Youth, Precarity, and Social Futures: An Original Sociological Theory of Nigerian Millennial Experience

Nigerian millennials, broadly defined as persons born between 1981 and 1996, have come of age in conditions of acute economic precarity, digital transformation, political frustration, and international cultural exposure that are producing new forms of social subjectivity, aspiration, and collective action not captured by existing youth sociology frameworks. This doctoral study develops an original sociological theory of Nigerian millennial experience and social future-making, grounded in five years of ethnographic and biographical research across Lagos, Abuja, Kano, and Enugu. Research combined generational ethnography in urban millennial social spaces including tech hubs, entertainment venues, religious organisations, and protest spaces, biographical narrative interviews with 108 millennials across diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and regions, analysis of millennial digital cultural production, and social movement analysis of the 2020 EndSARS protest as a millennial generational event. The original theoretical framework, termed Aspirational Precarity, proposes that Nigerian millennials occupy a distinctive generational position in which globally connected aspirational identity formation occurs within conditions of structural economic precarity that makes aspiration simultaneously driving and destabilising. Three original theoretical contributions are advanced: a theory of hustle habitus as the normative adaptation to precarity that valorises entrepreneurial mobility over institutional loyalty; a concept of digital elsewhere-imagination describing how global digital culture creates aspirational reference communities that intensify relative deprivation; and an account of periodic collective action as a pressure-release valve within aspirational precarity that mobilises millennial cohort solidarity without producing sustained structural transformation. Keywords: millennials, precarity, youth sociology, Nigeria, aspirational identity.