Red Scare is a podcast hosted by @annakhachiyan and @nobody_stop_me Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere "But it is the most (inaudible)y god damned board you could ever imagine." cross to comply, still in control, understand a hand, a hand moved me, just like a station on the radio
Growing up in the school system at the time, I feel like I was in a bubble amidst all the chaos. I didn’t even know it was really happening until years down the line since I guess either the adults did a good job of insulating me from that or it wasn’t as big a deal for my family as with potentially other people, despite us being below the national poverty level. At the time of the crash I was about 12-13 living some of the best years of my adolescent life. The only MASSIVE injustice (to me) then was that the cinnamon scrolls at Tesco’s had gone up in price by like £0.05-0.10, but Lidl grape juice was about £0.85 and a tray of chips from the kebab van was still around £1. I talk to people years later in my local area and they tell me it was so bad for them job-wise they almost committed suicide, and it was all we talked about in economics class a few years later.
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I hardly knew it was going on. I was in college and wasted out of my fucking mind partying like it was 1999. Its weird to me that i sort of knew it was going on but i was just like i have fun things to do like blasting tik tok and drinking 4loko or whatever the fuck i was doing
I was always extremely poor and getting fucked up though so it didnt seem like a big change in my life.
Same here, barely knew it was happening aside from people arguing on the bus about the auto bailout because I was hammered all the time and only knew other broke college kids.
I got lucky that I found a job a few months after graduating though. Had to have a dumb major to get it unfortunately.
I graduated into it with a sort of useless degree. It was a rough couple of years.
I hated all the "what'd you expect with a useless liberal arts degree??" comments because back when we entered college, you could get a good job with a humanities degree from a good school.
you could still get a good job with a humanities degree from a good school.
not really, no
the uchicago anthro / hc social studies to gs ibd pipeline would disagree with you
I was too young to be impacted personally but I grew up in a real-estate-dominant state and it was an absolute disaster for some other kids I knew.
the saddest was a kid on my soccer team's dad blowing his brains out after a scary quick spiral - he quit his finance job years prior and was basically a home flipper. filed for bankrupcy and then got divorced all in the span of a few months
Brutal!
my dad and another teammates parent started a pool for the kid and we raised a nice sum of money but its hardly recompense :/
there were other suicides among parents at my school but i dont think any were in my grade. this was before gofundme so they were collecting cash, checks, and gift cards. its part of the reason why I hate online collapseniks.
My mom lost her job in a “recession proof” field and started spiraling. A bunch of my extended family moved into my grandparents house for a few years. I graduated from college around that time and was lucky to find a 20 hr per week job that paid $9 an hour.
It wasn’t the Great Depression but it was worse than a lot of people realize.
Demoralizing, in a first world problems kind of way. Graduated honors, etc with a humanities BA from a very prestigious college, eaned an MA immediately after...and then I applied for about 100 jobs (positions like barista, service jobs, admin, secretary, paralegal, tutor, proofreader, whatever etc) without ever getting a reply. It didn't matter that I had worked through college--there were just zero open positions because all the laid-off 40-somethings with full resumes were taking the entry level jobs. Lost the respect of my family, zero romance for years, severely depressed, black mold infested apartment--basically a big fat loser in every respect (other the fat part, because I was so broke and immature that I lived off eating a single $5 burrito a day). Moved out after somebody rear-ended me and the insurance paid first-month's rent. I was spoiled in that I didn't end up working in fast food or in manual labor, but I was a failure according to everybody's expectations, despite doing everything right according to the conventional wisdom at the time. Eventually I got a shitty copywriting gig for a shady company. Gave up after a year and went to law school.
The long-term effect for me and many other elder millenials is that we have a permanent sense of precarity and anxiety about work--an ingrained fear that we'll never find another job, and so we kiss ass and work ourselves to the bone and lose sleep. It's shocking to me when my Gen Z coworkers make demands for higher pay or complain when the boss isn't nice--I'm jealous of their confidence and freedom. At least my friends and I all have a giant pile of fancy/useless degrees that we earned while waiting out the recession. And underground culture was more fun then, as everything was cheaper and less gentrified.
I was 18 in 08 but I started uni in 06 because I was homeschooled by crazy evangelicals. In 08 I had been reading the SomethingAwful threads about the upcoming economic collapse, ended up working for a startup in advertising. Afterwards I worked for a racist jeweler.
You should make a post on the homeschooling
I graduated around then and it was basically impossible to get a job for at least 3 years (and still awful for a few years after that). But there was something fun about being young and broke in the city those years.
The job market stuff was really, really demoralizing though. I always did well in school and did well at whatever shit job I had and it just didn't matter. No one responded to my applications. Didn't get a halfway decent job till 2015.
partying/drinking and going to whichever cheap gig was basically how we dealt with the existential dread of the shit job market going 'I'm never going to have a real life' but in a couple of years even that gave out and all that was left was the dread.
and dear god was the job market awful. I don't know what's worse, the non-responses or, on the few occasions I did get as far as an interview, the smug interviewers managing to make me feel like I was scum stuck on the bottom of their shoes for having the temerity to apply to their place without a 1:1.
Stock market was dropping like a fucking boulder. Anybody in their junior/senior year in college was in major oh shit mode. Sophomores were freaking out but not as hard. Jobs for people right out of school were hard to come by. Not a fun time.
Not much but my rich grandparents went from driving a saab and living in a fancy house to downsizing and driving an old kia. They never recovered and I understood as a kid that they were having hard times. Probably took some years of their lives.
We were always poor, big family single income but I was the last one left. I was 13/14, dad was raising me solo and sometimes walking across town to the bus station in his early 50s (my mom had left and took the car). Factory job ended up putting him on furlough, we had a car by then but things were rough. I got really good at memorizing all of the grocery prices and handled our shopping lists, helped manage general expenses, learned to cook and cook cheap. Helped where I could, mostly by not complaining and keeping my mouth shut. Shit could have been a million times worse, saw a lot of families get hit harder. You make do, but some of these people don't understand what's already happening, and I don't know how to tell people a few years younger to tighten their belts.
My father lost his job. It might have been incidental since he was blue collar, but he was unemployed for around six months. Our fridge went out and somehow -- it's still unclear to me -- we couldn't afford to fix or replace the fridge. We ate Little Caesar's three or four times a week and I got even fatter
I was aware of it but being a drug-addled loser at the time there wasn’t much lower I could go so I was relatively unaffected
Living off student loans and spending at the bar like I was flush with cash
graduating college and trying to get a job in that post-08 recession sucked really fuckin bad
We were fine but a family I knew well at church was left holding the bag on multiple spec houses in Florida and went bankrupt. They turned their home into a boarding house to make ends meet. I went over there a few times and it felt pretty chaotic.
A few years later the parents divorced, then my mom starting hanging out with the wife a lot more, then my mom left my dad. So in a way I guess I blame the breakup of my family on the recession.
It didn’t affect my family or anyone I know in my part of the Bay Area. Merrill Lynch and some other bank branches shuttered—that’s all I noticed of what was happening first hand
I remember shit getting weird all the way back in December 2007. My dad worked at a flower shop and my mom was a massage therapist and they both had really dead Christmas seasons. I also knew the owner of a local record store and he had an extremely slow December. It wasn't until months later that most people had any idea how bad shit was gonna get.
yeah it's like everyone forgets things were bad as far back as 2007 thanks to the level of shit that hit the fan in 2008. I've found old magazines from winter 2007/08 that were already talking about financial situations being bad (and these were Vogue, not the Economist or whatever so obviously there was some baseline public awareness of it).
The company that operated the seaport terminal I worked on was owned by Merril Lynch so two entire union locals got laid off for months until a company owned by AIG bought it. I just worked odd dishwasher shifts for cash and collected unemployment for a year.
Yh I knew about it by around late 2008 when I was like 9
Recession era atlanta as a college age kid rocked. As far as I can remember, I spent the whole time in the basement at Wonderroot (RIP).
I graduated into it, but it really didn’t impact me that much. I had a really good retail job in college (15 bucks an hour in 2008 was pretty good money) and just stayed in the job for a year and a half after college until I found something in my field. My gf at the time and I lived together, we lived in a cheap crappy apartment in a bad neighborhood that has since been torn down, and the neighborhood completely gentrified. Our rent was so cheap. Miss those days actually.
I graduated in 07 and was on an internship, things shifted from ‘we will take you on full time after six months’ to ‘how would you like to continue interning for a £150 a week allowance?’
I took the offer and lived a quasi homeless existence, sleeping on various friends sofas or at girls’ places for the next two years. Metronomy’s Nights Out was the soundtrack to me walking from Camden to Old Street every morning.
I made things work by taking a bar job at Cargo whilst it, and shoreditch in general, were still cool. That gave me another £30, and a place to be between 9pm and 4am two nights of the week. The manager was this absolutely insane Swedish woman who would walk around with a tray of tequila handing them out to staff.
The owner of the company I was interning in also had a small studio space we used for shoots, I had a key and the responsibility to check post and mail anything that needed mailing on the weekend, so I’d go there and sleep on the floor of the stockroom. I only got caught once by another guy who was a few years older than me, he’d just shagged some girl two weeks before her wedding.
All in all I romanticise it now but at the time it was bleak.
Everybody and their dog was flipping houses. I was 22 in 2008, but I remember being 18 and going to visit family in Oregon and all of my aunts were leveraged up to their eyeballs in real estate. These women were previously stay at home moms. I remember my dad telling them it couldn’t last.
In 2008 I married my husband and he works in large commercial construction. His older, more expensive colleagues were the first to get laid off. It was brutal and frankly I think it turned my husband into a lifelong workaholic. My first real job was teaching elementary school for 32,000 bucks a year lol and I was thrilled to have it.
I just remember the news telling me to laugh at those silly occupy wall street people. Pay attention to them being silly with their hands.
They were fucking silly. Progressive stack and drum circles, all that nonsense. They've tried to revision that shit, but it was 100 percent what it was, because the people involved in the protests weren't actually suffering, they had zero impetus. Fuck those hippies. Worthless movement that to this day spends their energy defending some old commie. It was as obvious what he was in the 2016 election as it is now. At least Trump was funny, Bernie was a joke.
Psyop
it's what made me get a trade degree
Was in college unaffected, no memories of any crises
i was 10 years old so i was playing call of duty
https://youtu.be/pu6HDd7gDr8