Beirut is often highlighted as a necessary passage-point toward upward mobility and eventual emigration, since many aspirant youth from smaller cities and villages in Lebanon move to Beirut in order to obtain their college degrees and find jobs. Nevertheless, amidst the postponed presidential elections, dysfunctional state institutions, soaring rates of youth unemployment and lurking sectarian tensions, many of these aspirations are also blended with feelings of frustration, fear and being stuck. Particularly for youth from low-income families with weak wasta ties (mediating connections) promises of upward-mobility were limited. What do young people do when they feel desperately “stuck,” or when they do not want to feel stuck like (or among) the majority? I focus on the everyday performances of class to explore these complex experiences that are affectively articulated through the narrative tropes of dreaming and fear, utopias and dystopias. Thus, I situate complex sets of youth aspirations and practices within the shared narratives of crisis, survival and hope. In addition to in-depth interview data, I bring in observations on popular spaces where young people from diverse sectarian backgrounds intersect, (such as NGOs, trainings, universities, and work-spaces), in order to interpret the everyday efforts of low-income youth to expand their connections and to build their own wasta networks. Interestingly, expanding one’s networks also requires deemphasizing one’s class background or sect-based identity markers in order to appear less “traditional,” more “modern,” and to gain wider social acceptance. The material for my discussion comes from my fieldwork (2011-2014) in Msaitbeh area, Beirut with university educated youth from low-income families. With rare exceptions, class in the Middle East has been surprisingly under-theorized. Most social studies on Lebanon similarly privilege analyses of sectarianism, religion, public space, gender, and sexuality to understand power and contestation in Lebanon. By focusing on youth’s everyday affects and embodied practices, this paper is an attempt to theorize class within the perspective of intersectionality advanced by feminist studies. I treat class not as a pre-defined self-evident category but instead as a cultural performance that is produced in relation to other locally relevant social categories of sect, the urban/rural nexus, and gender.