Indebtpending: an ugly feeling of youthful financialised futurity

Abstract

ABSTRACT ‘The future’ is a key object of concern in youth studies and sociology more generally. With the recent rise of the financialisation of everyday life and the consumption of credit, young people’s futures are concomitantly financialised. Our research with young people in Australia discussing their experiences of debt and their financial practices shows how these navigations have implications for how they imagine their own futures. Drawing upon Sianne Ngai’s theorisation of ‘ugly feelings’ and Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, we propose the term ‘indebtpending’ to conceptualise how financialisation processes affect and mediate young people’s orientations towards the future. Indebtpending includes ‘in debt’, ‘independence’ and ‘pending’ as elements that work together to create an array of temporal-related feelings towards how aspirations and life plans may play out, some of which feel like aspects of ‘adulthood’ are being foreclosed. Indebtpending is therefore an affective state of youthful imagining where being in debt is a necessity of late capitalism.