At this point, it is worth recapping the argument with which we opened this book. Economic change in the West has made the directions of working life more difficult to fathom. Jobs and careers that once appeared stable seem more and more precarious, as do skills, both those acquired on the job and through education. In societies where communal and social supports have eroded, people are increasingly made responsible for their own fate. Policymakers and educators have encouraged workers to develop their creative skills, arguing that the West's future prosperity depends on symbolic and intellectual innovation. Such an injunction strikes a popular chord at two levels. Firstly, it accords with a radical critique of soul-destroying, Taylorised work that has its roots in both the 1960s counterculture (a largely middle-class movement) and in working-class resistance to alienated labour. The creativity injunction appears to offer an alternative to moral conformity, mass production and consumption and the conventional scripts of working life. It finds expression in popular culture, particularly televised talent shows (now a subgenre of ‘reality television’), where contestants can find fame in a variety of creative endeavours – singing, dancing, cooking, modelling. Secondly, the creativity injunction appeals to youth, particularly those who resist or don't fit in at school. Such people can easily become lost in the fog in the journey to adulthood and the idea of a creative career suggests the possibility of bridging subculture/ youth culture and adult life. Where once such cultures seemed hermetically sealed against the workaday world – forming a parallel universe where only imaginary solutions to alienated adult life were possible – now youthful symbolic play receives pedagogical and technocratic encouragement. Most of our interviewees related their vocational aspirations to those freewheeling youth cultural practices. In the creative economy even resistant subculture can provide a foundation for life.