For a long time the bargain sounded simple: work, contribute, and a stable life will come into reach. It was never equally available to everyone. But it gave ordinary people a direction. When I look at the anger moving through European streets, I wonder how much of it begins with the feeling that this bargain has quietly been withdrawn.
A payslip does not answer the question on its own. What matters is what remains after rent, food, transport and the small emergencies that make up a life. If the answer is almost nothing, a person can be employed and still feel permanently unsafe. Telling that person to be grateful for having a job is not an economic policy.
Do not call anxiety laziness
I dislike the habit of blaming young workers for wanting too much. Many are asking for something remarkably modest: the ability to plan six months ahead without a single unexpected bill undoing everything. Older generations should listen before they lecture. The starting conditions are not the same.
I also know that businesses face real costs. I build things myself. But we cannot keep describing every pressure on employers as practical and every pressure on workers as emotional. Both are real. A serious politics has to hold both in view.
The promise worth rebuilding
The answer is not nostalgia for an economy that will not return. It is a more honest account of what work should provide now: enough to live, a chance to learn, a route into housing, and a share in the productivity that technology creates.
If Europe wants people to believe in the future, it has to make that future visible in their ordinary Tuesday. A job should be more than proof that somebody is busy. It should make a life possible.
This column represents the author's view. It is separate from News Beast's automated, source-backed news reports.