What do you call a generation of young people, mostly known for what they're not doing?
There's an actual term for it, and it's about as flattering as it sounds: not in employment, education, or training. It exists on spreadsheets and policy reports across Europe, counting the young people who've fallen out of both systems at once, and it says almost nothing about what any of them are actually spending their time on. It defines a person by absence, which is a strange way to describe someone, and an even stranger starting point for trying to help them.
The pandemic made the category swell fast. Millions of young Europeans lost jobs or training placements within months, and a fair number never quite found their way back onto either track. Policymakers started using the phrase "lockdown generation," with the specific worry that this wasn't a temporary gap but the start of something that would follow people for years, since the longer someone sits outside both work and education, the harder both become to re-enter.
A Label Built From an Absence
What the label misses is what a lot of these young people were actually doing with the time. Editing videos. Making music nobody paid for yet. Running a small side project that never turned into anything because no one around them ever suggested it could. None of that shows up in an employment statistic, and none of it looked, from the outside, like anything worth building on.
That's the real gap, and it's not a talent gap. It's a translation gap, between having a genuine creative or entrepreneurial instinct and having any idea that instinct could lead somewhere. Vocational tracks exist for plenty of trades. Far fewer exist for the person who's spent two years quietly getting good at something creative with absolutely no path connecting that skill to an income.
Nobody Told Him It Counted
Picture a young man in his early twenties, call him Marek, who spent most of a lockdown teaching himself to edit video, cutting clips for friends, learning software nobody paid him to learn.
"Nobody ever told me editing videos could be a job," he says. "I just did it because I liked it."
He wasn't unemployed in the sense of doing nothing. He was unemployed in the sense that nobody around him had ever drawn a line from what he was actually good at to something that could pay rent.
That gap isn't really his failure, or his family's. It's a structural one: the systems built to catch young people who fall out of school or work were mostly built around retraining for existing jobs, not around noticing and developing the creative capital someone's already sitting on.
The Missing Middle
Between "still in school" and "has a job," there's a wide middle ground most support systems simply don't cover: young people with real creative or entrepreneurial instincts and no structured way to turn either into something sustainable. Culture and creativity aren't small economic categories either, contributing more to European economies than most people assume, which makes the absence of a clear on-ramp into that sector even harder to justify. The label was never the person. It just happened to be the only thing anyone was measuring.
Not Just a Label Anymore
This is the gap Young Cultentrepreneurs, a project co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ programme is trying to close, working across Poland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden to give youth workers a real way to support cultural and creative ambition, and to give young people who've fallen out of employment or education a genuine, non-formal route into turning what they already make into something with a future.