Sacrifice and Sacredness in Youth in a Context of Precariousness

Abstract

This article proposes to analyze how different concepts of the sociology of religion operate in today’s youth. Specifically, it starts from the concepts of “enterprise of the self” and “performance/enjoyment device”, proposed by Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot in The New Way of the World, to try to identify the reconfiguration of sacredness and sacrifice in the younger generation, in a context that is identified as precarious. The analysis delves into a precariousness that goes beyond the system of modeling subjectivities and the device for controlling action proposed by Laval and Dardot. This does not imply the ineffectiveness of these concepts, but rather their intensification and rearticulation in accordance with the different realities of youth.

1. Introduction

This article proposes a reflection on how concepts specific to religion operate in the subjective experiences of youth. In particular, it seeks to delve into the notions of sacrality—linked to the person as a project of the self—and sacrifice—as one of the internalized references that can be identified with particular clarity in the transitions to adulthood. These notions appear to be conditioned by precariousness and by the difficulty of constructing the trajectories that have been socially defined as expected and successful, which affects the particular and generational experience of today’s youth. From there, we will look at how context influences the configuration of identity and, in particular, religious identities.

For this approach, we build on two research projects, one of which has been completed and the other is in its final phase, which are brought into dialogue with each other, allowing us to identify points of connection that illustrate aspects of young people’s lives and their religiosity1. The first study explored the generational situation and the trajectories of transition to adulthood based on the accounts of young people themselves, considering the structural reality that shapes a context of precariousness. The second one delved into the configuration of Catholic identity today. The convergence of both lines of work in this study allow us to recognize the sacralization of certain ideals that shape a specific worldview that can be identified with values and promises that, not coincidentally, are valuable to the logic of the current economic system.

In this work, we use the concepts of “the enterprise of the self” and “performance/enjoyment device” proposed by Laval and Dardot in The New way of the World. Essay on Neoliberal Society (Laval and Dardot 2013). These concepts are connected to the religious atributes that we have identified as determinants in this social reality, such as the sacralization focused on the person and the new conceptions of sacrifice defined by Henaff (2002) and Girard (2012), which in turn give rise to and foster these dynamics anchored in the performance/enjoyment device. We pay special attention to this social dynamic due to its relevance in the generational experiences of youth.

To this end, we first look at how the economic context and its neoliberal logic promotes the emergence and consolidation of a notion of sacrifice closely linked to the requirements of the labor market. We do so by focusing on its impact on youth. Later, we devote some space to pointing out the difficulties of using the category of youth, rescuing the value of the concept of generation to refer to the sense of shared life contexts. The aim is to reflect critically on the assumption of collective destinies referring to the supposed shared experience of generational dynamics that foster common worldviews, noting the limits of this analytical reductionism, which is otherwise essential but requires caution when making generalizations about youth as a group. After this section, we focus on identifying the key elements of the shared economic context and the possible consequences for young people’s experiences of the precariousness of the current labor market. This precariousness affects individual strategies for guiding expectations and is directly linked to the internalization of sacrifice, and more tangentially, to the sacralization of the individual, which, as we shall see, is manifested in an obsession with the “enterprise of the self”. Finally, before drawing our conclusions, we note how these key elements of meaning and life orientation are traversed by the tension between performance and enjoyment, affecting the trajectories of individuals who frame their experiences in a context that requires them, based on the sacralization of the person, to face the need for sacrifice in order to maintain expectations of success defined by consumer capitalism. This reality has displaced the traditional sphere of sacrifice, linking it to the mundane and to “rewards” in the immanent world. In short, it has deactivated the notion of transcendence usually linked to both sacredness and sacrifice.

2. The Place of Economics and Sacrifice in Society

The role of religiosity in the worldview of the individual in general and in their relationship to work in particular has been a widely discussed issue in sociology, especially since Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, proposed a dialectic between the way of relating to the world that emanates from religion and its elective affinity with capitalism. Karl Marx, as is well-known, downplayed the importance of religion, considering it one of the ways in which the superstructure deceived people in their perception of economic reality, insisting that change in the economic structure would modify the superstructure. This materialism, which turned Hegelian idealism on its head, was linked to the expectation of the destruction of capitalism, which at that time was mainly productive. Financial capitalism had not yet taken on the leading role that later transformed the global economic system. Nor did intensified consumption appear as the core of its maintenance, something that, as we shall see, forms the basis of the relationship between individuals and capitalist production and is embedded in the expectations of performance/enjoyment that we will look at later. Already in the transition to post-industrial society, Daniel Bell (1989) noted the tension between the values of rationality, discipline, and sacrifice characteristic of capitalism and a modern cultural life closer to hedonism, the desire for immediate gratification, and, as we anticipated, consumerism.

Thus, a new social structure emerges, requiring new symbolic references that affirm and perpetuate capitalism as a new economic system from which that structure derives. From this perspective, Max Weber, in his classic study on the spirit of capitalism, identified Protestantism as one of the factors that facilitated the triumph of this new economic system. Thus, the world of work and religious beliefs appear intertwined. Weber exposes a correlation between divine salvation and everyday acts, condensed mainly in work.

As his involvement in worldly affairs increased, so did his appreciation of the significance of professional work. And so, each individual’s specific profession became a specific mandate from God to the individual to fulfill the specific position in which divine design had placed him or her.

(Weber 2004, p. 98)

Consequently, work, until then understood as mundane, came to be understood as a divine element, through which God communicated with the individual, giving them a place within society. Thus, work, deified and referred to by Luther as a profession, became a sign of salvation, an idea that perfectly matched the requirements of capitalism2. Today, salvation tends toward the secular, turning individual work into a goal, without identifying that reference to God, although operating in a key of sacralization that allows for a certain connection with the moral dimension derived from that other interpretation.

Thus, an inherent tension between faith and work is resolved through Weber’s analysis of the socio-historical situation, in which both dimensions are no longer conceived as isolated, but rather understood as a communication between planes of transcendence. It is the concomitance between daily work and faith that develops an experience of transcendence that resolves this tension. Proof of the validity of this link between religious and work experience can be found in recent studies that show that “religious workplaces can significantly enhance employee well-being” (Syahir et al. 2025, p. 3313) or that “(…) companies will benefit more from creating a supportive and accommodating environment for workers’ religious and spiritual selves, and such efforts may have little negative impact on less religious or nonreligious workers” (Goff et al. 2025, p. 20).

In turn, these incipient social structures and their consequent axiological clashes require and produce different configurations and experiences of sacrifice. We can refer here to how we have moved from the animal sacrificial modes of archaic societies to the personal renunciation prevalent in the late modern era, passing through the sublimation of the process by means of the written word, characteristic of the axial age3, constituting in each case a society with different symbolic worldviews. In this sense, Rene Girard summarizes the history of sacrifice and its inherent social repercussions.

Sacrifices are therefore different everywhere, but not to the point of justifying current relativism, the denial of all universality, and contempt for religion. Far from being “neurotic,” the savage desire for accuracy in imitation responds to a legitimate concern for effectiveness.

(Girard 2012, p. 58)

Thus, each society, at different moments in history, makes its own particular sacrifices. We try to illustrate this by looking at the uniqueness of the sacrifices of our time.

With the development of capitalism, both symbolic structures, and the subjects that incorporate them evolve, affecting each other, until, in the 20th century, the sociological literature identified the productive subject as the typical individual of industrial society. This new subject represents a leap in the modeling of subjectivities: although in different socio-historical contexts the identity of the individual is inseparable from their work facet (Marx [1844] 2007), the productive subject requires a specific configuration of identities. It is from this moment that two turning points arise. On the one hand, there is the increasing conquest of the multidimensional identity by the sphere of work, and on the other hand, there is a systemic requirement for the construction of the subject for the proper functioning of neoliberal logic (Foucault 2001).

It was necessary to conceive and implement, “through a strategy without strategists”, the types of education of the spirit, control of the body, organization of work, rest, and leisure that were the institutional form of the new ideal of man, who was both a calculating individual and a productive worker. It is this device of efficiency that provided economic activity with the necessary “human resources”, which has continued to produce souls and bodies fit to function in the great circuit of production and consumption. In a word, the new normativity of capitalist societies was imposed through a particular type of subjective normalization.

(Laval and Dardot 2013, pp. 328–29)

In this new system, where the individual is enrolled in a plurality of institutions, each with its own norms, symbols, and communities, the economic institution stands out as central and homogenizing social life. On a religious level, this implies that sacrifices must be appropriate to the economic institution, since each institution is the consecration of a sacrifice, and these institutions are in turn validated by these sacrifices. As Girard states,

Cultural institutions must all be interpreted as transformations of sacrifice, at the end of an evolution that gradually specializes them in the areas of activity most surrounded by sacrifice, as they are the most likely to engender conflict, such as funerals, marriage, initiation, food, education, political power, etc.

(Girard 2012, p. 58)

The centrality of the market as an institution in social life drives a specific sacrifice that transforms individuals into suitable members of that society. In this way, the modeling of subjectivities and the forging of the spirit (Foucault 2001) come to (have to) constitute the individual, since the structural functionality of the productive subject requires its ontological revision.

What is fascinating about sacrifice, then, is its capacity to be the symbolic operator through which the entirety of a group’s social and cultural life passes.

(Marcel Henaff 2002, p. 216)

In this way, the construction of character made the subject an individual whose subjectivity revolves around production, which extends to the different spheres of their life and not only to production limited to the working day4. However, in the face of this new type of individual, the “internal plurality of the subject”, pointed out by Laval and Dardot (2013, p. 330), still maintained an increasingly weak separation between the spheres of life. This validated and developed Weber’s idea that work takes on a divine form, and therefore power in social life, directing and guiding it in this new stage.

On the other hand, tireless professional work is strongly recommended as the best means of achieving this certainty; this and only this dispels any religious doubt and provides the assurance of a state of grace.

(Weber 2004, p. 131)

With these first steps, a modernity had already begun, characterized by the subject who makes himself a cog in the productive system, transmutable to systemic requirements, whether these are demanded in his role as a productive worker, consumer, student, companion, athlete, or even lover. Thus, a new symbolization of the world is constructed, where work is placed at the center and the subject pivots around it, reconfiguring the sacred and profane elements into a new structure. Beyond the sacralization of work, the person is also sacralized, further consolidating the imperative of the “enterprise of the self”.

This entails a change in sacrifices, a shift towards sacrifices adapted to the context of work and the subject, an understanding of these in terms of “renunciation” in order to obtain goods and services. In this situation, social relations are likely to become renunciation in pursuit of individual benefit. This individual sacrifice contrasts with the archaic concept of sacrifice, where goods are offered up to the sacred world on behalf of the community, connecting the sacred and the profane.

The inconsistent use of the term “sacrifice” in the field of economic practices would then be as follows: we refer to the now commonplace meaning of sacrifice as renunciation, deprivation, effort, to interpret social attitudes involving these virtues.

(Marcel Henaff 2002, p. 266)

This centrality of economic space in social life brings with it not only changes in the expressions and materializations of religious forms, as we have already seen from sacrifice and sacredness, but also shapes interpretations and actions that challenge the subject itself from a wide range of scenarios. According to Laval and Dardot, the definitive collapse of the fragile boundaries of the subject’s internal plurality, which barely safeguarded the separation between spheres, has already arrived with post-industrial societies. In these societies, the sphere of business engulfs subjectivity, giving rise to the “enterprise of the self” (Laval and Dardot 2013, p. 331; Aubrey 2000) as the axis of the constitution of individuality, causing the individual to throw themselves inexorably into the actions they undertake. As a result, business logic seeps into spheres previously unrelated to it, beyond religiosity: the sphere of the couple is quantified by sex-affective couples; sport is submerged by a logic of ranking that is evident, for example, in current trends in CrossFit, where daily individual activity is monitored, published, and put into competition, very much in line with the consequences of the metric society described by Steffen Mau (2019); and enjoyment becomes exhibited as a manifestation of the success of the enterprise, turning the experience into an echo of the subject’s triumph that would relegate intimate enjoyment to the background.

In essence, the subject no longer has to perform and produce only in the workplace, but must be an enterprise that produces and performs in all spheres of their multifaceted life, since one’s success and salvation lie in the success of the enterprise. Therefore, it is no longer a question of performing more, but also of enjoying more and enjoying what is socially required, since this increases human capital, or in other words, the capital of one’s personal enterprise. This is an effective and internalized mechanism (Reckwitz 2020). Not surprisingly, without safeguarding the internal plurality of the subject, control over the actions of the individual ceases to be external and acts from both outside and from within, turning subjects into sentinels of their own actions and of themselves.

In short, in contemporary societies, where work operates as a central institution (Freeman 2010), both sacrifice and the expected reward are located in the workplace, whose logic has spread to all areas of the subject’s life. Thus, sacrifice is no longer articulated as a connection between the two dimensions that emerge from the religious perspective (and which are made explicit in the distinction between the divine and the profane), but is instead established in the earthly world of work, where the individual, encapsulated in their work role, sacrifices themselves by focusing on themselves.

3. Defining Youth and Its (Collective) Destiny

Having pointed out the central role of work in society and its relationship to sacrifice, we now focus on the notion of youth, which requires some clarification in order to understand what we mean when we identify these social transformations and their impact on the young population.

In analyses carried out in the sociology of youth, there is always (or there always should be) an underlying question or tension that remains unresolved to a certain extent, namely, why do we use the category of youth as a valid unit of social analysis? In this regard, Enrique Martín Criado (2018, p. 2) provides an initial answer that could be used as a premise.

Whenever we categorize—and we always categorize—we highlight one of the many traits that characterize us: men versus women, young people versus adults, blondes versus brunettes, whites versus blacks, those from here versus those from outside… By emphasizing a trait, two important operations take place. First, the population is divided into groups, and those included in each group are homogenized. Second, and at the same time, the rest of the possible characteristics that could identify us are left in the background: they are implicitly assumed to be less important.

This idea about the establishment of social categories, applied to the field of youth, inevitably raises another series of questions. First, when we refer to youth as a social category, we must be aware that we are grouping, equating, and observing a whole series of individuals who, in principle, only share their age (Martín Criado 1998). Second, this exercise in categorization leads to a disregard for other elements that may be decisive in the position of the subjects. In other words, if we observe individuals on the basis of age, we will be failing to observe them on the basis of a series of other social variables that may be of greater significance, such as gender, social class, or origin. Essentially, what does a young university student, the son of the upper classes, originally from the country where he lives, have in common with a migrant woman, without family support, without the opportunity to study, the daughter of the working classes?

At the same time, there is a certain consensus that adulthood is marked by stability or, perhaps more precisely, that expectations surrounding adulthood are marked by the stabilization of life (Tirapu Intxaurrondo 2024), which is defined by the achievement of a series of key milestones (Garrido 1980, p. 103), among which the following stand out: obtaining a job with stability and average conditions in the area in question; living conditions that allow for procreation; and the factor with the greatest explanatory power (Carbajo-Padilla and Gómez 2011), achieving emancipation from the familiar household. Consequently, by relating these issues, we could consider the relevance of youth studies, since we are probably able to explain more factors linked to the achievement of residential emancipation through social class than through age.

It is at this point, amid tensions arising from the inevitable and necessary reduction of social reality in sociological analysis, that the notion of generation emerges, precisely to explain that there are common and determining factors in youth that go beyond age.

Generation as a unit of analysis refers to the comprehensibility of the (internal) world and the social context, articulated through Heidegger’s idea that a generation shares a collective destiny. In addition to the importance of the socio-historical context when assessing the relevance of a generational perspective (Sánchez de la Yncera 1993, p. 154), the current regressive context—as pointed out by Sánchez Capdequí and Roche Cárcel (2022)—could call into question the positivist assumption of a linear and progressive succession of history inscribed in the modern worldview (Rodríguez Fouz 2024). At the same time, this scenario raises a series of shared material conditions that are key in shaping the paths to adulthood.

From there, we can see how the current young generation is experiencing the precariousness of their living conditions, which implies the exacerbation of the consequences of belonging to a specific socioeconomic stratum, that is, the impoverishment of the working classes and the former middle classes (Tejerina 2020). However, the dynamics of individualization and the device for modeling subjectivities explained in the previous section have meant that this precariousness, understood as “a state of deprivation, instability, and insufficiency (…) a kind of vulnerability that is both material and existential or vital” (Carbajo-Padilla 2010, p. 127), is conceived as something individual, as a state of (existential) vulnerability that has its origin and solution in the individual.

In short, and based on the new way of the world5, the current young generation constitutes a generation precisely because it is experiencing the collective precariousness of its living conditions, the prolongation of youth (Carbajo-Padilla 2014), and the denial of adulthood on an individual basis, and there is no greater sign of collective destiny than to experience it individually. Consequently, establishing a dialogue between, on the one hand, the proposal of the neoliberal subject, the enterprise of the self, and the performance/enjoyment device proposed by Laval and Dardot, and on the other hand, the (internal) experience of the compressibility of youth time is necessary to understand both the latent generational meaning in youth and the transformation of the neoliberal subject that derives from the realization of precariousness; a dialogue traversed by the dynamics of sacralization specific to the context and the sacrifices of the modern age that incorporate the subject into these social dynamics.

4. Precariousness in the New World Order

The intensification and spread of precariousness is the common factor that conditions much of the current transition to adulthood, extending from the periphery of society to the middle classes and permeating, from the workplace, the entirety of young people’s lives (Tejerina 2020, p. 7). We are faced with a generation marked by the individual experience of collective and multiple precariousness, both in terms of its degree of expansion and its impact. As a result, a series of specific circumstances arise which, apart from specifically afflicting young people, may also account for novel transformations in society and reconfigurations of the subject of self-improvement and the religiosity underlying these issues.

On the one hand, in the workplace, today’s youth face a precarious context characterized by instability and uncertainty, given that the erratic nature of job placement has spread throughout their entire professional careers (Verd and López-Andreu 2012; Santamaría López 2018). The growing instability that prevents us from “de-futurizing the future” (Artegui 2017) makes it impossible to adopt long-term strategies. In other words, an increasingly present and vigorous uncertainty negates the ability to make long-term plans that bring about the desired stability.

Thus, precariousness, which is one of the forms of structural violence, passes through the filter of individuality, being conceived and experienced as an obstacle that must be faced in pursuit of self-improvement. There are many examples of this in the lives of young people, such as those who string together work placements at the expense of postponing their emancipation in search of endless experience, or the not inconsiderable number of those who return to their family home with the aim of saving up to buy their own home. These sacrifices, understood as instant renunciation and whose reward is and is known to be uncertain, incur the euphemism characteristic of sacrifice: the concealment of one form of violence (in this case, the structural condition) through the use of another form of violence, in this case, conceived as self-coercion or self-sacrifice.

Sacrifice is an effort to deceive the desire for violence by pretending, as far as possible, that the most dangerous victim, and therefore the most fascinating, is that of sacrifice rather than the enemy that obsesses us in everyday life.

(Girard 2012, p. 54)

In turn, democratization, and the consequent devaluation of university degrees as an element of distinction that provided advantages in the labor market (Martín Criado 2018), inevitably led to the impoverishment of the tool in which hopes for social advancement and the conquest of stability had traditionally been placed: education. The working classes and the former middle classes lost educational resources as a promise for the aspiration to govern the contingent. Furthermore, a job market saturated with graduates and hypercompetitive emphasizes the difficulties of entering and stabilizing employment, so that, given the scarcity of opportunities, their emergence would depend on young individuals (Lasheras-Ruiz and Pérez 2013, p. 148) via entrepreneurship. The enterprise of the self finds an (in principle) ideal enclave in which to establish itself as a device for internal control of action, and at the same time, as a repertoire of meaning, since the lack of opportunities is interpreted as a failure of the personal enterprise. This deactivates the possibility of a critical reading, which is dismantled by the discourses of entrepreneurship (Serrano 2016), management (Alonso and Fernández-Rodríguez 2013), and even coaching (Alonso and Fernández-Rodríguez 2021).

In this context of uncertainty, young people’s enterprises see how the threat of the unknown, or rather the realization of its permanent presence, becomes unmanageable. This dynamic, in conjunction with the processes of individualization (Beck 2009) and the consequences of liquid life (Bauman 2003), causes contingency to gain strength in all spheres of life, while the ability to predict the future fails to anticipate whether, five years from now, one will still have the same job, the same partner, the same environment, or even live in the same city. All of these realities, under a veneer of flexibility, leadership, adventure, or daring, reveal an individual assumption of well-being (Ararat Herrera 2010) that, in relatively recent times, was recognized as one of the pillars of the state. The markedly individualistic interpretation that distrusts the role of the state as guarantor or provider of well-being points, in turn, to the dismantling of a specific way of understanding, constructing, and operating state institutions. The individual enterprise as the cornerstone of the subject took with it the possibility of understanding the common and the alternative (Sánchez Capdequi 2021), since, with the individualization of responsibility (Butler 2004), it becomes more difficult to orient oneself towards the common good. Thus, taking individual responsibility for the consequences of generational precariousness facilitates the symbolic crisis of the welfare state, and at the same time, transforms the way the common good is understood.

There has been a shift from the idea of the state as a common provider to the state as an impediment to personal development. An example of this shift is the growing perception of tax collection as a burden on personal enterprise, without considering its function as a basic mechanism for sustaining social welfare6. This understanding of the role of the state also modifies the modeling of subjectivities: the individual would no longer rely on the state, but rather against the barriers and difficulties that it would put in their way. In this highly individualistic society, and in this context of collective precariousness understood as a challenge and responsibility that pushes towards personal sacrifice, the subject incorporates all three elements of sacrifice identified by Henaff: a sacrificer, a sacrificed, and a divinity to whom the sacrifice is offered.

Let us simply repeat the elements of the first series; every sacrifice involves at least three protagonists: (1) a sacrificer; (2) a sacrificed being; (3) a deity to whom the sacrifice is offered.

(Marcel Henaff 2002, p. 237)

The subject would be at once the sacrificer, the sacrificed object, and the object of the sacrifice. In other words, one sacrifices oneself for (the hope of) a better future.

Faced with the collapse of the foundations of stability, normality, and security, young people find themselves faced with the imperative of having to keep their employability (and also their matchability) in shape at all times (Gil Calvo 2005), given that, as Carbajo-Padilla (2014, p. 339) mentions, this prolongation of youth inevitably speaks of “the precariousness of the adult individual”, who, through their enterprise and entire subjectivity, tries to navigate the uncertain. Therefore, the current context of precariousness has contributed to emphasizing individuality as a lifeline in the face of the contingent, highlighting the need to reinforce the enterprise of the self, even at the expense of the self. In essence, faced with the rise of uncertainty and the inability to predict the future, the only option would be to increase the capital of the enterprise of the self, whatever its nature.

This shifts the violence of sacrifice onto oneself: in favor of a promise of economic prosperity, the individual self-harms, defocusing the violent social problem onto the subject and not pointing to the context as the perpetrator of violence.

Social forms are nothing more than organs or means of sublimating self-sacrifice, of a productivist repression that in principle has already lost its raison d’être.

(Echeverría 2008, p. 12)

Faced with the structural dimension of precariousness, which is nothing more than, recalling Girard, “the enemy that obsesses us in everyday life” (Girard 2012, p. 54), this is sublimated over one’s own existence, with the subject being drawn into the sacrificial dynamic of sacrificing oneself. In turn, the sacralization of the person, typical of the modern context, and the deification of work as a profession, legitimized by capitalism, bring with them self-sacrifice. In this way, the individual, who embodies the three elements of sacrifice, ends up assimilating and concealing the shared generational precariousness.

In this context, a particular relationship with the experience of enjoyment takes shape, which is inscribed in the space of expectations and the immediacy of young people’s experience. Enjoyment would be assumed by the cumulative need of capitalism or, more specifically, by what Hartmut Rosa (2019) called the “logic of increase”. The constant increase in productivity inevitably requires an increase in consumption capacity, but above all, it requires a determined will and habit of consumption that goes beyond the satisfaction of needs (actually generating new needs that are redefined symbolically rather than materially). Thus, this new subject turns (the consumption of) enjoyment into a symptom of the success of the enterprise of the self, which, in a genuinely youthful enclave that is broadcast daily on virtual social networks, only emphasizes the social requirement of enjoyment. As Laval and Dardot suggest:

This requirement, inherent to the regime of capital accumulation, had not yet unfolded its full effects. It is now a fait accompli when the subjective implication is such that this “beyond oneself” has become the condition of functioning, both for individuals and for companies. Hence the interest in identifying the subject as an enterprise of the self and as human capital: it is certainly a “plus of enjoyment” that one extracts from oneself, from one’s pleasure in living, from the simple fact of living, that makes the new subject and the new system of competition function. “Accounting” subjectivation and “financial” subjectivation ultimately define a subjectivation through the excess of oneself with respect to oneself, or through the indefinite overcoming of oneself.

(Laval and Dardot 2013, p. 361)

Delving deeper into the dimensions of jouissance, in psychoanalytic terms and with the help of Lacan, jouissance is defined as the surplus, as that which exists for the sake of existing without a purpose that constitutes it.

What is jouissance? Here it is reduced to nothing more than a negative instance. Jouissance is what serves no purpose.

(Lacan 2008, p. 11)

However, this idea of jouissance would be disrupted and redefined in the new context. Individuals would cease to understand jouissance as something in itself, inserting it into the framework of performance and equating jouissance with benefit/performance. Laval and Dardot (2013, p. 332) refer to this when they argue that “[modern management] is in this sense a ‘Lacanian’ government: the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other”. They refer to the fact that the enterprise of the self as a construction of the neoliberal subject incorporates the desires of the Other.

The new neoliberal framework turns the subject into an actor, object, and process, both in the sacrificial process already discussed and in the process of enjoyment. The subject needs an Other to desire in order to enjoy the surplus. However, in the neoliberal system, enjoyment ceases to be a surplus and becomes part of production, since, while complying with the imperative to “enjoy more”, the company’s capital is increasing.

Thus, enjoyment and sacrifice are reconfigured in this new social reality, becoming two social mechanisms that require the triad of object/other/agent. While sacrifice originally implied a violent ritual in favor of a God, the sacred, or the community, enjoyment originally pointed to a limitation, a ceiling that must be exceeded in order to be configured.

But, conversely, perhaps enjoyment in turn shows that it is lacking: because for this to be the case, something on its side must be lacking.

(Lacan 2008, p. 70)

In this way, the relationship between jouissance and sacrifice is narrowed, since, originally, sacrifice presupposed that symbolic limitation, which provided an overflow. This blurring, where neither of the two processes arises in relation to their classic elements but rather does so by, for, and from the individual themselves, would constitute a new contextual reality for young people.

5. The Tension Between Performance and Enjoyment

At this point, we have discussed the direct consequences of precariousness on today’s youth from the perspective of the performance/enjoyment device described by Laval and Dardot. It could be said that the individual experience of the common, as a sign of the collective generational destiny, has only reinforced the new reason of the world described by the authors, which can be seen in the assimilation of the enterprise of the self. However, as we saw in a previous section, the experiential plurality of subjectivities cannot be understood solely under the paradigm proposed by Laval and Dardot. Although young people may share a collective destiny that gives them generational meaning, there are different variables that continue to explain (perhaps to a greater extent) core factors in the modeling of subjectivities and in the very understanding of the (internal) world. The intensification of precariousness, the prolongation of youth, the impossibility of fulfilling the milestones required by adulthood, and a series of other dynamics that lead to the generalization of erratic trajectories of transition to adulthood (Martuccelli 2009) ultimately reveal the seams of the enterprise of the self. Faced with this realization of a precariousness that, well past the symbolic barrier of thirty (Carbajo-Padilla 2010), does not cease, the performance/enjoyment device ends up becoming tense, articulating novel configurations of these two axes.

As we said, the current context favors the emergence of subjects who fit in with the mandates of the enterprise of the self or with the productive perspective of performance/enjoyment. However, this issue is not generational, nor is it applicable to all young people, but rather refers to specific profiles. The fact that the institution of work is central to the productive and even chrononormative (Freeman 2010) organization of contemporary societies does not imply that the experience of work is so too. In this sense, work experiences typical of a labor ethic (Weeks 2011) remain fully valid (Prieto-Arratibel 2024). In fact, it is common to find Fordist aspirations among young people, both in their conception of life as a succession of stages (Alonso 2024, pp. 25–26) and in the separation of spheres and times. This, in turn, is accompanied by a symbolic structure of sacralization of the person, which permeates the subjectivities of the era, defining the person as an idea in itself, for their abilities as a human being, and not as an untouchable individual.

The driving force behind this new faith in the person is not selfishness, but sympathy for everything that man represents. It is a great feeling of empathy, of the ability to put oneself in the place of the other-who-is-part-of-me (the other who is me) in the face of (his) suffering, tragedy, etc.

(Beriain and Gil-Gimeno 2022, p. 7)

Consequently, trying to interpret the youth experience as a whole through the configuration of the enterprise of the self leads us to make a metonymic error, quite common in youth studies (Friedenberg 1959), which identifies a specific youth profile (more or less representative of the whole) as generational. Caution against such generalization forces us to distinguish between different experiences and situations. We thus see that a large part of young people who carry out Fordist-style work tend to maintain a separation between the spheres of life where performance is located in the workplace and fulfillment (in general) is sought in other spaces and experiences. For their part, young self-employed people experience a breakdown of the boundary between work and life (Valenzuela et al. 2015). Young people with intermediate-level qualifications maintain a strong connection with their profession, but from a stable and routine-based experience, almost in similar terms to those described by Sennett in The Craftsman (Sennett 2009). Finally, young people with university degrees and changing careers, characterized by constant training and curriculum hypertrophy, which collides with a labor market saturated with graduates, seem to identify most closely with the performance/enjoyment device and the mandates of the self-company (Tirapu Intxaurrondo 2024).

This specific profile, whose expectation of stability collides with a hypercompetitive labor market incapable of satisfying the demand for skilled (and fulfilling) employment, finds in the enterprise of the self a device for internal control of the spirit, in addition to a repertoire of meaning that, by instilling in the subject the responsibility for the emergence of opportunities, generates a way of understanding (oneself) in the workplace, and to a large extent, in the world.

A good example of the routinization/materialization of this trend is provided by Diego Carbajo-Padilla and Gómez (2011) when they talk about hyperactive waiting. Specifically, Carbajo explains that young graduates, when confronted with a labor market incapable of meeting their expectations of fulfillment, stability, and well-being, end up in a period of involuntary waiting characterized by hyperactivity. In other words, faced with a reality that forces them to pause, which is otherwise sanctioned by a context of acceleration, young individuals try to run faster to make up for their lag and try to achieve what they feel they should be experiencing. Thus, faced with erratic entry into the labor market and working conditions that fail to compensate for widespread precariousness, readjustment strategies involve increasing training, with the intention of increasing their degree of exclusivity. As a result of this tension, an inevitable frustration arises that they try to alleviate through acceleration. This waiting period becomes hyperactive with the intention of reducing it through increased training, which, despite being perceived as the only tool capable of distinguishing7, does not ensure either stability or fulfillment.

In short, as we said, this young profile finds in the enterprise of the self and in the performance/enjoyment device a way to give meaning to individualized generational precariousness. But beyond that, they also find in this imperative to perform better, both inside and outside of work, and in enjoyment as part of the expression of human capital, the constitution of a sacrifice that gives them hope, that is, the illusion of being able to compensate through self-enterprise for a precariousness assumed as their own responsibility. In short, the new rationality of the world makes the individual responsible, from their own subjectivity, for the task of compensating for the precariousness established in the world, but at the same time, it gives them their own sacrificial mission that, it is hoped, will culminate in the compensation of precariousness.

However, as we warned at the beginning of this section, this idea of the enterprise of the self, neither in its dimension as a repertoire of meaning nor in its dimension as a device for internal control of action, reflects the plurality of experiences that fall within the category of youth. Nor, obviously, can it illustrate prolonged precariousness ad aeternum. The typical subject we have just described corresponds to a specific subject characterized by the prolongation of youth and by the determination to compensate for the situation of precariousness through curricular hypertrophy and the premise of sacrifice for a better future. However, this type of subject represents a social class and a very specific path that escapes other realities, unable to continue investing in themselves at the expense of prolonging their youth.

This prolongation of youth, which would be the negation of the milestones that characterize adulthood, has specific effects on individuals and their well-being. Specifically, the forced postponement of the social imperative to transcend the stage of adulthood causes individuals to feel a sense of failure and frustration (Echeverría-Esparza and Tirapu Intxaurrondo 2025) because they are unable to compensate for the individual(ized) responsibility for success. Success is conceived as the achievement of the milestones of stable (and sometimes fulfilling) work, emancipation, and minimum economic stability. In the face of frustration arising from sacrifice without reward, new reconfigurations of the dialectic between performance and enjoyment emerge.

Firstly, among young working-class people, economic hardship and pressing precariousness, combined with performance that proves insufficient to overcome these situations, end up subverting the concept of enjoyment. A tendency to feel that enjoyment is undeserved is emerging among these young people, whose performance does not eliminate their precariousness. In a reinvigoration of the sacrificial mission, the idea that one must invest in oneself in anticipation of future rewards is reinforced, but in an almost stoic revision of this sacrificial path, enjoyment is seen as something undeserved, something that can only be enjoyed once the achievements for which one is sacrificing oneself have been attained. In this way, this kind of spirituality emerging among some young people (and especially among the youngest) envelops their subjectivity in the values of performance, although it no longer conceives of enjoyment as part of this, but rather understands it as a burden that prevents performance. Thus, the idea of sacrificing enjoyment in favor of performance emerges with some force. This idea could be summarized (abruptly) in the phrase “enjoy less to perform more”.

This stoic revision could be understood considering the contribution of Hervieu-Léger (2004, 2005), who explains how in late modern societies, individuals construct their own spirituality from fragments of different religious beliefs. Faced with performance that does not alleviate precariousness, a social demand for unattainable enjoyment, and a sacrifice that never ends, the subject extracts concrete principles from stoicism (Guerin 2022). This is something that is very identifiable on social media, which, in conjunction with the grouping of the secular and the sacred, both in the idea of work and in that of the person, allows for the construction of a repertoire of meaning that, through the invigoration of the sacrificial mission, sustains the individual despite their constant clash with precariousness. The subject is thus consolidated as a sacralized entity through the sacrifice of himself and his own enjoyment in the construction of the enterprise of the self.

Secondly, and in relation to another profile of young people, we find a configuration of the performance/enjoyment device that, far from discarding the latter in favor of the former, embraces it to continue performing. As the symbolic barrier of thirty approaches or is passed, young individuals feel the (self-)imposed social imperative to fulfill the milestones of adulthood more strongly. However, the new revocable condition of this stage, in relation to general precariousness, means that at this point, a decision must be made whether to continue investing in oneself or to give up some of the milestones that mark adulthood. An example of this is the type of youth trajectory that after trying to establish oneself in the hypercompetitive job market, ends up opting for a job alternative that may not provide the expected degree of fulfillment but allows for the stability required to face emancipation or procreation. Consequently, these diverse contexts in which individuals are forced and resigned to give up some of their aspirations end up generating a mixture of situations where the imperative of performance remains in force, but enjoyment becomes a support in the face of the unbearable.

Enjoyment, excess, and surplus are rearticulated as a lifeline that young people cling to in order to continue performing. In a context of generational frustration that overwhelms the subject, escapism takes precedence over daily activity and endless sacrifice, allowing the individual to hold on by leaving the self behind.

It allows them to put that situation of uncertainty on hold. Escape consists of some kind of activity that clouds everyday reality; it can be sports, humor, video games, watching television, listening to music, going out, or anything else (…) Indeed, leaving the self by escaping from that hostile and negative reality is a support, but it can also become something pathological. The pathologization of this departure from oneself is what prevents a return to reality, however adverse it may be.

(Álvarez-Benavides and Turnbough 2021, p. 152)

In this way, enjoyment would no longer be part of the enterprise of the self, nor would it form part of its capital. Nor would it be framed within the concept of surplus, but rather, it would be rearticulated within the specific context of these young people under the mandate of “enjoy to perform”, thus creating a support that, through evasion, traps the individual, a support that is based on the premise of the sacralization of the person. Under the idea that the individual is sacred, simply because they are human and regardless of their actions, evading performance is taken as a valid option (under which integrity is not lost, as could happen in the past, where one’s value seemed to reside in their work or civic abilities).

However, as Álvarez-Benavides and Turnbough point out, this way of experiencing enjoyment carries the risk of pathologizing the escape from the self, which, in turn, should make us reflect on the structural conditions of life that demand escape from the self as a means of coping. The degree of mental health problems suffered by the current young generation is neither coincidental nor unrelated to social factors (Belzunegui Eraso 2025).

6. Conclusions

In this article, we have addressed the transformation of the notion of sacrifice and sacredness from the perspective of young people’s experiences in a context marked by job insecurity and difficulties in the transition to adulthood as a generational expectation that is systematically truncated or postponed. The purpose was to highlight how notions of religion continue to operate in the experiences of different young subjectivities in areas that, from a secularizing modern perspective, tend to be understood as detached from religion. The division of social life into autonomous spheres, characteristic of modern thought, has created an impression of static and autonomous dimensions that this article calls into question by understanding the reality of job insecurity (which would refer to the economic sphere) from its direct effects on the construction of subjectivities that sacralize the “enterprise of the self” and internalize the sacrifice of enjoyment (and its postponement) as well as the drive toward performance as potential springs for full integration into adult life. Both dimensions (sacredness and sacrifice) would be forms of expression of transcendence that are integrated into the world (in its immanent reality) and are traversed by the evidence of a radical uncertainty linked to precariousness. This uncertainty and the vertigo of a longed-for future that is never achieved are exorcised through strategies of dissipation or coping that connect with the religious. In particular, in the way that they shape normative and evaluative references on how to act and attribute meaning to actions.

The journey has revealed the driving force of the “performance/enjoyment” mechanism in promoting attitudes that are ideal for our neoliberal economic system, which, in addition to questioning the symbolic and material foundations of the state’s role as a provider of social welfare, shifts responsibility for situations onto individuals, undermining the value of the common good as a reference point for meaning. Individuals, especially young people who suffer generationally from the structural violence of job insecurity, attribute to self-improvement (which implies the sacralization of their value as a person) and sacrifice (which puts enjoyment on hold and accelerates the search for individual “merits” with which to continue competing and consuming) the capacity for salvation that would be individual and that does not entail any substantive criticism of the very system that is expelling them from the established model of adulthood. It is important to note this reality as one of the signs of our times, although without forgetting that these experiences that we have identified as relevant in the context of today’s youth do not represent the entirety of that youthful experience.

In response to this diversity, we have recognized three subjectivities in the youth sphere, adapted to new social realities, which we can bring together in their relationship with elements specific to religions, such as sacralization and sacrifice. Both are adapted to these new societies, as the economic/labor sphere gains strength. Thus, young people find themselves involved in societies where work becomes the social axis, sacralization focuses on the person and work, while sacrifice becomes self-sacrifice. In this way, the principle of “self-enterprise” is constructed. This new reality is complemented by the precariousness of the present day, redefining youth as a diverse group that must face it. From there, the performance/enjoyment device emerges, according to which the three subjectivities described above are articulated.

The first subjectivity would be the one best suited to this device, a subjectivity that understands the balance between performance and enjoyment, which confronts the precariousness of its context with hyperactive waiting, which implies waiting in performance. A subjectivity sustained by the work of Laval and Dardot, which nevertheless ignores the plurality of realities.

Among the subjectivities that do not comply with the performance/enjoyment device, we found a first imbalance that tends towards performance, which we call “enjoying less in order to perform more”. Thus, those who assume this subjectivity act in accordance with the premise of renouncing/sacrificing enjoyment in pursuit of performance and face precariousness through this sacrifice of enjoyment for performance, which is ultimately a concrete form of self-sacrifice. They sacrifice their enjoyment in favor of their performance.

On the other hand, we found an antagonistic subjectivity, that we have named as “enjoying to perform”. This subjectivity is based on renouncing the total imperative of performance, where the idea of performance is sacrificed and enjoyment is taken as the main focus, facing precariousness through evasion, turning enjoyment into a support in the face of the intangible social and economic reality that overshadows everything. This externalization of the self is sustained under the premise of the sacralization of the person, since the person is understood as sacred in and of themselves, and not in terms of qualities or abilities.

Based on all of this evidence, we emphasize that religious elements continue to impact social life, readjusting and adapting to new demands, and shaping subjectivities and the self in each social context. Secular elements, such as work and consumption, and religious elements converge in these new realities, affecting modes of action, symbolic structures, and subjectivities, thus, as we pointed out, weakening the possibility of a critical generational stance in the face of precariousness that is suffered and combated individually, without reorienting oneself towards the collective, something that, however, religion did and does carry in its understanding of the value and meaning of human lives, which express the sacrificial and the sacred in communion with its idea of a truth that transcends the mundane. Based on this observation, it would be interesting to investigate how this effect of secularization, which staked the idea of the future on the sacralization of individuals, defining them as autonomous subjects responsible for their own destiny, could be reconfigured.