This book has explored the cultures of doing society among Finnish young people. The aim of this methodologically and empirically manifold approach, as well as the conceptual suggestion of doing society in place of more specific terminologies of political and civic participation, has been to provide a holistic view of cultural patterns of reaching towards the common, irrespective of the group or type of political action the different actors could be categorized in. The necessity for such a conceptual turn, we argue, lies in two observations: first, actors – not just the young, and not just in our contexts, but all over where social researchers go to them – tend to dismiss the definitions of politics applied to them, often refusing the label ‘political’ to begin with; and, second, the range of included activities in sociological definitions usually reserved for societal participation – from politics to activism to civic and civil actions or spheres – leaves out the experiences of societal life of probably the great majority of people in an abundance of situations. For some, this is because they are not ‘civic’ – they do not adhere to normative ideals of common good and deliberation- based collective action – while for many, it is because they fail, willingly or unwillingly, to express themselves in ways recognized as civic participation. Yet such people, such situations and such engagements are also part of the common world, and they leave their mark in terms of how the common is forged. Leaving them out because of conceptual limitations leads to blindspots that social sciences cannot afford to have in our current world of complex, endless differences, and often painfully difficult pursuits for common ground.

We found that overall, the youth deployed cultural tools of individualism in all their engagements, ranging from individual life plans or career strategies to hardliner collective action. This is not really a novelty: the thesis of intensifying individualization has been repeated in sociological zeitdiagnose since the 1980s, and the state of the art of youth research has acknowledged the importance of this feature in any description of youth generations for decades.