ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on persisting or emergent levels of sustained unemployment. Youth work remained so preoccupied with the ‘acute anxieties of adolescence’ that it was failing to notice the onset of a ‘chronic crisis of young adulthood’ for a growing proportion of young people. The author argues that the acute anxieties of adolescence often give way, not to full ‘citizenship’ but to a chronic condition of helplessness and hopelessness in young adulthood: a crisis both reflecting and creating the symbolic prolongation of youth. He suggests that adolescents are still perhaps too young to fully grasp the cruel realities of the current world and the pervasiveness and persistence of the problems they are likely to encounter in the future.
