Youth is often studied in social sciences with regard to their cultural meanings or life chances. But rarely meanings and chances are analyzed in relation to each other and especially in terms of their impact on the making of young people as political subjects or subjects of power. Based on a fieldwork conducted with young adults (20-30 years old) in Ankara, this paper offers an analysis of ‘youth subjectivities in relation to material realities and inequalities in social life. In the first section the paper demonstrates that while young people have common narratives and structures of feeling due to what Karl Mannheim called, shared historical location, they experience and negotiate power relations in accordance with their position in hierarchies of unequal distribution. The paper argues, the ways in which common cultural narratives that make ‘youth’ discursively possible are in fact interpreted and employed variably by young people, who have different means. In the second section, the paper focuses on the ‘culture of time’ in making youth subjectivities. It analyzes the role of knowledge and sense of time in shaping young people’s experiences of social inequality and their sense of place in society. The paper argues that the ‘culture of time’ alleviates the sense of constraints in the present and future in Turkey. Finally, the paper discusses the sense of time and the weight of inequality in shaping young people’s political subjectivities by reflecting on the Turkish case in comparison with the recent political involvement of youth in Tunisia and Egypt.