This paper provides commentary to Sarah Marie Halls’ lecture on “A Pregnant Pause? Waiting, Reproduction, and Silences in the Everyday Endurance of Austerity” for Geoforum’s Annual Lecture delivered at the 2022 RGS-IBG Conference in Newcastle. It reflects on the relevance of this approach, considering the complex temporalities of living with austerity and precarity and how these experiences might be especially punctuated by long-standing experiences of marginalisation. Considering how crisis becomes everyday, ordinary, or even inevitable for some communities, this commentary draws on Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘cruel optimism’, and reflects on the classed dimensions of waiting during austerity, and finally, reflect on the relevance of these discussions for those working in the neoliberal academic system.