The narrowing eligibility and increasing conditionality of social security payments in Anglophone liberal democracies like Australia has been accompanied by growing attention to the ways benefit recipients navigate the personal and practical challenges of life amid welfare reforms. This article reorients the study of getting by on welfare benefits to focus on the material and affective investment in making life liveable. I argue that the generative dimension of getting by is suggested but submerged within the reactive orientation of much welfare scholarship on coping and resilience. This article takes up the challenge of telling sociological stories of hope in hardship without romanticising everyday struggle. It does so by focusing on the pleasures, pursuits and projects – however modest and muted – that sustain a liveable life in hardship but do not necessarily conform to normative ideas of ‘good resilience’.

在像澳大利亚这样的英语自由民主国家，社会保障支付的资格越来越窄，条件越来越严格，与此同时，人们越来越关注福利接受者在福利改革中应对个人和实际生活挑战的方式。本文将福利救济的研究重新定位到使生活变得宜居的物质和情感投资上。我认为，勉强过日子的生成维度被提出，但被淹没在许多关于应对和复原力的福利学术的反应取向中。这篇文章接受了挑战，在不将日常斗争浪漫化的情况下，讲述艰难中希望的社会学故事。它通过专注于快乐来做到这一点，