Disproportionate levels of youth unemployment and economic marginalization in the Middle East have prompted many regional observers to conclude that Middle Eastern youth - especially those from the lower classes - are more prone to radicalization and thereby constitute a threat to national and international security. The general consensus in these accounts is that low levels of occupational opportunities and social exclusion leave poor youth who have little marketable skills more disposed to fatalism and insecurity, which in turn are strongly linked to radical politics. In response to this imputed irrationality, scholars in the language of rational choice have argued that these young people engage in a deliberate calculation of means and ends in order to attain the power and wealth necessary for upward mobility. These scholars posit the poor youth as a rational, autonomous agent whose goals are defined by his individual interests and preferences. Nevertheless, these respective theories are unable to account for a) the absence of political radicalism among the majority of youth from the lower classes in the Middle East and b) the presence of seemingly irrational acts among these youth that neither maximize self-interest nor necessarily reflect individual preferences. Given the shortcomings of each of these prevailing theories, this paper, instead, draws from observational and secondary source data to synthesize these two approaches and to assess the social conduct of poor youth in the Middle East from the perspective of aspirations-bounded rationality. From this vantage point, the behaviors of poor youth in the region are not determined solely by individual economic interests or by pure emotion, but by their aspirations, which in turn are influenced by social factors. This paper proposes that these youth struggle and devise calculated strategies to pursue ideas of the good life that are conditioned by experience and observation of near others who inform their normative world.