The post-Fordist offer of happiness and self-actualization through productivity rests on fragile ground. The narratives of self-realization through work discussed in this book so far idealize work as a realm that welcomes young people's authentic selves, and that will confer value upon youth subjectivities as long as workers make the personal commitment to work that the work ethic requires. This promise is perhaps impossible to realize even in the best of circumstances, and longitudinal evidence suggests that work declines as a priority for young adults with more labour market experience and with the onset of other life commitments, such as intimate relationships and family formation (Andres and Wyn, 2010). In this sense, a total commitment to work as the key priority in life may be specific to young people with less experience in work, for whom the cultivation of employability is a live and pressing concern. However, the narratives in preceding chapters also reflect an intensification of young people's personal investment in work and productivity precisely as precarity and unemployment have become normalized in the youth labour market. This is particularly the case in the research sites explored in this book, which are economically peripheral locations in which youth unemployment is a topic of frequent public discussion. While the work ethic makes cultivating the self into a means for navigating labour market uncertainty, the promise of meaning and value through an earnest commitment to work becomes more obviously mythical as young people experience protracted periods of unemployment, or when the material realities of working practices in demanding, demeaning and poorly paid occupations make the myth of work as a realm of autonomous self-realization impossible to sustain. Drawing on these experiences, this chapter explores what happens when the post-Fordist work ethic meets the insecurity and degradation of actually existing working situations in the youth labour market.

In general, the chapter describes the struggle to form a relationship with work when it is experienced as a hostile social environment in which the value of the self is unrecognized or made impossible to actualize. Degradation, low-self-worth and anxiety are all long-standing aspects of experiencing unemployment in the work society, and have been documented throughout the Fordist and post-Fordist periods (Sennett and Cobb, 1972; Nolan and Whelan, 1996; Lamont, 2000).