4 - ‘Deferred lives’: money, debt and the financialised futures of young temporary workers

Summary

The systemic necessity to take on ever more unsecured credit simply to go about the business of everyday life in a financialised society is still positioned as a personal choice rather than an unavoidable means of survival. For young people endeavouring to make the transition to ‘adulthood’ – a state often associated with financial independence and self-sufficiency – the accumulation of debt has become an integral part of this transitional process, especially at a time of continued economic instability and with state support greatly atrophied in the name of ‘austerity’.

In this chapter, we assess the lived experiences of indebted lives in the context of precarious temporary employment in the UK, in order to examine the extent to which young people are ‘governed’ by debt (Adkins, 2017; Lazzarato, 2015). Sociological studies of debt have tended to follow a ‘left Nietzschean’ line through Foucault, Deleuze and Lazzarato. We aim to fill a gap in current understanding by contextualising young people's own perceptions of debt and its impact upon their future through a qualitative analysis of their lived experiences.

Assessing the extent to which debt becomes a tool of discipline, conditioning behaviour around market imperatives, we analyse original interview data to demonstrate how young people label and rationalise the different types of debt they are now compelled to undertake – from apparently ‘bad’ consumer debt to ‘good’ mortgage debt – and how the nature of their insecure employment impacts upon such judgements. Rather than total discipline, we demonstrate how young people actively reject, resist and negotiate the debts that they undertake, challenging a moralisation of debt that seeks to condemn the character of struggling debtors. As well as this empirical work, our theoretical contribution here is to assess this data in terms of what we consider to be the temporal dynamics of indebtedness, which result in living ‘deferred lives’.

Given our focus upon the UK, the pressure here for young people to ‘get into debt’ is particularly evident in the aspiration to attend university. The introduction and escalation of tuition fees has seen young people taking on significant amounts of debt in order to obtain higher education which, as current research demonstrates, may not be enough to secure the kind of well-paid jobs that would enable such debts ever to be fully repaid.