This study is grounded in a critical qualitative epistemology, informed by feminist theory, situated knowledge, and interpretive inquiry. Within this perspective, knowledge is not viewed as a mirror of reality but as a relational, partial, and historically situated construction—shaped by power dynamics, cultural narratives, and the researcher’s own positionality (Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1991; Hooks, 1994). Rather than seeking universal truths, this approach emphasizes understanding how individuals make meaning of their experiences within sociopolitical structures of inequality and affective regulation.

The choice of a qualitative methodology responds to the study’s aim of exploring complex emotional phenomena—such as moralized anxiety, internalized emotional mandates, and self-demand—which are often pathologized or depoliticized within dominant clinical frameworks. A narrative-centered approach enabled attention to the symbolic, affective, and contextual dimensions of distress without reducing them to diagnostic or individualistic categories.

Importantly, the feminist orientation underpinning this research is not limited to its thematic focus on young women’s experiences. It informs the entire research logic—from the formulation of questions to the interpretation of narratives—by foregrounding relational ethics, epistemic accountability, and resistance to discourses that normalize emotional self-exploitation (Hesse-Biber, 2013; Jaggar, 2014).

The researcher’s own position—as a woman of similar generational and educational background—constituted a double condition. On one hand, it fostered affective proximity and trust during the research encounter. On the other, it required ongoing reflexivity regarding how shared cultural codes might obscure differences, reproduce complicity, or create blind spots (Finlay, 2002; Pillow, 2003). Rather than being viewed as a methodological threat, this involvement was mobilized as a resource for interpreting the tensions, contradictions, and silences embedded in participants’ narratives.

In this framework, participants were not approached as clinical cases, but as active meaning-makers navigating and narrating affective contradictions in a specific sociocultural context. This situated reflexivity also opened space to question dominant psychological categories—such as “failure,” “instability,” or “lack of resilience”—as affective effects of structural expectations and normative ideals of emotional performance. In this way, the analysis did not seek to diagnose or classify, but to explore how distress is lived, narrated, and occasionally contested within broader affective regimes.

The knowledge generated does not aim for statistical generalization, but rather for interpretive, political, and ethical resonance (Creswell & Poth, 2018; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). Relevance was understood in terms of the capacity to foster critical insight, cultural intelligibility, and engagement with broader social conversations—both within and beyond academic spaces.

This study adopts a qualitative, exploratory, and interpretive design aimed at understanding how young women make sense of emotional distress in the context of neoliberal mandates of performance, positivity, and empowerment. Rather than seeking causal explanations or statistical generalizations, the study sought to generate situated, relational, and critically engaged knowledge about the narratives emerging around anxiety, emotional self-demand, and the construction of the “ideal self.”

Drawing on a discursive and post-foundational approach, emotional experiences were not treated as fixed intrapsychic states, but as dynamic and relational constructions shaped by cultural frameworks, gendered expectations, and normative discourses (Davies & Harré, 1990; Gergen, 1991). These affective forms of subjectivation were examined within the sociopolitical context of post-pandemic Spain, marked by intensified pressures related to academic performance, economic precarity, and emotional self-regulation in digital spaces.

The analysis focused on participants’ narratives, conceived not as transparent expressions of an inner self, but as situated discursive practices through which social meanings, moral orientations, and emotional tensions were negotiated. Particular care was taken to avoid flattening participants’ accounts into overly coherent narratives. Contradictions, hesitations, and emotional ambivalences were preserved as meaningful components of the analysis, not as inconsistencies to be resolved.

This discursive, post-foundational positioning allowed for attention not only to thematic content, but also to silences, ambivalences, and affective contradictions that reveal the complexities of living under a neoliberal emotional regime.

The sample consisted of twelve young women, aged between 22 and 28, all residing in urban areas of Spain and either currently enrolled in or recently graduated from university-level education. Although the inclusion criteria allowed for ages 20 to 30, the final sample naturally concentrated within a narrower range. All participants reported sustained emotional distress related to self-demand, anxiety, social comparison, perfectionism, and a persistent sense of inadequacy in response to everyday pressures.

While statistical representativeness was not pursued, the sample included a range of academic and professional trajectories, employment conditions, and affective narratives. Most participants lived in Zaragoza, but differed in terms of living arrangements, financial stability, and subjective relation to emotional mandates. The decision to focus on urban, university-educated women responds to the study’s theoretical emphasis on how neoliberal emotional logics are articulated in settings of educational privilege, visibility, and self-regulatory expectations—contexts where positivity, performance, and self-improvement are particularly emphasized.

Inclusion criteria required participants to self-identify as women, be between 20 and 30 years of age, and have experienced ongoing emotional discomfort related to performance, control, or affective self-optimization. During initial contact, we used a brief screening to ensure analytic relevance: candidates described ongoing emotional discomfort related to performance, control, or affective self-optimization (in recent months) and outlined their typical engagement with social media (platforms used and general frequency). We sought regular engagement to address dynamics of visibility and comparison, but we did not impose quantitative thresholds nor exclude low-activity users. The final sample largely consisted of women reporting some routine platform use.

In line with the study’s non-clinical and non-pathologizing stance, we excluded participants undergoing acute emotional crises at the time of fieldwork—based on mutual agreement rather than diagnostic criteria. This exclusion criterion and the mutual agreement at initial contact ensured that participation was emotionally sustainable and ethically sound. When needed, participants were informed of available support resources.

We used a purposive sampling strategy, combining direct invitations to women known to the researcher with snowball recruitment. This approach, grounded in trust and generational proximity, fostered the emergence of intimate, reflective narratives and facilitated the creation of an emotionally safe interview environment.

The final number of interviews (N = 12) was determined according to principles of narrative richness and theoretical sufficiency (Charmaz, 2014), rather than saturation in a positivist sense. In critically oriented qualitative research, the value of the sample lies not in its size but in its capacity to illuminate lived contradictions, emotional ambivalences, and the discursive production of meaning (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). In this study, the depth and diversity of participants’ accounts provided a robust foundation for analyzing how neoliberal affective mandates are embodied, negotiated, and—at times—resisted by young women in contemporary Spain.

Our reliance on urban, university-based personal/professional networks and snowballing facilitated trust and depth, yet it likely introduced affinity- and convenience-bias, narrowing the intersectional range of experiences represented. In particular, it may have tilted participation toward women sharing similar educational, urban, and socio-cultural milieus and discouraged more dissenting or less institutionally connected voices. We sought to surface dissonant narratives during coding and through peer debriefing; nonetheless, a more purposive, intersectionally oriented recruitment would better capture how affective mandates—and refusals—are (re)configured across structural locations.

The data collection technique employed in this study was the in-depth semi-structured interview, selected for its capacity to explore the emotional, symbolic, and narrative dimensions of participants’ distress. This format allowed for a general thematic structure to be followed, while also maintaining a flexible and open conversational space that respected the rhythm and expressive style of each woman.

We conceived the interviews as relational and reflexive encounters grounded in care and horizontality, deliberately distanced from an interrogative logic. The aim was not to extract information, but to co-construct meaning through attentive, validating listening. In line with the study’s feminist and critical epistemological framework, the interview was approached as an ethical-political space where participants could articulate affective experiences in their own terms.

Prior to each interview, participants received a brief explanation of the study’s aims and were invited to ask questions, clarify doubts, and confirm their comfort with the recording process. Throughout the conversation, they were reminded that they could skip any question or pause the interview at any time without pressure. Emotional hesitations or silences were respected as meaningful elements, rather than seen as obstacles to data production.

The interview guide was informed by prior critical feminist literature on affective labor, neoliberal agency, and emotional regulation. It covered several core thematic areas: perceptions of the “ideal self” and personal expectations; the relationship with productivity, success, and rest; emotional management and subjective discomfort; the influence of social media on self-image and self-worth; discourses of empowerment, resilience, and self-help; experiences of guilt, comparison, and everyday anxiety; and personal strategies for coping with or resisting these emotional mandates. For instance, participants were invited to reflect on questions such as: “What does being emotionally strong mean to you?” or “Can you describe a moment when you felt you were falling short of who you ‘should’ be?” A full version of the semi-structured interview guide is included in the Appendix.

We conducted all interviews individually and online (via video call), for reasons of accessibility, convenience, and within the social context of the post-pandemic period. We encouraged participants to choose a private, comfortable setting, and the digital format enabled participation from different cities, while fostering a sense of intimacy as conversations unfolded in familiar environments. The online interview modality was also consistent with the ethics of accessibility and the shifting affective geographies of everyday life in the wake of COVID-19. We were mindful that network-based recruitment can heighten social-desirability dynamics—especially when participants perceived indirect ties to the researchers—so we emphasized confidentiality, normalized ambivalence and critique, and reiterated that disagreement with dominant narratives was welcome.

Conducting interviews online shaped disclosure in specific ways. For some participants, the familiar home setting lowered social risk, enabling calibrated vulnerability and greater control over visibility (e.g., camera on/off, pacing, breaks). Conversely, digital mediation may have flattened affective and embodied cues—masking micro-silences, overlaps, gestures, or shifts in posture. We attended to these dynamics by slowing the interview pace, explicitly welcoming silence and hesitation, and annotating paralinguistic features (tone, tempo, pauses) in reflexive field notes; when connectivity glitches interrupted a thread, we named the disruption and revisited the narrative rather than reading it as lack of meaning.

The interview guide included prompts on platform-specific affordances (e.g., posts/stories, seen receipts, streaks, follower counts), audience management (close-friends lists, archiving), comparison, and affective self-presentation; low activity or selective non-participation were treated as meaningful practices rather than exclusion criteria. Each interview lasted approximately 60 to 90 minutes. With participants’ consent, we audio-recorded the interviews, transcribed them verbatim, and documented emotional tone, silences, hesitations, emphases, and significant non-verbal cues in reflexive field notes. These methodological decisions were aimed at ensuring a dense, situated, and ethically engaged approach to the voices and experiences shared.

The data analysis followed an inductive–deductive logic, grounded in reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2019) and adapted through a critical feminist lens. This method allowed for the integration of theoretical sensitivity with openness to the situated, ambivalent, and sometimes contradictory character of participants’ accounts. The aim was not to “verify” predefined concepts, but to explore how young women narrate, negotiate, and occasionally resist dominant emotional norms.

The process began with familiarization through multiple readings of the transcripts, accompanied by analytical memos that noted tensions, silences, and emerging affective patterns.

We coded the data manually, attending to meaning units related to emotional mandates, the ideal self, performativity, guilt, comparison, or resistance. Specifically, we identified affective mandates when participants invoked moralized expectations about feeling and performance (e.g., positivity, resilience, composure), and we traced how these mandates were internalized, negotiated, or refused across narratives and paralinguistic/non-verbal cues. The coding followed a two-phase strategy. First, an open coding phase identified initial meaning units in a grounded, inductive way. Then, axial coding was used to group these into conceptual categories that captured tensions, recurrences, or emotional logics.

These categories formed the basis for the thematic configurations developed later in the analysis. This two-phase coding strategy helped preserve the complexity and ambiguity of narratives while identifying shared affective patterns. To counter potential network effects in interpretation, we engaged in negative-case analysis, retained dissonant/counter-narratives during coding, and held peer-debriefing sessions with colleagues outside our immediate networks; we also kept reflexive memos documenting how recruitment pathways might have influenced meaning-making.

We gradually clustered preliminary codes into thematic configurations—not as fixed categories, but as interpretive axes that illuminated recurring emotional logics across narratives. These configurations were refined iteratively in dialogue with the theoretical framework, while remaining attentive to what exceeded or unsettled it. Thematic revision prioritized cultural resonance and affective density over frequency, in line with the study’s interpretive and critical orientation.

Throughout the process, the researcher maintained a reflexive stance regarding her own positionality and assumptions. Peer debriefing sessions with three colleagues from a feminist qualitative research group enriched the interpretive process and supported analytical transparency. Rather than aiming for thematic saturation or representational completeness, the analysis sought interpretive depth, narrative nuance, and epistemic integrity.

Ultimately, the results do not seek to universalize or pathologize emotional experiences, but to situate them within a broader affective economy shaped by neoliberal ideals of performance, positivity, and self-regulation. In doing so, the analysis foregrounds the cultural and political dimensions of emotional distress as narrated by the participants.

The design and development of this study adhered to the fundamental ethical principles of qualitative research with human participants: autonomy, informed consent, confidentiality, relational care, and narrative justice. In line with the critical and feminist orientation of the study, particular attention was paid to the power dynamics inherent in the research process, as well as to the potential emotional impact of the interviews.

All participants were informed—both verbally and in writing—about the objectives of the study, the voluntary nature of their participation, their right to withdraw at any time, and the confidential handling of their data. We ensured anonymity by using pseudonyms and omitting identifying information. We recorded interviews only with explicit consent, stored them in secure digital environments, and deleted the files after transcription and final analysis.

Drawing from a feminist ethics of care (Gilligan, 1993; Hooks, 1994), the interview was conceived not as a data extraction technique but as a relational space: an encounter where both speech and silence were valued, and where respect for the participant’s lived experience guided every interaction. Narrative pressure was consciously avoided, pauses were offered when needed, and active listening was maintained to honor each participant’s expressive agency.

Throughout the research process, a posture of critical reflexivity was sustained to examine the researcher’s own positionality, emotional investments, beliefs, and potential biases. Knowledge was understood as always situated, co-constructed, and shaped by power relations.

Although the study did not involve legally recognized vulnerable populations or invasive procedures, all recommended ethical guidelines for qualitative research in psychology were followed. The research process was carefully documented to ensure transparency, traceability, and methodological accountability.

A recurring thread in participants’ narratives was the internalized demand to remain emotionally stable, productive, and self-sufficient at all times. This pressure was rarely named as a structural imposition. Rather, it was experienced as an inner voice—persistent, moralizing, and often difficult to distinguish from one’s own thoughts or values.

This “ideal self” echoes the affective model described by Gill and Orgad (2015): a self that is grateful, positive, and resilient. Yet participants did not always articulate it in the same way. Some embraced it as a sign of strength or maturity, while others questioned it more explicitly. For many, the mandate felt naturalized—“just how things are”—but its origin remained opaque.

Interestingly, a few participants expressed ambivalence about this logic. They acknowledged the emotional cost of maintaining composure and self-sufficiency, yet simultaneously blamed themselves when they failed to do so. This created moments of cognitive and affective dissonance.

Not all participants framed their emotional demands as negative. A couple of them spoke about the pressure to “keep it together” as a protective mechanism, especially in contexts where showing emotion was previously punished or misunderstood.

These divergent and sometimes contradictory accounts suggest that the ideal of the emotionally competent self is not a fixed identity but a negotiated and unstable affective reference. It may be mobilized differently depending on each woman’s history, environment, and relational context. Rather than treating it as a universal internalization, we interpret it as a flexible script, activated and inhabited in ways that mix identification, resistance, and emotional ambivalence.

A transversal theme that emerged throughout the interviews was the experience of discomfort, confusion, or guilt when feeling or expressing negative emotions—especially in the absence of a “clear” or external cause. Several participants described how sadness or anxiety would appear “out of nowhere,” and their first reaction was not self-compassion but doubt, irritation, or self-correction.

This logic, while not always fully conscious, reflects a broader emotional regime where only justified or productive emotions are tolerated. In this context, distress that cannot be rationalized tends to be denied, hidden, or interpreted as personal failure.

For some, this silencing was framed as a learned response—something that had helped them in the past or was expected in their family or work environment. Others recognized it as harmful, yet still felt unable to do otherwise.

These narratives resonate with what Ahmed (2010) calls the “happiness mandate”: a cultural expectation that treats negativity not just as unpleasant, but as morally suspect. In this framework, suffering must be corrected or hidden, rather than explored or shared.

Participants described strategies to manage this internal conflict—some used humor, others intellectualized their distress, and many spoke of isolation as a form of emotional self-regulation. However, several also acknowledged the long-term cost of these strategies.

Importantly, not all silencing was framed as externally imposed. Some women described it as an automatic, internalized pattern—something they did without even realizing. Others named it as a protective mechanism: a way of staying functional in environments that were not emotionally safe.

Rather than interpreting this distress as a lack of emotional competence, we understand it as a situated response to affective norms that reward positivity and penalize fragility. In this sense, emotional silencing becomes both an individual coping strategy and a reflection of broader structural pressures.

Across all interviews, social media emerged as a central space for emotional regulation, self-exposure, and comparison. Participants did not experience these platforms merely as tools for entertainment or connection, but as arenas where personal and emotional value is at stake.

Several women described small decisions that, while seemingly minor, were experienced as acts of subjective affirmation: saying no, allowing themselves to cry, resting without justification, or showing vulnerability without apology. These actions challenge the ideal of constant emotional self-control and open up possibilities for inhabiting emotionality differently.

These resistances do not appear as fully consolidated discourses but rather as affective gestures marked by ambivalence—interrupted by guilt, fear of judgment, or the feeling of not doing “the right thing.” Nevertheless, as Ahmed (2010) suggests, the decision not to perform emotional resilience or positivity in public can be understood as a form of affective disobedience against the neoliberal emotional regime.

Although much of the discourse gathered reflects a deep internalization of the neoliberal ideal of emotional strength, several interviews revealed moments of exhaustion, saturation, and small subjective ruptures. Some participants began to voice their weariness at having to constantly uphold an image of resilience, positivity, and self-sufficiency.

These expressions, still fragile, point to a fissure in the logic of emotional performance. They do not articulate an explicit or systematic rejection of the ideal self, but they reflect an emerging awareness of the emotional exhaustion that comes with embodying it.

These forms of resistance did not emerge as coherent discourses, but rather as hesitant gestures marked by contradiction and ambivalence—often followed by guilt, fear of judgment, or a lingering sense of not doing “the right thing.”

Nonetheless, as Ahmed (2010) argues, the refusal to embody emotional resilience or positivity in public can itself be a form of affective dissidence within the neoliberal emotional regime. These minor ruptures challenged not only an external expectation but an internalized ideal that often feels inseparable from one’s identity.

These micro-practices of subjective disruption invite us to reconsider agency not as heroic or radical, but as an embodied and situated capacity for everyday affective disobedience (Cvetkovich, 2012; Lazar, 2014). While these acts did not always bring relief or resolution, they were often described as necessary—however uncomfortable—for reclaiming emotional honesty.

In a context where distress is privatized and framed as a symptom of individual insufficiency, inhabiting fragility may become a political gesture. These affective dissonances, though fragmented, highlight the political potential of emotional distress—once it stops being silenced and begins to be narrated as excess, limit, or quiet resistance.

Taken together, the four affective configurations identified here have direct consequences for how emotional life is taught, supported, and governed. First, they call for critical reflexivity within psychological and educational settings, where emotional competence is often framed as an individual skill to be cultivated—rather than as a socially conditioned and politically mediated process. Interventions that promote emotional regulation must interrogate the cultural ideals they implicitly reinforce. Second, the results invite mental health professionals and policymakers to challenge dominant narratives that privatize distress and obscure its structural and cultural origins. Approaches centered exclusively on individual adaptation risk reproducing the very emotional mandates that contribute to suffering—particularly among young women navigating spaces of high self-expectation, visibility, and affective control.

More broadly, this study advocates for legitimizing emotional expressions that fall outside the normative frameworks of positivity, productivity, or resilience. Creating spaces—in schools, workplaces, digital environments, and healthcare systems—where fragility is not treated as failure, but as a valid mode of being, is an urgent ethical and political task. These spaces must not only allow for distress, but also recognize the political meaning of discomfort, ambivalence, and emotional limits. The everyday microgestures described by participants—saying no, resting without guilt, expressing sadness without justification—can serve as starting points for reimagining affective support beyond correction or optimization. Practices that affirm these expressions of affective disobedience may foster more humane, plural, and collectively responsive approaches to care.

In sum, this study foregrounds the political potential of distress. Rather than pathologizing it, the challenge is to listen to it as a signal of dissonance with an unjust affective order. Doing so enables us to imagine and co-construct more livable emotional worlds—ones in which being tired, sad, or lost does not diminish one’s worth, but can be met with recognition, solidarity, and care.

This study is based on in-depth interviews with twelve young women living in urban contexts in Spain, offering a situated and interpretive understanding of their emotional experiences. The qualitative, critical, and reflexive design enabled an exploration of how distress is lived, narrated, and contested within a sociocultural landscape shaped by neoliberal discourses of performance, positivity, and emotional self-regulation. However, this approach also entails certain limitations.

First, the findings are not intended to be generalizable but to generate theoretical and affective resonance. The focus on urban, university-educated, and predominantly white women highlights the intensity of neoliberal mandates in contexts of visibility and educational privilege. At the same time, this homogeneity of the sample implies a partial reading of the phenomenon. While analytically fruitful, such a perspective may obscure how emotional mandates operate in other lived realities and structural positions. Anticipating this limitation is important to prevent a homogenized understanding of young women’s emotional distress.

Network-based recruitment likely amplified the sample’s homogeneity and gatekept certain perspectives. While analytically productive for depth, this approach limits the transferability of our claims beyond urban, university-linked milieus. Accordingly, our predominantly white, university-educated, urban sample narrows the intersectional range of experiences considered.

Future research should intentionally recruit across racialized and migrant communities, working-class and precarious labor contexts, queer and trans participants, and disabled and neurodiverse populations to examine how affective mandates and micro-resistances are reconfigured at these intersections. Comparative designs (urban/rural; majority/minority; citizen/migrant) and participatory approaches with community partners could help decenter dominant affective norms of “emotional competence” and trace distinctive grammars of affective dissent.

Because data were generated through online, video-based interviews, some embodied and relational cues may have been attenuated despite our efforts to slow the pace, welcome silence, and annotate paralinguistics; this may have constrained interpretations of affective nuance. To protect confidentiality in a small urban scene, we did not systematically collect markers such as racialization or sexual identity, which—together with network-based recruitment—limits the breadth of our intersectional analyses. Self-selection and social-desirability are also possible: volunteers connected to university networks and familiar with critical vocabularies may be overrepresented, and some narratives may have been shaped by perceived ties to the researchers, even though we normalized ambivalence and dissent.

Moreover, fieldwork took place between September and December 2024, a conjuncture marked by post-pandemic strains, housing pressures, and inflation; the salience of some themes may therefore reflect this time-bound context, and transferability to other periods should be cautious. (Interviews were conducted in Spanish and excerpts translated into English for publication; while we sought semantic and affective fidelity, translation may have smoothed idioms or connotations.)

Further studies could also examine more explicitly the intersections between affective self-demand and clinically diagnosed suffering. Exploring how anxiety, burnout, or mood disorders are shaped by the imperative to remain emotionally functional could help bridge critical psychological theory with therapeutic practice, and inform more socially attuned forms of care. Institutional contexts also deserve deeper attention. Schools, therapy spaces, and workplaces often function as laboratories of emotional regulation—reproducing, naturalizing, or occasionally disrupting the emotional ideals examined in this study. Understanding how these institutions shape the affective economy of everyday life is key to developing collective responses.

Methodologically, ethnographic, longitudinal, and participatory approaches may be especially useful to trace how emotional norms are internalized over time, and how small, ambivalent acts of resistance take shape in daily life. Attending to pauses, contradictions, or ordinary ruptures could provide a richer map of how affective agency is exercised—often quietly and without a name.

Although Spain is not among the most structurally marginalized contexts in global academic production, it remains underrepresented in international debates on gendered neoliberal subjectivity. Most empirical studies in this field originate from Anglophone countries, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom. This research offers a critical feminist contribution from a Southern European context, enriching the transnational understanding of affective regimes by foregrounding cultural specificities and ambivalent forms of dissent. Lastly, this study does not aim to speak for the women who participated, but to co-create a space where their emotional tensions can be heard in their complexity. Drawing on critical theory and feminist epistemology, the analysis seeks not to simplify or resolve these tensions, but to trace how they are felt, narrated, and occasionally unsettled. It is in the gaps—between what is felt, what is expected, and what can be spoken—that possibilities for affective reconfiguration begin to emerge.

This study has shown that the emotional distress described by many young women cannot be adequately understood through clinical or psychopathological categories alone. Rather than emerging from individual dysfunction, these experiences reflect a cultural landscape in which positivity, resilience, and emotional self-regulation are moralized as personal duties. The neoliberal “ideal self”—efficient, emotionally competent, grateful, and always improving—operates not only as an external model but as an internalized affective lens through which many young women judge their worth and interpret their emotional lives.

One of the most striking findings of this research is that distress does not disappear under this affective regime; it is silenced, reframed as personal failure, or aestheticized as something to be quickly managed. Emotions such as sadness, anxiety, or exhaustion are rarely recognized as valid responses to structural pressures—instead, they are treated as signs of weakness, lack of gratitude, or poor self-management. Neoliberalism thus governs not only behavior, but also affect, desire, and the frameworks through which emotions are made (in)visible.

Located within the sociopolitical context of post-pandemic Spain—marked by youth precarity, pressure to self-optimize, and the digitization of emotional life—this study proposes reframing distress not as a personal shortcoming, but as a symptom of an unsustainable affective economy. Crucially, this does not mean dismissing individual agency or the value of personal coping resources, but contextualizing emotional suffering within broader regimes of normativity and self-demand.

Still, the findings also point to cracks in this logic. Several participants voiced their emotional exhaustion and articulated subtle, ambivalent refusals: saying no, slowing down, crying in public, or admitting not to be okay. These gestures—though small and often interrupted by guilt—can be read as affective dissent, challenging the idea that strength and composure are always desirable. To resist the mandate of strength is not to collapse, but to affirm other ways of being: more porous, fragile, and real.

Listening to these voices is not only an academic exercise—it is an ethical and political task. It demands that we question dominant definitions of well-being that frame distress as failure, and instead recognize emotional discomfort as a potential sign of dissonance with the prevailing affective order. From this perspective, suffering becomes not something to correct, but something to hear and think with.

These findings raise important questions for practice. How can educational and clinical institutions avoid reproducing cultures of emotional performance? What would it mean to support emotional life without moralizing it? And how might we create spaces—both public and private—where fragility is not punished, but received with care, legitimacy, and collective meaning?

Ultimately, this study does not seek to close the debate, but to open it. Perhaps the most urgent question is not how to become stronger, more resilient, or more emotionally efficient, but rather:

What other forms of subjectivity, connection, and well-being could emerge if we stopped demanding that we always be okay?