This paper charts the development of young people’s self-making in neoliberal capitalism, specifying relationships between their self-making and susceptibility to mental health difficulties as they make their way in neoliberal market society. While neoliberal capitalism provides young people with opportunities to pursue and experiment with diverse identities and ways of being in the world, it also structures their self-making opportunities, by which charting selfhood becomes fertile ground for internalizing mental health problems. Our paper argues that the cultural imperative on young people to attain social status and success in the competitive and achievement-oriented forms of life that inhabit neoliberal capitalism demands that they curate and commodify highly desirable forms of selfhood that can never quite be realized. Endlessly failing to satisfy the conditions of selfhood in neoliberal capitalism, exhausted by the injunction to be more than they have already achieved, young people are socialized into increasingly complex and pressurized neoliberal capitalist cultures which challenge their ability to fulfill both their extrinsic desires for status and identity enhancement and their intrinsic needs for relatedness, belongingness, and self-worth. To conclude our paper, we summarize our main arguments and make some recommendations for promoting a more beneficial relationship between young people and the culture of neoliberal capitalism.
Articles by Nathaniel Coward
Nathaniel Coward is a PhD student in Educational Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island, with a background in theory and criticism. His research areas include theories of learning and development, reflexive models, and cross-cultural, comparative epistemology. Nathaniel’s previous graduate research focused on a phenomenological/existential model of human development, contextualizing specific experiences of “wonder” (Thaumazein) as indicative of the individual’s passage through communal and historical institutions that paradoxically reframe intersubjectivity without subjects. His current research is focused on addressing the urgent need to understand the role of education in resisting conspiracy-driven, political division. This is his first collaboration with Dr. Stephen Butler and a welcomed opportunity to exercise more interdisciplinary thinking.