I feel like what happened to the author epitomizes the experience of a generation that graduated in the year or two right before the crash of 2008. The first round of layoffs obviously disproportionately effected people that were just starting off their careers at that time (of course other groups were disproportionately hit hard as well). It happened to me being about a year into my career as I was still feeling my way around. It happened to many of my friends as well, and was especially hard on the group of folks that didn’t have the fortune to have gone into the IT field. And once you are out of work for a year or two when the recovery started happening, the resume’s of people fresh out of college look more attractive than the out of work ‘lazy millennial’ which only compounded the problem. Having facebook made it easier to kind of see what was going on with the larger crowd of acquaintances that I maybe would not have explicitly kept track of and though its hard to compare my experience against other cohorts I feel like depression and alcoholism are more of a problem for the group I am describing than others.

In my case I feel lucky for the experience, I was only out of work for a few months and learned that you should never trust the company you are working for beyond the next paycheck. Never work on weekends with the promises you will be ‘paid back’ etc. You are ultimately working for yourself regardless if you are salaried or contract.