Abstract
Cieslik explores the accounts of happiness offered by five young adults in their late twenties and early thirties. The discussion illustrates the social nature of happiness and how it involves struggle and negotiation over how to live. The interviewees document the challenges of establishing homes and parenting and the trade-offs and compromises this entails. In comparing the experiences of men and women it details the difficulties that many women face today balancing the demands of waged work, caring and domestic labour and how this impacts on their wellbeing.
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Notes
- 1.
Although I refer to his group as the ‘Thirty Somethings’, two of the sample were in their late 20s, but much of the talk at interview, even with these younger interviewees centred on becoming a ‘Thirty Something’, hence the title of this chapter.
- 2.
One weakness with small-scale qualitative projects such as this is the inability to adequately map the social networks of individuals (and their structure or fields) to explore in detail how actors deploy various resources as they pursue their goals. To do this one would need to interview many more participants which was beyond the scope of the current project.
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Cieslik, M. (2017). The ‘Thirty Somethings’: Happiness in the Late Twenties and Thirties. In: The Happiness Riddle and the Quest for a Good Life. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-31882-4_8
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