Unease in Uncertain Times

This chapter examines the emotional experiences of young working-class men navigating economic precarity and marginalisation in post-industrial Glasgow and Liverpool. Drawing on qualitative interviews, it highlights how emotional suffering is a politically situated response shaped by structural inequalities, institutional failures and cultural misrecognition rather than being reduced to individual pathology. The chapter explores intergenerational transmissions of pain and resilience, the impact of deprived environments and the small acts of meaning and resistance through which young men assert agency amid systemic neglect. It argues that emotions serve as vital registers of despair and potential repair which reveals how gendered and classed expectations interact with neoliberal economic shifts. This chapter calls for a justice framework that attends not only to material redistribution but also to affective recognition. The emotional lives of young men reveal dimensions of youth marginality often overlooked in policy and research.