Daniel Lorente has worked construction, flipped burgers at McDonald’s, been a camp counselor, telemarketing representative and doorman.

But Lorente’s part-time jobs never lasted more than seven months: He was laid off from each one as Spain’s economic gloom deepened into a historic crisis. Now the 21-year-old is staring into a dead-end future.

“How am I going to make it if I don't have a steady job, to pay a mortgage, for example?” asks Lorente. “Or for a wedding, or anything involving a big expense? You can’t get anywhere.”

Lorente is stuck among Spain’s “Lost Generation” of 20-somethings, with no work and no real prospects in sight: Roughly half of all Spaniards between 16 and 24 are jobless, the highest level among the 17 nations that use the euro. It’s a devastating picture of blighted youth that threatens to distort Spain’s social fabric for years to come, dooming dreams, straining family structures and eroding the well-being of a rapidly aging population.

“This puts the whole welfare state at risk,” said Gayle Allard, a labour market specialist at Madrid’s IE Business School. “The young people who are coming on the market now are the lost generation. They are losing the advantage of their youth and energy and that does not come back.”

The staggering jobless figures — 48.6 % for Spaniards between 16 and 24; 39 % for those ages 20-29 — hold dire consequences for a country that grew accustomed to prosperity on the back of a property boom that collapsed in 2008.

The 1.6 million unemployed teens and young adults in the nation of 47 million risk never having a decent start to a career. They probably won’t accumulate assets like their own homes or savings until they are in their 40s. And they then will likely face much higher taxes to maintain Spain’s costly social welfare system.

What’s more, they’re expected to put off having children or have fewer than their parents, slashing a birth rate that’s already declining just as Spain’s large baby boom generation begins to retire. That means fewer people to absorb the costs of caring for the swelling ranks of pensioners.

“It’s a historic waste,” Allard said. “The economy has not been transformed into a higher-productivity economy even though all those educated young workers were available for the task. I would not be surprised if eventually they rebelled against the tax burden.”

Anger and frustration among young adults have already taken root. Thousands erected protest camps last spring and summer in Madrid and Barcelona in illegal tent cities set up in central plazas. Unrest erupted again last week when students in Valencia protesting austerity cuts clashed with riot police, generating nationwide demonstrations against alleged police brutality.

Some Spaniards fear that Spain’s relatively new democracy, launched in 1978 after decades of dictatorship, may become threatened if an entire generation ends up convinced they will never attain the same lifestyle as their parents.

“The main risk for the country is we could lose a generation who go away and the young people who stay will have less education, condemning Spain to crisis for many years to come,” said Ricardo Ibarra, the 27-year-old president of The Spanish Youth Council, which represents groups for young adults.

“In 10 years we could have populism instead of democracy, and we cannot waste our democracy and throw it away.”

In a scene mirrored nationwide, Lorente lives at home with his mother and an unemployed 28-year-old sister. Like many other young Spaniards, he thinks Spain’s economy is so bad as it heads toward recession for the second time in four years that he might not be able to move out until he hits 40.

But with the overall unemployment rate now at a eurozone high 22.8 %, even family support networks are being eroded — as young people find they can rely far less on handouts and shelter from mom and dad.

And with low-paying jobs the norm — often €1,000 a month or less — college graduates are increasingly moving abroad to do work below their qualifications, for example as bartenders or hotel workers in Germany or Britain.

Last year more people left Spain than came to settle for the first time in a decade. While 418,000 moved to this country, 508,000 departed, the National Statistics Institute reported.

Ibarra of The Spanish Youth Council said his sister, a bank worker, was making €18,000 a year but moved to Switzerland where she’s now getting more than €60,000 in a new bank job she likes more. Another friend of Ibarra’s who worked with computers in Spain is now a bartender in Scotland.

“The feeling is growing in our country that if you want a good life, you have to go away,” Ibarra said. “Young adults are leaving for anything, and the typical profile is a professional who can’t get anything or can’t get what he wants.”

“I’m part of the Lost Generation, those young 20-somethings stuck in the ditch of a society that we increasingly see less as ours and identify more as the enemy.”