So, part of the issue is that those "last 2 years" also simultaneously felt a bit like an economic slowdown caused by the pandemic via lockdowns and infection fear. Maybe for some aspects of "tech", like video conferencing, sure: people alone at home would make that stuff overly important in a way that would crash back down... but, I certainly had felt a world that went from being pretty awesome in 2019 to businesses shutting down left and right through 2020 and 2021 due to people all staying inside.

I had not just hoped but kind of expected that, if we ever felt reasonably safe going outside and eating at restaurants and shopping together at stores and such, that things--including, relevantly, advertisements on Google for all of those physical products and delayed services people might now want again--would kind of explode from latent demand and pent up frustration during the COVID period, not that we would only THEN go into a recession!

But like, I guess this is why we can say with certainty that I don't know much about complicated global- or even national- scale financial matters as I didn't know much about how--and very critically when--the Federal Reserve functions (having not had to care at all about this around 2008/9, when I had my bandwagon hitched strongly to the iPhone and everything looked amazing) and have never actively tracked inflation indicators as anything other than a numerical input for CPI wage increases :(.