That is interesting, but if you shift ten years back from there, the kids from that time went through:

* Operation Desert Storm

* The early 1990s post-war recession, and its jobless recovery

* The Asian and Russian recessions (and the LTCM collapse) and knock-on effects

Go back 10 years from that and you have:

* Early 1980s recession

* Black Monday

Yea, so turns out being a human in a peaceful stable society is pretty rare. Most of humanity has had much more severe crisis than what you experienced. We’re a remarkably resilient species.

I would argue that resilience came from innovation and creative thinking. When we encountered a problem that threatened the species, we came up with solutions to fix it.

There are very few times in human history where we took any steps backwards on that progress. The collapse of the Roman Empire was one of those moments, and it took hundreds of years for civilization to recover from that.

I'm not saying we're getting close to a catastrophic event like that any time soon... but we should definitely not shrug off unnecessary world hardships with a glib "we've survived worse". Because if the worst should happen and Western Civilization takes a step backwards... the consequences aren't going to be pretty. Especially now that we have nuclear weapons.

I'm a similar age as you, but personally wouldn't count 9/11 (although maybe the year difference is why). For me 9/11 happened when I was in pre-k. I don't remember learning about it back then and had no clue what 9/11 was until middle school. I'd guess for most kinder/pre-k age kids even if they did learn about it, it's not something they meaningfully processed and then the life post 9/11 is pretty much all they remember. My memories of elementary school as a whole are already really weak and become nearly 0 for memories <=5.

The financial crash did impact my family some, but not much personally (prevented us from selling our house). I feel like covid is the first situation that's had a very direct impact on me. I was laid off due to finance issues back in march, have had a 'fun' time searching for a new job, and being stuck mostly at home. Still a lot better than others due to having a good financial safety net (my family).

In fairness, the Soviet Union fell when I was in grade school, which means I got laid off from my first job during the dot com crash, went to grad school, and re-entered the market when the housing crisis finally caught up with Silicon Valley.

Worse, I know someone that was supposed to retire in a few years, and he was laid off once for each Republican president going back to Regan.

Of course, when all that happened, the planet’s ecosystem wasn’t collapsing.

Yes, the US looks increasingly more like a 3rd world country. One crisis after another.

Europe was an even worse place crisis-wise for the majority of the 20th century.

The sad thing about humanity is our living memory only goes back fifty years or so. Everything past that is just "back in the old days" and we forget how extremely recently all those things were even on a human timescale.

The US had its share of bad times in the 20th century too, including the largest depression ever, but at least it invested in economic development. Currently, the goal seams to be reducing all social investment and let the financial industry take control of everything.

Yet every crisis the 1% seem to make more... very opportunistic of them to leverage our society and not give back