title: Precarious: Millennial perspectives on work, housing, tech, climate, and other crises
Creators: name: Kassel, Nathaniel
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: millennial generation
subject: precarity
subject: longform literary journalism

description: The millennial generation - born between 1981 and 1996 - are now entering their 30s and 40s, coming of age during a time of increased precarity, which encompasses the casualisation and gigification of work; unaffordable and insecure housing; rapid technological development; and the looming threat of climate disasters. While these forms of precarity are regularly covered in news reportage and public discourse, the overarching, interconnectedness of this precarity is rarely acknowledged outside academic circles. This creative work and exegesis bridge a gap between academic and public sphere discourses by taking a literary journalism approach to understanding and mediating millennial precarity. Precarious is a work of longform literary journalism that explores the intersecting experiences of precarity among seven millennials. The exegetical components bring this work into conversation with academic literature and critically reflect on the impacts of insider research and collaboration with sources in literary journalism practice. By asking how millennials understand and internalise the looming forms of precarity in their lives and how this affects their experiences, attitudes, and perceptions, this thesis posits that longform literary journalism, with its human-centred approach, provides a unique platform that can amplify underrepresented voices, mediating academically identified structures of precarity through the lived experiences of individuals. It further argues that the longer format of this literary journalism project, coupled with collaborative methods used, provides a unique opportunity to collectively explore, identify and mediate the scale and interconnectedness of millennial precarity, and to animate a deeper public sphere discourse beyond regular news media coverage. Although millennial precarity is magnified by large-scale neoliberal policies and economic shifts over which ordinary people have very little control, the condition of constant precarity has become a reality for the millennials participating in this study. Many of them were not necessarily concerned by the precarity lurking beneath the surface of their lives until the sudden intrusion of an injury, an eviction, or a debt. In many cases, it was a sudden crisis that made precarity feel proximate, personal and immediate. This thesis argues five major findings: (i) precarity is not always self-identified, (ii) recognising personal precarity can be cathartic, (iii) technology can exacerbate precarity, (iv) institutional safeguards are often ineffective at negating precarity, (v) precarious circumstances are highly likely to intersect with and exacerbate one another. Ultimately the study argues that millennial precarity is caused by large structural and economic problems, but these problems play out in myriad ways across peoples' lives. By focussing on the personal perceptions and interconnected nature of millennial precarity via the method of literary journalism, a clearer view emerges of the challenging, grim, and sometimes life-threatening realities of what precarity can do to the individuals who experience it.