This paper analyses the experience of living in uncertain times, focusing on how the articulation between emotions and care produce the possibility a life worth living, while creating asymmetries and power relations. Building on ethnographic work in Portugal I will discuss how people confronted with shortcomings in the state care system - during the austerity crisis (2011-2015) and the pandemic period (2020-2022) - people turned to informal ways of making ends meet. Broad care relations, imbued with emotional sympathy and a morality of “care” and the common good, have made life possible for people in despair. By focusing on the new regimes of care developed to overcome the challenges of a precarious present, and on the multiple ways by which uncertainty becomes embodied, I will further argue how uncertainty deeply transforms the constitutive processes of being a person, and how the existance of hope is what makes it possible for people in dispair to engage in strategies to make the present possible and envision a future.

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