The Role of Desired Future Selves in the Creation of New Experience: The Case of Greek Unemployed Young Adults

This article uses data from a qualitative case study to help support and further develop an argument about the uses of futuristic-hypothetical narratives of self as a tool to educate desire through imagination. First, existing research about the role of the future in the creation of new experience in narrative approaches to history, psychology, and sociology will be brought into dialogue. Via such interchange, the claim will be made that: (1) the creation of new experience requires seeing a difference between past and future selves, (2) for this difference to have motivating force in the present it has to be perceived as experientially close, and (3) experiential closeness is a cultural as much as personal matter that depends on the perceived believability of desired future selves. Second, we explore how this tension between difference (distance) and closeness (proximity) is discursively and narratively constructed by young unemployed people in Greece who wrote and shared narratives of desired future selves. Finally, we propose that the intricacies of an education of desire as constructed by these young people may represent a need of the modern world.