In the backdrop of recently heightened political and economic crises and the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Lebanon, college-educated middle class youth speeded up their efforts for immigration abroad. While they are in a constant search for high-scale job opportunities in a range of places from Gulf countries, Iraq and Africa to Europe and North America after graduation, they consider salaries in Lebanon extremely low and their positions insecure, affectively portraying their lives in Lebanon in terms of their ‘deprivations’, if not ‘poverty’. Most express that they have to maintain very high standards of living in Beirut because of social pressure, i.e. to spend a good deal of money on fancy clothing, personal care and up-to-date technology in order maintain their professional appeal. Exploring this paradox of ‘having little to spend much’ (as precisely framed by the Lebanese youth as the main reason behind their impetus to migrate), this paper problematizes ‘poverty’ as a public affect of ‘deprivation’ in relation to culturally framed ideas about a decent life. For lots of Syrian, Bangladeshi and African workers flooding Beirut, who hardly earn a third of middle class salaries, Beirut is a land of economic opportunities to save money for their future. Middle class Lebanese youth, however, typically portray Beirut as a hardly survivable place ‘without future’. In constant references to ‘corrupt politicians’, failing infrastructures and inflation of the housing market, the educated Lebanese youth constantly frame their lives as ‘having the best education in the Middle East and yet being deprived of a decent life after graduation’. In referring to constant sceneries and portrayals of life at ‘more developed’ parts of the world, they commonly complain that they deserve better. In order to elucidate novel local constructions of ‘lack’, ‘superiority, ’inferiority’ and ‘deprivation’, this paper traces the life trajectories of educated middle class youth in relation to connections with ‘outside Lebanon’, and unpacks imagined perceptions about a ‘decent life’. Exploring and analyzing a variety of dimensions in Lebanese youth's everyday life (i.e. connections with family members and friends abroad, Western friends in Beirut, personal travel experiences, stalking of ‘better lives’ at social media), I will suggest everyday feelings and embodied practices of ‘deprivation’ need to be investigated more to better theorize poverty, globalization and middle class in the Middle East.