The Pandemic and the Challenges for Young People of Living Well in the Anthropocene

This article builds on work in which we have engaged nearly 100 young people in video-based interviews in two separate projects that have been concerned with asking young people about their lives in the present (that was 2020–2023) and the challenges and opportunities that they imagined in their futures—personally and more widely concerning the crises of the pandemic, the climate and global capitalism. That work has been framed by a critical engagement with young people’s health and well-being, and the issues that impact their hopes for living well in the Anthropocene. In this context, we tell a version of two young people’s stories and introduce, and then extend on, the idea of socio-ecological understandings of young people’s health and well-being, to argue that while these models offer productive possibilities, they fail to critically account for the crises of capitalism and the climate that the pandemic is a consequence of.