The purpose of this article is to show how young people in Italy deal with the structural injunction to become individuals. While there is a considerable body of work on how institutions converge to promote individualization and an “entrepreneurial self,” in this article we investigate how young people give shape and meaning to social relationships within the framework of the injunction to become autonomous entrepreneurs of themselves . The research presented here was conducted in Milan, from 2017 to 2019. We carried out 40 in-depth interviews with young people to explore
(1) how individualization as a structural historical process becomes an ongoing outcome, a part of the “common sense” that people use to interpret their everyday experience; AND
(2) the extent to which individualization and individualism are intertwined and conflict with each other.