Making sense of precarity: talking about economic insecurity with millennials in Canada

Abstract

While there are many effective metrics for quantifying economic precarity, talking to young people about their experiences in the labour and housing markets reveals a gap in explanatory language around living in/through crisis. In particular, in my research with Canadian millennials (born from the early 1980s through the mid-90s), although they could state the facts about how hard it is to get a good job or afford decent housing, what this pervasive sense of insecurity feels like is much harder to put into words. For many, a generalized sense of precariousness invades everyday life, even when work and housing are relatively secure. Thinking through this sense of anxiety, that the future might not be any better than the present and that young people might not be as well off as their parents, leads to a generational understanding of economic crisis – and for a group of young adults who came of age during the downturn of 2008–2009, examining how they talk (or cannot talk) about precarity is revealing.