This work investigates the way a group of teenagers who live in the state of Rio de Janeiro think their future, on what concerns work, affection and family life. The study had as its main presupposition to think teenagers as subjects who, on building their speech, articulate their own desires with what their culture offers as real and that their social interaction builds as values. We approached the way in which these subjects take notice of themselves as inserted in their life-course, which roles they assume or wish to assume and the alternatives they think to deal with matters which are put to them, concerning their present and future choices. The research made use of the socio-historical perspective, which consists on the presupposition that the way the person refers to reality and acts on it is historically built, in an essentially dialectic relationship with the social environment. To respond to this aim, we made a reflection on the concept of adolescence, on the concepts that socially organize it, and on specific elements of contemporary culture which goes around it. We chose Richard Sennett`s discussions on the dynamics of public and private and on the problem of authority in contemporaneity. The research developped with 19 teenagers who live in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Petrópolis. We used semi- structured interviews, which were analyzed under the contents analysis method, by Bardin . From our study, we consider that the adolescents` views on their future, particularly on what concerns work and family, seem to experience often a strong feeling of insecurity, specially on what refers to choosing a profession. They react to that trying to promote their personal will and individual power as supposedly capable of beating any obstacle, in affection relations as well as in work. However there is also a movement of elaborating reality that manifests the necessity of recovering values, stable relationships and experiences of interpersonal affect relations. Considering the presuppositions of our theoretical approach, we take the subjects behavior not only as an expression of a certain age, but as the representation of a social reality that claims matters like stability, reliability in institutions and authority as important issues in defining life projects and making them come true.