Indebtpending: an ugly feeling of youthful financialised futurity

ABSTRACT

‘The future’ is a key object of concern in youth studies and sociology more generally. With the recent rise of the financialisation of everyday life and the consumption of credit, young people’s futures are concomitantly financialised. Our research with young people in Australia discussing their experiences of debt and their financial practices shows how these navigations have implications for how they imagine their own futures. Drawing upon Sianne Ngai’s theorisation of ‘ugly feelings’ and Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, we propose the term ‘indebtpending’ to conceptualise how financialisation processes affect and mediate young people’s orientations towards the future. Indebtpending includes ‘in debt’, ‘independence’ and ‘pending’ as elements that work together to create an array of temporal-related feelings towards how aspirations and life plans may play out, some of which feel like aspects of ‘adulthood’ are being foreclosed. Indebtpending is therefore an affective state of youthful imagining where being in debt is a necessity of late capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Debt
• financialisation
• ugly feelings
• cruel optimism
• future

Introduction: debt, the future and youth

Debt has become a ubiquitous and normalised aspect of young people’s lives, especially in the Global North where the following research was conducted. As a social group young people are overindebted, which has particularly severe impact on disadvantaged youth who are at risk of falling into ‘debt traps’ (ASIC 2018). Over recent decades there have been important conceptual and empirical developments to consider in the financialisation of everyday life (Martin 2002; Karaagac 2020). Recent years have witnessed the rise of financial technologies (fintech) including buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) services, cryptocurrencies, blockchain investment and mortgages, share trading and gambling apps. Young people are the target market for these products and services, which have a much younger customer base than mainstream financial services (ASIC 2018). In this context, young people need to individually strategize a trajectory towards a good life by stitching together the means to make a living and service the debts they have accrued – credit cards, bank loans, student loans, BNPL repayments – with the aim of creating some form of financial security in the present and into the future. They are doing this not just by relying on traditional sources of capital such as wages and career paths, but also by engaging with an array of opportunities and risks offered by new fintech products, aspects of which are unclear or hidden. For the purposes of this paper therefore, while different kinds of debts may be accessed for different reasons, incur different senses of purpose, and be dealt with (or not) based upon one’s financial position, what is important is the emergence of fintech and the ubiquity of debt in all its forms, its taken-for-grantedness, and how this affects subjective feelings and orientations towards the future.

Young people and categorisations of ‘youth’ are figuratively positioned as a proxy for the future, a figure of hope, expressed in the constant moral panics about them, with the imperative that if young people are ‘good’ the future will be ‘good’ (Threadgold 2020). In this article, we contribute to studies of futurity in youth studies by discussing how the financialisation of everyday life and the inevitability of being in debt have implications for the way young people’s futures are felt in the here and now. We call this a state of ‘indebtpending’, comprised of being ‘in debt’, striving towards ‘independence’ and a suspended sense of ‘pending’. These elements work together to create an array of temporal-related feelings towards how aspirations and life plans may play out, some of which feel like aspects of adulthood are foreclosed. The term ‘indebtpending’ draws on Berlant’s (2011) concept of cruel optimism and Ngai’s (2005) focus on the subjective feelings characteristic of late capitalism, through which we suggest ‘indebtpending’ as a new ‘ugly feeling’. We use indebtpending as a conceptual device which can shed light on the feelings young people have about the promises that have been made from a young age about meritocracy and making the right choices. ‘Indebtpending’ means that many young people are exposed to an affective orientation towards the future dependent upon relations of debt, and while that future orientation is felt in the here and now, it is also pending, forthcoming, uncertain, relating to ideas of adulthood and independence. As precarity moves up the class ladder to impact even highly educated professionals, getting the right degree, doing the right internships and the like is no guarantee of financial security, and in Australia, certainly no guarantee of being able to buy a house in metropolitan or key regional centres where high-quality jobs are concentrated. This is especially important in the context of Australia’s asset-based welfare state, in which home ownership is a necessity for avoiding poverty in later life (Stebbing and Spies-Butcher 2016). In the context of young people dealing with debt now and into their imagined future, our research shows that the ubiquitous feelings of being in debt, how this affects one’s sense of independence, and how this leaves the future as something hauntingly pending can be conceptualised as an emotive state central to being a young person, and as stemming directly from the extraction of value from notions of ‘youthfulness’ (Farrugia 2018; Threadgold 2023).

Samman and Sgambati (2023, 103) link financial capital’s fixation on the future in terms of derivatives and market fluctuations to broader apocalyptic visions of the future, where ‘financial eschatologies bind the contemporary subject to debt and indebtedness to the very end’. ‘The future’ may be imminent in the sense that it has not yet happened, but it is affective in the sense that it is an absent presence that colours how young people imagine themselves, their lives and their aspirational trajectories. We therefore suggest that young people’s orientations to the future operate as an affective-temporal dynamic (Coleman 2016). The future is not just a looming era or event, but a present concern enrolled into the uncertain investment strategies that young people inevitably need to rely upon to make decisions about their lives. So, while the future is something that is imminent, it is also immanently ever-present as a reflexive leitmotif (see Bourdieu 2000; Adkins 2018, 32–41).

Youth, debt, well-being and the future

Young people’s levels of indebtedness and feelings about their lives and futures are clearly linked (Pimlott-Wilson 2017; Pimlott-Wilson and Hall 2017; McDowell 2017; Coffey et al. 2022). This is important, as it gives credence to how financial situations at the family level and broader societal-level financial norms and trends contribute to shaping the horizons of possibility young people feel in their orientations towards the future. Essentially, debt has become an inevitable facet of trying to attain a middle-class lifestyle and to lubricate the transition towards ticking off markers of adulthood (Dwyer, McCloud, and Hodson 2011) such as higher education study, gaining full-time work, moving out of the family home, travel and other milestones. As Horton (2017) argues, not only are multiple forms of debt normative and taken for granted for young people to the point that they are just ‘getting on’ with life accordingly, but futures are also now perceived as being inevitably tied to accruing more debts. Debts, especially the rising amount of student debt young people are exposed to across the Western world, is of particular concern for young people, leading to them experiencing an array of feelings and engaging in a range of coping mechanisms to strategize their futures, ranging from acceptance of debt as a necessity, feeling distress and being ‘haunted’ by debts, feeling pressured and constrained by their debts, feeling alienated from others around them due to their indebtedness, and experiencing uncertainty about how their future may unfold (Feige and Yen 2021).

There is also a growing literature on the behavioural aspects of being in debt, particularly its negative affects on mental and physical health outcomes, arguing that debt itself needs to be considered a socioeconomic determinant of population health (Tay et al. 2017; Sweet, DuBois, and Stanley 2018; Greenberg and Mogilner 2021). Debt – particularly high levels – is associated with higher blood pressure, worse general health and higher levels of stress and depression. Moreover, this remains the case even when controlling for socioeconomic, physical and mental health and other cohort factors (Sweet et al. 2013). In their UK-based study, Meltzer et al. (2011) found that those in debt are twice as likely as the general population to think about suicide, even after controlling for sociodemographic, economic, social and lifestyle factors. Some studies suggest that debt can be experienced as a physical burden in people’s day-to-day lives, with the indebted estimating their own physical weight as subjectively heavier than those who are not in debt, despite their objective weight (Liu, Li, and Rao 2018). The work of Sweet (2018, 86) and colleagues in this field has been especially important for considering indebtedness as a form of neoliberal embodiment, where the connections between debt and health problems need to be considered ‘within the context of both neoliberal economic policies that funnel consumers into chronic debt and neoliberal sociocultural ideologies that promote self-judgments of indebtedness as personal failure’.

‘Promising to pay’: debt, affect and the future

The affective dimension of debt associated with the conditions of economic life under capitalism has been a key focus in the literature on financialisation and debt (Anderson et al. 2020). Through the ubiquity of consumer credit, debt becomes a routine, normalised and highly accessible aspect of everyday life, central to how young people manage their lives and plan for their futures. In this article, we extend the work of others who have analysed the relational, embodied and affective dynamics of debt and its implications for subjectivities. Anderson et al. (2020, 423) approach digitally mediated payday loans as ‘a set of techniques, resources and cluster of promises are entangled with forms of living’. Others, including Deville and Seigworth (2015), have articulated how an obligation to pay can be felt as an embodied attachment. Kirwan (2021) conceptualises the affectively charged ‘imaginaries of debt’ towards future stability. The temporalities of youth and adulthood have arguably become intertwined with the moral obligation to strategically, responsibly and entrepreneurially manage credit and debt, as well as the multiple logics of consumption, speculation and investment through which indebted subjectivities are produced (Farrugia et al. 2022).

Other scholars have also highlighted that debt is defined by time, and oriented to the future (Deville and Seigworth 2015; Wilkis 2015; Adkins 2017). Debt ‘concerns a promise to pay at a time which has not yet arrived’, constituting a promise both to, and of, the future (Adkins 2017, 450). Further, debt as ‘the promise to pay … operates via a double move in regard to time: it defers the present but does so by counting on (and counting) the future’ (Adkins 2017, 450). This work is part of a broader approach in sociology, human geography and cultural studies that seeks to explore how ‘the economic is affective’ (Coleman 2016, 84), and how dynamics of power are felt and made through social, cultural and economic dynamics. The understanding of affect we draw on here extends from Ahmed’s (2004, 119) conceptualisation of affective economies, where ‘emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities – or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments’. Coleman’s (2016, 84) analysis of debt approaches the conditions of austerity in terms of ‘pessimism’, and how this mood shapes orientations to the future, showing ‘how the economic is affective, and folded into the cultural’.

Affect is also a useful conceptual tool for understanding topics of futurity and time, since both are ‘immaterial’ yet felt and real. Affect provides a way of apprehending and complicating linear temporality, ‘so that the future is not (only or so much) a distinct and/or far off temporality, separate to the present (and past), but is (also) experienced and felt ‘in’ and as the present’ (Coleman 2017, 527). We extend this focus through an affective approach to debt, and by exploring ‘the affective consequences of economic worlds’ (Anderson et al. 2020), where affective entanglements of debt are integral in arranging the conditions of possibility for young people in the present, and into the future.

Indebtpending: a new ugly feeling

While the future is unpredictable, even intangible, the future is always affectively present. To conceptualise how the financialisation of everyday life feels, we draw upon the work of Sianne Ngai and Lauren Berlant to think through these orientations, first with the new ugly feeling of ‘indebtpending’, and relating this to Berlant’s now well-established concept of cruel optimism. Ngai (2005) provides a map of subjective negative or passive emotions that relate to feelings of a lack in political and social potency, expressed in an array of ‘ugly feelings’. These include envy, anxiety, paranoia and irritation, but also two feelings that Ngai invents to describe specific contemporary affinities. ‘Animatedness’ refers to a racialised affect where people of colour, non-binary gender identifiers and non-heterosexualities are positioned as being both too emotional (see also Ahmed) or being too pliable. ‘Stuplimity’ is a combination of boredom and shock, the sublime and stupid. This feeling emerges in the face of the overwhelming abundance of information, images and spectacle consumed daily that results in a numbing feeling of ‘whatever’. These ‘non-cathartic’ states are associated with passivity, a lack of action. Ngai sees these ugly feelings affecting how one orient towards their lives and their future, linking these feelings and moods to notions of suspended, restricted or obstructed agency (see Coffey and Farrugia 2014 for a critique of agency in youth studies). Importantly though, these states may not just be a sign of apathy but forms of everyday resistance and making do (see Dobson and Kanai 2018; Coffey 2019; Richerme 2024). It is in the spirit of Ngai’s creation of new ugly feelings that correspond with aspects of contemporary everyday life that we propose ‘indebtpending’ in this article.

Berlant (2011, 1) has theorised the concept of cruel optimism to consider a situation where rapid social change produces a precariousness that has fundamentally altered how one can relate to one’s own subject position and future: ‘A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’. Cruel optimism is particularly useful for contending with the double-binds that individuals encounter as they struggle to make a life in world that is failing and falling apart. In his recent commentary on Berlant’s work on cruel optimism Anderson et al. (2023, 144) argued that the concept ‘allows a new answer to the longstanding question of why people stay in relations and worlds that harm them’. It is in this spirit that we use the concept to think through the affective life of debt, and the temporal relations that it suggests. In the following, we use indebtpending as a subjective ugly feeling to conceptualise what these developments imply for young people’s day-to-day lives, assembling aspects of how it feels to be in debt, how this relates to notions of independence and how relations to the future are therefore pending in both the short and long term.

Methods

This paper draws on a programme of research with young people on credit and debt conducted in the Australian city of Newcastle approved by the University of Newcastle Human Research Ethics Committee (H-2021-0435; H-2020-0219). Newcastle is a regional city 170 kms north of the state capital, Sydney. The project used a combination of qualitative interview methods alongside participatory workshops to enable the narratives, discourses and subjective feelings associated with young people’s experiences of indebtedness to be explored. Interviews were conducted face-to-face or over zoom, and lasted up to an hour. Interview questions focused on young people’s use and experience of credit–debt in a biographical context, including the sources of credit that they accessed, their use of credit, their experiences of indebtedness and how these experiences made them feel about their future. Workshops included 4–6 participants, and lasted two hours. Workshops included the presentation of some quotes from earlier interviews to the participants for critical reflection, and showing the participants BNPL services’ advertising and websites to discuss. Together, these methods proved particularly valuable for understanding the subjective and embodied feelings associated with the circumstances of indebtedness.

Participants were aged between 18 and 30 years old – a range that reflects the relatively ‘extended’ nature of the youth period (Woodman and Wyn 2015). Recruitment for the interviews was challenging. Participants were recruited initially through social media advertising, and then by a recruitment company which was engaged when initial recruitment efforts proved difficult and to address a gender imbalance in the sample when no men came forward to participate. Despite using these different recruitment strategies, of the 48 participants, only 10 were men, and the remaining 38 identified as women. The challenge of recruiting men for ‘soft’ or ‘sensitive’ topics has been noted by others (see Butera 2006). In this study, we suspect that men may have been particularly wary about discussing topics related to debt and money, due to stigma associated with indebtedness in hegemonic masculine identities. Thirty-nine participants were interviewed and the remainder participated only in the workshops. The interview participants received a $25 gift card in acknowledgement of their time and contribution to knowledge, while the workshop participants received $50 giftcards (due to the larger time commitment). The data were entered into NVivo 11 and then analysed by all members of the research team, using a method adapted from Deterding and Waters (2021) ‘flexible coding’. This approach involved coding thematically to allow for comparison between interviews, and then coding analytically in order to place our findings in dialogue with existing empirical and conceptual material. The themes of morality, affect and temporality emerged as key findings during analysis (Farrugia et al. 2021) and were reflected across the dataset. The data presented in this article are chosen to exemplify the tendencies within the dataset that emerged in relation to how BNPL services made our participants feel. All names below are pseudonyms.

The ‘in debt’ of indebtpending

Participants described learning how to manage different kinds of debt as an entirely normative process tied to the phase of ‘youth’ and becoming an independent adult. Whilst the ubiquity of debt is well known as a dimension of the financialisation of everyday life, participants’ responses also show that debt is so central as to be required for young people to meet crucial ‘transition’ markers of young lives, including through consumption practices like buying clothes, and through independence markers like owning a car and moving out of home. Feelings of uncertainty and insecurity related to the ugly feelings of debt, whilst managing the significant risks of unmanageable debts, were rife:

The whole normal basics of ‘oh I own my own home and have a car’, it apparently requires us to go into kind of ridiculous amounts of debt now. And it makes you not do things, and it makes you anxious (Irene, 25, Disability support worker)

The ‘not do things’ that Irene mentioned include things like travel, socialising, consumption and participating in youth cultures that have been normative elements of youth rites of passage. The financialisation of everyday life means constant calculations about the implications of spending, and how this relates to fun now, but maybe pain in the future that resonates with cruel optimism. Corey told us about a typical narrative in this regard when it comes to using BNPL:

When I was working fulltime, I put everything on Afterpay … like two and a half grand. And my payments from work – half of that would go to Afterpay every week. Like it was just ridiculous. It wasn’t even anything like I needed, it was just clothes. And then I paid it all off and then I deleted that app. So I learnt the hard way. (Corey, 25, Full time retail worker)

This type of story, in which a negative experience of debt is framed as a learning experience and as inevitable, was common. For instance, Carolyn (20, Law student and paralegal) explained that whilst she does not want a credit card having one feels like a ‘rite of passage as you get older’. This kind of transitional narrative regarding accessing different forms of credit as one gets older was repeated by others, and relates to how accessing credit is an ‘experience’ that one needs to have in order to ‘learn’ over time. Jaden experienced homelessness while he experienced financial stress, but now feels grateful for that experience as he feels that he understands ‘how things work’:

From my past experience of debt, if I could go back in time I would do it differently. But I suppose if I didn’t have the knowledge that I have now that’s what I’m thankful for. I suppose having been in debt in the past, having been homeless, having to borrow money and take out loans and everything like that, it did help me learn … now know what to do and what not to do. (Jaden, 29, Creative writing student, formerly homeless)

Carolyn describes a combination of making thrifty calculations to manage their everyday needs, experiencing tax debt for the first time, and feeling more comfortable with these situations over time:

When I was younger and using Afterpay every now and then it kind of affected the choices that I made socially and food wise. Still, I wasn't starving or anything, but you'd be like, ‘Okay, two minute noodles or mince it is this week.’ Not going out or not going for lunch and stuff like that. And now the first time when I had that tax debt, I was stressed because I've never really been in that much debt before. That was terrifying. But this time I'm a bit like, ‘Okay, it's okay. Been there, done that.’ Expected it a bit more this time (Carolyn, 20, Law student and paralegal)

Carolyn’s story shows the acceptance of a financialised subjectivity. Debt is scary but is to be learnt from, while the inevitability and ubiquity of debt are unquestioned. Even when debt can have severe impacts, such as leading to homelessness in Jaden’s case, it is narrativised as something that can be overcome through a redemptive story arc where responsible financial management can be ‘learned’ and accepted.

In contrast, higher education debt was commonly seen as a positive investment in one’s future, but still managed to extract deleterious feelings about whether this investment would ‘pay off’. For some, HECS debt (a student loan provided by the Australian government to domestic university students) is in the background, haunting the future but not causing too much stress.

I haven’t even really looked at my HECS that much. So, I know that I have the debt, but I don’t really know a lot, a huge amount about it (Claire, 21, student)

Not knowing exactly how much HECS debt had been accrued was very common, a way of bracketing off the ‘pending’ aspects of being ‘in debt’, but whether one knows the actual amount or not, it hangs heavy as a burdensome absent presence. As Jenny told us:

HECS debt is something that I don’t even think about the majority of time. And then I will and I’ll panic and then I’ll get over it and maybe a month or so I’ll panic again … But with HECS debt I might never pay it back if I don’t get the right job, if I don’t earn enough throughout my life. But I would hope I can … I’m kind of worried about how little I really know about it, I don’t know exactly how to manage it … Because it’s a substantial amount, it’s more money than I’ve ever had for anything else. I’ve never seen that much money, the amount I owe them, I think it’s about $37,000. I’m nearly at the end of my degree so that could still go up and that’s more money than I’ve ever had, times three, maybe even more. It’s a lot of money for me and even though some other people probably wouldn’t see that as so much money, it’s still, it’s scary. (Jenny, 21, Design student)

Jenny articulates the ‘unknown’ or intangible aspects of a HECS debt, where it looms as a pending, almost unfathomable amount of money. Jenny’s story, which concludes that debt is a ‘scary’ ugly feeling, sums up how the majority of our participants feel towards debt: all are negotiating debt in various forms, are struggling with how to deal with it based on their current circumstances, but are strategising how these present-day decisions will affect their pending future.

The ‘pending’ of indebtpending

Our participants commonly discussed their future hypothetically, making reasonable predictions or imagining how they thought things might transpire. As discussed, the pending nature of one’s future is immanent in how one thinks about the here and now. As Catherine (21, Law student and paralegal) put it:

Sometimes I think, ‘what if we all died tomorrow and I’ve got all these savings but no fun experiences?’ But then, I’m like, ‘think long-term, save, have a house and have that security’. And if you want to have a family, you don’t have to move them around between rentals and have to email your landlord every time you want hang a friggin picture up. But then other days, I’m like, ‘live your life, go travelling’. It’s kind of like a constant mentality jumping between the two, travel or a house.

The pending nature of the future was generally imagined in short-term and long-term temporalities. For instance, Jaden told us about having to make choices between eating and accessing health care in their current impoverished financial situation:

I will admit I don’t eat as much as I used to. Healthcare would be another thing. For example, only just last week was I able to actually get one of my teeth fixed, that I’ve been waiting for about two years to get fixed. And because I don’t exactly have a job or the money, I had to go through the public health system, which is a very long wait. And even then, they couldn’t fix all my teeth (29, Creative writing student, formerly homeless)

These kinds of short-term choices are common for young people who are living under the poverty line, and are often made in order to avoid either going into more debt or making more sacrifices. The use of BNPL products is particularly pervasive in the short-term pending nature of debt choices:

I used to think it would be like, ‘Oh well, that’s a fortnight’s issue. Like I’ll just worry about that later on.’ If I’ve got say $100 in my Everyday Account and it was $25, I’d be like ‘Oh it’s only $25.’ Like I wouldn’t actually think ‘Oh it’s $25 times four.’ I would just think ‘Oh it’s only $25,’ because it was nothing up front. Whereas now I think I have like $150 on there and I’m aware ‘Oh, in two weeks I have to pay this,’ like, I’m more aware of it now and when I have to pay, whereas two years ago I was like ‘Oh no it’s only $25.’ (Alexa, 24, student and retail worker)

In terms of the longer-term aspects of the pending future, credit scores were put forward as important for one’s future, especially for putting one in the position of being able to get a mortgage, but largely unknowable in terms of how they work. Jenny narrated this connection between the short and long term:

Credit comes in kind of two ways. First, you have to be so responsible and you have to be managing and you have to maintain debt. But on the other hand, you also need a good credit score. And that’s something that I don’t really understand how to achieve because I’ve never really looked at those gateways of credit and things like that. So I’m very confused about the whole system. (Jenny, 21, Design student)

The pending aspect of the ugly feeling of indebtpending leads to confusion about what to do now. Debt becomes a distortive lens to view the future through, making aspects of it unknowable despite the obvious pressures to have a plan in place, similar to the discussion of higher education debt above. For Hayley, when asked about how debt may impact their long-term future, they said:

I'm going to have to analyse what I'm spending my money on and how much I can commit to certain things. So, the debt definitely is getting in the way of your future plans just in terms of work and budgeting … It's a big struggle to actually visualise a future. I have plans, like, I could jot them down in dot points for what I would probably want. But in terms of seeing myself in a future setting I can't do that. (Hayley, 24, NGO worker in disability sector)

Some participants felt that their debts were serviceable, that they did not foreclose the future per se. This meant that although they were struggling with the pending nature of debt, they maintained a sense of hope that aligns with the experience of debt as a rite of passage discussed above:

I feel like I’m going to pay off my debt, I’ll be able to breathe a lot easier knowing that I don’t have that obligation anymore and that I can also dedicate more money to things that I actually want to do. Start saving for a house deposit and things like that. … I guess I wouldn’t be the only person that’s had experiences like this or have been in a position like this either, so I guess it’s about giving people a sense of hope that sure, things are really shit right now but eventually you will come out the other side of it. (Alice, 21, Sales rep)

Note the embodied language that once the ugly feeling of indebtpending is overcome, they will be able to breathe easier. For participants with large debts, the future felt like it was put on hold, that there was a sense of stasis incorporated in the embodiment of debt that delayed markers of adulthood:

Me being in debt, it stops us from moving into like the next phase. Like it’s my debt that kind of stands in the way of like engagement and babies and all of that kind of thing … it’s kind of hard that I know that I’m not financially responsible enough to do that. It’s just circumstances that’s brought it that way, it’s not like I have a gambling problem or a drinking problem or anything like that. It’s just kind of a sequence of shitty events where I’ve kind of just had to do it, had to get cash loans. It kind of sucks that it’s these shitty events that I had no control over is the reason why I probably haven’t already tried to start a family or anything like that. (Mia, 26, Lawyer)

Mia has had life experiences that made debt unavoidable, having to access credit at times to pay for the basic necessities of life. They do not drink or gamble, or spend frivolously on consumer purchases, but have gone into debt to get by. Now they feel that even though they have come out the other end of those problems, the burden of debt means that they feel it is irresponsible to start a family, that they are currently ‘not financially responsible enough’ to move on to the ‘next phase’ of life. Mia is essentially outlining the cruelly optimistic false promises that young people experience in a so-called meritocratic world. In this example, indebtedness is a tangible obstacle constraining their future plans, sense of adulthood and more general sense of possibility in the future.

The ‘independence’ of indebtpending

Mia’s example illustrates aspects of indebtedness that truncate feelings of progressing through life. In terms of debt’s relation to feelings of independence, which is a traditional key marker of adulthood in youth studies, there is the obvious facet of being financially dependent upon parents for longer in life. However, some of our participants actually went into more debt to either become more independent or to protect their parents from financial risk. In terms of relying upon parents, Alexa told us about the embarrassment of asking for money from her father:

I remember one night out with the girls, and I had no money and I think they were all wanting to go to another bar and I was like, ‘No, no I can’t afford it. I’m just going to go home.’ And they went ‘Oh no, no, no just what about your Dad? He’s out. Could he just drop by money?’ I was like ‘I can’t do that.’ I’ve never asked him for money ever. And I did and he dropped over a hundred bucks, and I was like, ‘Thanks so much’ … But my Dad’s very giving, he’d be like, ‘No, come to me if you’re struggling with money’. He doesn’t see an issue with it. Whereas I’m like ‘Oh it’s so cringe’ (Alexa, 26, student and retail worker)

Embarrassment and cringe are elements of the ugly feeling of indebtpending when one must ask for money. Others pointed out how beyond just struggling to pay for everyday expenses, they walked a thin line between living hand to mouth each week and the possibility of homelessness if something was to go wrong. As Irene says, this is not just in relation to notions of independence, but to survival:

Having financial stability I see like a self-preservation thing. I am very aware of the fact that I don’t have huge family like a lot of people. So, if I fuck up and something happens and I lose my job [trails off] … So lucky I’ve got my mum, I can go with her, and I’ve got friends. But you know, it’s not really that far if a few things change, and maybe I don’t have the close friends or something, or my mum dies, I’m really not that many steps away from the possibility of one day being homeless if things went wrong, you know. (Irene, 25, Disability support worker)

Relations with parents are not always a case of the young person taking money from them. Steph told us that they once were in a bad financial position and had to weigh up whether to approach their parents and ask for a loan, knowing that their parents were also financially struggling, or to access high-interest credit, the only type of loan that they were eligible for as they were unemployed at the time. Steph decided to get the credit even though she knew she could not pay it off, as she thought that was the right thing to do. Under similar circumstances, Alice made a similar decision, but this was due to pride more so than protection:

I would rather [go in to debt] than have to ask my parents for money because again, it was that I don't want to admit defeat that I can't cope on my own … I guess, because I had survived for so long on my own, that I didn't want to admit that I’d failed to plan and that my stupid decisions had led me to that point. (Alice, 21, Sales rep)

Before they moved out of home, Alice was providing financial support to her Mum. In this scenario, Alice establishing financial independence was ‘particularly important’. When her financial situation ‘crumbled’ and she was struggling to cope, Alice ‘felt like such a failure because I'd had to eventually admit defeat and ask my parents for help because I just had no other avenue. Every other avenue was exhausted’. Crumbling exhaustion is an element of the ugly feeling of indebtpending when independent responsibility becomes overwhelming.

Housing was a key part of imaging the future, but for many of our participants owning one’s home was a form of cruel optimism, seemingly completely unattainable and was spoken about almost ironically. Sandra, for instance, has a fantasy that one day she and her friend could go halves on a cute ‘Cottagecore house and have a nice lawn’ or a ‘shack in the woods’:

But you know what? I don’t have a lot of faith in that. It’s just a dream for now … because I feel like the house market is getting so expensive and all people care about is money. So it’s obviously going to be an issue for everyone at some point in their lives but specifically in their adult life (Sandra, 21, Supermarket worker)

For the likes of Irene, ‘I’m just not even going to worry about it. What’s the point? Like why buy a house?’ Irene had already given up on the dream of buying a house due to the huge costs involved:

I honestly don’t really have any intention on striving for it, because what’s the point. I’m not going to put myself in a million or close to a million dollars-worth of debt anytime soon. Like I’ll try and save, but I don’t know, it gets to a point where it’s just like [trails off] … The idea of being in debt and all that has really impacted my choices. Like I’m really indecisive, because you know it’s like such a huge investment to pay off. That’s why I’d have to be very comfortable about buying a house. You know, it’s just that I want to save a really big deposit because, you know, down the track, the interest rates might go up a bit and [trails off quizzically] (Irene, 25, Disability support worker)

Irene has felt the cruel optimism of wanting a house, but knowing that entering into home ownership is likely to place her in a financially precarious position. This ambivalence sees her cautiously jettison that aspiration, at least for now. Participants’ sense of the future ranged from rationalising negative experiences as teachable moments – as a rite of passage – through to feeling pessimistic about having any financial independence or secure, stable housing. While feelings of indebtpending are mediated by one’s individual circumstances, all our respondents expressed elements of indebted embodied affects implicating future possibilities. So far, we have presented data from different participants’ perspectives to illustrate the three elements of indebtpending. In the following, we focus on one participant’s narrative in depth to show how the elements of indebtpending emerge for one participant, Anna, who has an especially intense experience of indebtedness that continues to impact her present and orientation towards the future.

The future ‘on hold’: indebtpending.

Anna, 27, a young mum and current nursing student with three kids aged under six, described feeling like her future was ‘on hold’, that is, pending, due to her debts. She and her husband had a combined debt of almost $70,000, made up of a couple of credit cards, car loans and more recently, BNPL services. Anna did not make a connection at first between what felt like ‘lay-by’ (in which goods are paid for in installments and received once the total has been paid) and being in debt. When she first signed up for AfterPay – the most popular BNPL service in Australia – she said the rules were quite lax:

you didn’t have to put any driver’s license details or anything, so I had one in my maiden name and then I made another one in my married name. So, I had two going and then my husband had one as well, so that was three.

Anna was pregnant at the time and needed stuff for the baby, so she also created accounts with ZipPay and ZipMoney (both BNPL services owned by Zip) that ‘made it so much easier to buy those things’. This was also at the time when she got married and moved in with her husband, so they needed kitchen items and furniture. For the baby’s things and household needs that are needed to formulate one’s independence, they used BNPL. Anna feels ‘a bit silly’ about her situation and is concerned for future generations, for whom she expects BNPL services will be completely normalised. She would like to see financial planning that keeps up with technological advances taught at school:

it is really scary for my kids … I’m really trying hard to change our financial situation and our money story to help them with their money story.

When asked about her own future, the debt hangs heavy to the point where Anna feels that it ‘puts a lot on hold’. Anna and her husband have had to delay even thinking about buying a house until Anna finishes university and they pay off the debts. This means they do not have extra income to save for a home deposit anyway. Money ‘is pretty tight’ so ‘I guess that’s kind of all delayed, but we’ll get there’. Despite her current situation, Annia feels optimistic: ‘yeah, we definitely know where we’re going, what we want to do, we just have to keep at it. It’s going to take as long as it takes’.

Most young people do not get into this kind of deep credit trouble. Most are dealing with day-to-day finances on a lower scale than mounting up $70,000 of debt. Nevertheless, any kind of debt can significantly impact how participants feel in the here and now and how they are struggling to orient themselves towards the future.

Discussion and conclusion

Young people constitute an under-addressed cohort of the recent boom and subsequent normalisation of consumer credit, which we hope to help address in this article. Participants’ narratives illustrated how they created moral and risk hierarchies towards forms of credit and display ambivalence towards their own inevitable indebtedness. Our research has shown that most young people are wary of credit, and that being in debt affects one’s orientation towards the future (Farrugia et al. 2022). Debt therefore is a ‘massy, troubling, pressing co-presence’ in young people’s lives (Horton 2017, 286); a form of long-term social suffering in the vein of Bourdieu’s ‘weight of the world’ (Bourdieu et al. 1999). Being in debt, one’s orientation towards paying off those debts, and the strategic use of credit–debt can tell us a lot about how one’s past, present and future coalesce as dispositions. Affective relations to debt, and how these impress on dispositions towards the future, formulate the horizons of possibility that young people envision. Indebtedness, we argue, creates a particular ugly feeling which affects how young people orient their futures, characterised by a sense of suspended or constrained capacity. As we have aimed to show, these constrained affective relations can create a sense that the future is ‘foreclosed’ – an affective state of indebtpending. This has implications as to whether one may feel ‘unable to ‘live one’s life,’ and of looking toward a fragile future’ (Feige and Yen 2021, 611). This theorisation also further illustrates a particular example regarding how the economic is affective (Ahmed 2004).

Many of the above examples relate to the use of BNPL. As Tan (2022, 912) points out:

The strategic use of affect in framing BNPL services to satisfy immediate materialist consumption masks the fundamental nature of BNPL as debt, while the targeting of young individuals with no credit history through opaque techniques of credit and risk management creates new indebted subjects.

Digitalised, ‘frictionless’ (Ash et al. 2018) engagement with credit fits with the everyday practices and feeling rules of young people where there are blurry meaningful distinctions between the online and IRL (in-real-life), but it seems they would rather deal with an app than actual people (Threadgold et al. 2024). Debt is rendered an inevitable occurrence that needs to be negotiated in order to have an acceptable life in the present and be able to plan for the future towards a good life, but the weight of debt can delimit young people’s horizons of possibility, leaving them feeling indebtpending. The other key form of indebtpending is that of the very possibility of accessing a mortgage and ever being able to own a home. This relates to a key public discourse in Australia about the increasing impossibility for young people to get into the housing market, especially in locations where there are actual jobs. Inequalities here become generational where one’s family’s level of assets becomes more important to their jobs and professions in terms of how class reproduces, especially in areas where houses appreciate at rates higher than the yearly average wage (see Adkins, Cooper, and Konings 2020). As housing is important to a stable and secure life now, but also central to having a decent standard of living in retirement due to the assumption of home ownership built into Australia’s aged pension system, our respondents’ anxieties about housing are well founded.

These findings and the concept of ‘indebtpending’ contribute to key theorisations of the future which has long been a central concern in youth studies (Nilsen 1999; Brannen and Nilsen 2002). There have been studies about young people’s attitudes towards the future in terms of politics (Bessant 2020), the environment (Threadgold 2012; Field 2017) and their own individual trajectories (Cuzzocrea and Mandich 2016). There has been work that thinks about the future conceptually (Adam 2018), especially relating to notions of hope (Bryant and Ellard 2015; Cook and Cuervo 2019). Young people grapple with the precarity of their present to imagine a better more secure future. This is where the significance of this article lies. While the present-day impact of debt is well established, the impact of debt on the conditions of possibility that young adults imagine for themselves is a tacit and often under-acknowledged aspect of the expansion of consumer credit and debt-fuelled consumption. Foreclosure of the future means that young people who are in a state of ‘indebtpending’ cannot progress towards ‘full’ adulthood and instead find themselves in a state of ‘stuckedness’ in which they are not afforded any of the scarce social hope that is on offer in neoliberal societies (Hage 2009). The cruel optimism element of indebtpending comes in the way current predicaments are projected forward as teachable moments or rites of passage that will harden one up or prepare them for the next hurdle to overcome and the reflexivity displayed towards the predicament of housing. Ironically, many participants displayed an investment logic towards their financialised future: invest, do the hard work now and the pay-off will be forthcoming. But as broader research shows (Piketty 2014), this meritocratic orientation is a discursive mirage that distorts the continuing weight of inequalities. Samman and Sgambati (2023, 117) call this the ‘the rolling apocalypse of contemporary finance. Doomed to experience the endless, repetitive quality of tending to one’s debts, of servicing or investing in one’s indebtedness’ where ‘people are nurturing the hope that this cold season might end with a global financial ‘meltdown’ that will wash away the wealth gains made by the ultra-rich over the past decades’ (118). One can only hope.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by College of Human and Social Futures.