracture in their lived experience, and decides they no longer want to continue like this. This rupture can point to the place from which to build an alternative—a proposal that inspires young people and reverses not only precarity and the unequal distribution of time, but also allows them to project an expectation of a better, more equitable, and more just future. Perhaps the generational challenge of this era lies in democratizing the future.
1. Pablo Vommaro, “Much talked about, little listened to”, Anfibia Magazine , October 31, 2023.
2. René Ramírez Gallegos, Juan Guijarro and Gabriela Gallardo Lastra, From the labyrinth of solitude to the paths of companionship. Political cultures in contemporary Mexico , Buenos Aires, CLACSO, 2024.
3. According to data compiled by the author based on statistics from INDEC, in 2024, 66,4% of workers between 16 and 18 years old were not registered, and 31,3% of those between 19 and 29 years old were also unregistered.
4. Pablo Semán (coord.), He is among us , Siglo XXI, Buenos Aires, 2023.
5. I am referring primarily to the studies by the consulting firm Punto Doxa. www.puntodoxa.com. Some data are available on the GEPoJu, IIGG-UBA website. https://gepojuiigg.sociales.uba.ar/.
By Pablo Vommaro
Executive Director of CLACSO. Professor and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires.
