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Paper Short Abstract:

This communication seeks to analyze the connections between loneliness and precarious labour among individuals aged 18 to 30 in the city of Madrid (Spain). These connections, far from being univocal ambivalent, encompassing aspects such as alienation and discomfort, as well as agency and resistance

Paper Abstract:

The phenomenon of loneliness has been publicly constructed as a foremost social issue - a hallmark of the 21st-century pandemic - essentially viewed as negative, with individual and subjective roots linked to psychobiological processes. However, contributions from the anthropology of loneliness extensively problematize this matter. Towards this topic, sustained ethnographic fieldwork spanning over two years with individuals aged 18 to 30 in the city of Madrid (Spain) and its Metropolitan Area regarding loneliness proves that, in contrast to the public construction of loneliness, it is a socio-cultural affect, at times contradictory and ambivalent, rooted in structural and cultural processes that go beyond mere individual experiences.

Within this framework, waged labour and the logics of precarization are described by the young individuals involved in the ethnographic work as major causes and motivations for the experienced loneliness. Job insecurity, associated with neoliberal flexibility, the characteristic labour/working precariousness among the youth in Southern Europe, the often contradictory new logics of corporative management, the diminishing significance of the workplace as a motor of socialization, or what Boltanski and Chiapello (2002) have termed "connective capitalism" are some of the labour-related elements observed following the widespread emergence of such affect. Thus, this communication aims to analyze the links between loneliness and waged labour, which, far from being univocal, are complex and ambivalent, encompassing aspects such as alienation, fatigue, and discomfort, as well as agency and forms of resistance.