I got married when I was 21 years old. Which means I was a little 22 year old in 2007, when the crisis started. We didn't hit the bottom of the crisis until March 9th 2009, one month after I had my first baby. The recession didn't end until that summer.
But the recession ending didn't mean everything was suddenly fine. We'd all fallen a long way and many of us had lost a lot on the way down. Or we were newly adults and had not yet had much to lose. But we were having a hard time getting anything - jobs, housing, security, groceries - for the first time.
I think the clearest memory I have of that moment is standing in line at a grocery store, trying to keep my baby from crying while trying to add up the cost of the contents of my cart before I got to the check out. Swaying and counting, swaying and counting. Putting back anything we couldn't afford, trying to remember to include tax, kissing the baby and then biting my lip.
We had a $50 a week grocery budget. I couldn't nurse, so we had to buy formula too. On good weeks, I didn't have to include the formula in the grocery budget. On bad weeks, I did. My baby required one of those *special* formulas, so each canister was about $32. So on the bad weeks, we $18 to feed Riley and me. We were very young and Riley was still in school. But the possibility of a life lived abundantly - the security of *enough* - in the future felt closed up.
I felt like I'd always be swaying and counting. and I was terrified I'd never figure out how to make our needs and the numbers add up. Even once the crisis was over and the climb out of the recession was complete, I'd find myself swaying and counting. But it was different. The possibility of abundance - in the best sense of that word - came back.
Over the past weekend, I've felt that old closing fear return. And I feel determined to not give into it. Financial crises are constructions of our current economic model. There is enough for everyone, there always has been. And I am going to spend my life proving those numbers add up. It's what we do to each other in the name of capitalism that doesn't.
I've just begun to let go of that "swaying and counting" mentality in the past few years. We're a two income household! By every metric, we're super stable! We should be doing fine! I don't have to budget every last penny!
But, oh, that old closing fear returning. My husband works for a tech start-up based in Silicon Valley so everything with SVB felt a little like life flashing before my eyes. How quickly it could all come crashing down. And this time we have three kids and a mortgage.
We always swore we'd be ready when the next recession came and it doesn't feel like we are. We are only 38 and it feels like there hasn't been time. And same, he's in tech, we've got three kids and a mortgage. And my income is a *writer's* income which is ummmm not stable or super profitable. So the panic. It's there.
I have two empty rooms, more toilet paper than anyone needs, stockpiles of peanut butter, an obscene amount of canned tuna, fiber internet and a full heart.... there’s always a backup plan ❤️😀
I grew up dirt poor and no matter how much I have in the bank accounts (I know...) or what it says on paper, I’ve never lost that feeling of always being on the edge of poverty... I don’t think that feeling goes away and it returns like a tsunami when news like the banks failing or a recession looming or 2008 happens... I know I’m not hungry or cold or unhoused... but the terror of poverty lingers...
I was privileged enough to weather the 2008 crisis just fine, but we have always been very conservative in our financial affairs. My brother, on the other hand, really went down the economic doomsday rabbit-hole early in the naughts and 2008 just confirmed his view that the world economy was on the verge of collapse. So he invested in gold, as in actual gold coins, which are sitting in a vault in Switzerland. He died in January and we now have the task of figuring out how to get them and sell them. Judging by the state of his house he was ready for the apocalypse, but what we don’t quite get is - if the world collapsed economically, exactly how was he going to access this gold from the US? We found many things (many many things) in his house , but no rowboat. (I can joke about it but honestly, knowing how frightened he must have been, it's heartbreaking. He was such a bright guy and he was so influenced by these a#@hat bloggers that the world was ending and we never realized just how bad things had gotten for him.)
Elizabeth, I've been reading your comment over and over again. It's like a short story, and such a sad one. I just ache for him. We all want to be safe. And so sometimes we put things in safes. I am so sorry for your loss. I am so sorry for your brother's pain. Thank you so much for trusting us with this - his story and yours.
We were six months into my husband's launch of his own construction company and construction were we live DIED. I was teaching my second year. Our mortgage was $1500 and my salary was not quite $30k a year -- less because everyone had to furlough a couple days in order for no one to get fired.
We had three kids: 3, 5 & 7 years old. Paying the mortgage and childcare meant we rotated what other bills we could pay, never skipping the same service two times in a row. Feeding the fam included a lot of pasta (Mac & Cheese primarily). I'm not sure I have fully worked through what I need to work through because there are things that show up in daily convos now that launch FEELINGS.
RE: things that show up that launch feelings? Oof. Yup. We were in different life stages, but there are still things that trigger me to this day about that time. Honestly? I'm still angry.
I did therapy for 4 1/2 years and took ten months off. Then I started again with a different therapist and boy am I realizing that an awareness of something that hurt isn't the same as healing from that hurt.
Oh my gosh. To be in construction when the housing bubble burst!
My dad was a small insurance broker for medium size companies. His biggest client was New Century - the mortgage company that went into Chapter 11 and sparked the first panic. When that happened, he lost nearly everything. It was excruciating.
I don't know how to work through that kind of trauma. I guess it just lives with us. And we try to keep it from hurting us or those around us.
In September 2008, I worked as a fundraiser for the University of Washington (in Seattle, also former home of Washington Mutual the bank failure that was bigger than Silicon Valley Bank). I had just finished a huge fundraising campaign (I believe it was $2B in 5-6 years?) and we had a huge party for donors scheduled to celebrate. It was hugely awkward because getting a bunch of rich tech and finance people together to pay each other on the back was a super bad look during the same week John McCain was suspending his presidential campaign to be in DC during the crisis. So a lot of donors left the party pretty early--I got hugely drunk, asked my boss’s husband to teach me how to ballroom dance (half my colleagues thought I was flirting with him), and got my car towed because I had to take a cab home and I had parked where tailgating was happening for a football game the next morning.
The year after that, I went back to school to become a lawyer and then went to work for a labor union. I don’t want my livelihood to be about sucking up to rich people ever again.
1. I think getting hugely drunk is a totally acceptable way to process a global financial meltdown. 2. "I went back to school to become a lawyer and then went to work for a labor union. I don’t want my livelihood to be about sucking up to rich people ever again." This is incredibly bad ass and I love every single part of it. I'd love to hear about your work with labor unions.
I was 2 years from graduating high school during the last crisis, and my family had just moved to Germany for my dad's work. At that point, at 16, I was of course mostly wrapped up in my teenage affairs: leaving behind my girlfriend, navigating queerness and living abroad, but the financial crisis loomed like a giant flashing warning sign all the same. I remember feeling insulated from it, over in Europe, and also very very aware of it because I was going to graduate into the world that it created. It was the beginning of the conversations for me about college and scarcity and choosing a major that would make money rather than doing something that I loved. I had privilege, because my family was spared and my dad was in the military, which was pretty stable; but I was scared all the same, and that fear definitely followed me into my college days.
Jordan, this is such a needed and fascinating perspective. I wonder how much Germany's (relatively) strong social safety net helped create a feeling of insulation? I know that you didn't use that safety net because your family was there because of the US military. But I wonder if the environment created by that net still helped insulate. And I really love how you articulate that insulation didn't keep fear from going with your into college. I think that's a very important point - that even people who were not adults when the crisis happened have been haunted by it.
I'm very sure it did! Not only did Germany's safety net help, the US Embassy's helped. They pay attention to things like cost of living and pay accordingly. One summer, for an internship, I biked around Berlin with the person who would become my spouse and we wrote down the costs of various food things in different stores, to help calculate how much the embassy's cost of living stipend should be. So money was front and center but also strangely abundant in a way that felt like it had an end. I got to college in 2010, and so much of me & my peers' talk about money was this weird dichotomy of "thank god we weren't like the folks two graduated two years ago; we're lucky" and "but it's going to happen again, right?" So bizarre! It almost reminds me now of the greater glacial epochs we live in, like a little spring among a bigger period of glaciation.
It definitely haunted us. We were so steeped in college the early rhetoric of what would become hustle culture, and now it looks so much like a lot of panicked people going "maybe if I work harder, it won't happen to me. you should work harder too and then you'll be safe!"
This was meandering but wow, very interesting thoughts!! thank you for opening up this space: it's so important.
And adding that it feels even scarier and more precarious now because my spouse and I are both trans, visibly and clearly so, and we also just bought our first house, and I am a freelance illustrator. They work in tech. We have woven ourselves a big safety net based on the fear from the last recession but oh, am I nervous.
In 2008, I was a couple of years into college and not paying that much attention. My husband and I have talked about how clueless we were at the time, compared to just how much it would consume our attention now as married-with-kids-and-a-mortgage-30-somethings. But then? We were more consumed with deadlines and stipends and pulling all-nighters and planning our weekends.
That is until the following summer, when I NEEDED an internship between my junior and senior year to graduate with my interior design degree. And all of the internships seemed to have vanished. We were the first class to try to get placed after the crisis hit. I landed an internship, but mine was incredibly boring. I learned almost nothing and paid around $1200 for 3 "credits" for the privilege to do so. It probably goes without saying that this internship was unpaid. Not just for me, but for almost everyone in my class of 30.
I finished out my senior year and graduated in 2010. Into a world that had imploded on itself. Do you know the first thing that gets cut when businesses and people don't know if/how they're going to hang on? Things like interior design. No one, and I mean NO ONE was hiring. Graduates from my university only a few years before had gotten 4-6 job OFFERS. I sent out over 70 resumes, called these places, showed up in person, etc. to...crickets.
To stop myself from writing 1000 more words, I'll just end by saying that my career would have looked entirely different had I graduated just five years sooner (or maybe even 5 years later). I entered college into something that had been considered stable, and exited into something that had blown up in real time. A honors graduate who had done everything "right" and ended up with debt, a degree, and no job prospects. That sentence-It's almost laughable how common my story is. Almost.
I teared up at that last "almost." My goodness. I see you. It is absolutely wild that the way the US labor market works so often is "get experience in your 20s in your chosen field or never work in that field for the rest of your life." The impact this has on everyone, but especially women and other marginalized groups, is well-documented but almost always ignored. It's almost always five years too soon or five years too late, even when there isn't a recession.
Fall 2009 waves at Spring 2010 (I walked that spring though--I had too many credits & my scholarship ended so I had to leave a semester early).
I went through all the same things you did. It was truly hell. I have literally cried myself to sleep recently thinking of that "5 years sooner/5 years later" wage loss.
I was working at a big newspaper, where I'd been for three years, and they were doing layoffs. I felt expendable and was shocked when I wasn't. I was in a bad marriage that would have become worse if I'd stopped bringing in money (there was a part of me that wanted to take a buyout and run away with it). It was scary and the journalism industry has never recovered from it - a lot of us changed gears and became good at doing a lot of different things, but I don't think any of us ever stopped feeling expendable.
I am so sorry about the bad marriage. And I am, always, so sorry that surviving bad marriages requires security we so often fail to provide in America.
My friends who were in newsrooms during the crisis always cite it as one of the inflection points that led to the end of living wage journalism. The consolidation the crisis led to has never stopped.
"I don't think any of us ever stopped feeling expendable." This is a really succinct, poignant way to sum up what happened to so many people - a permanent, internal shift. You, of course, are necessary. And I am glad we all know it here.
Thank you Meg! And thanks for providing a place for us to get out these feelings.
I am out of the bad marriage and in a much, much better and healthier relationship now. I'm still in the industry, but as a freelancer, and on my own terms. I'm fortunate that both of these things are true.
This was so bracing and beautiful. This in particular: "Because no matter what happens in the next 15 minutes or 15 days or 15 years, your stories are the story that really matter."
My story is not terribly interesting but I graduated college in May of 08 and moved to NYC for a paid internship with a labor union that August that was supposed to be intern-to-hire. But we all know what happened. The weird thing is that there were people hauling their desk accoutrement out of Lehman downtown and I really had no idea what was happening because I was negotiating being 23 and adjusting to living in nyc on very little money. Then my union had a hiring freeze and I was scrambling to find a job, which did lead me down particular paths I'm not sure world have happened otherwise.
I also came here to recommend Matt Stoller and his anti-monopoly substack, BIG, which does some very smart reporting on the intricacies of government regulation and business: https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller/p/fire-the-fed?
Thank you so much for this recommendation! And your story *is* incredibly interesting because it's yours. And also because it did really change your life, even if you didn't quite see it at the time It's bringing up something I hadn't totally realized about myself - it took me a long time to realize that things were much harder than they usually were because it was all happening just as I started navigating life as an adult. I conflated economic crisis with "being in your twenties" for a very, very long time.
Yeah, I do think it helps you realize that good times in the economy are temporary. And that good times for one person might mean bad times for another, which was certainly true during the pandemic.
Hahahaha sob. I had just bought my first house, an 800 sf condo, at a lovely 5.75% interest rate. I got a first time homebuyer LOAN, because in those days it was a loan and not a tax credit. We have since paid it back, but yeesh. The market absolutely plummeted weeks after we purchased, and we were underwater for 12 of the 15 years we've lived there (yes, still there!). Because it is a condo and financing depends on the condo association's finances and not just our own, we've never been able to refinance. So now, 15 years later, we still live in an 800 square foot condo with a 5.75% interest rate, but now with 2 kids, 1 dog, and 3 cats. It's small. We are slowly paying down our mortgage and who knows, we may be able to move one day!
I know these are all first world problems, and I tell my kids that when they gripe about sharing a room and not having a yard. Many many many people have much less than we do. I work hard to be grateful for what we DO have, but it is a choice and often somewhat of a stretch. Sigh.
WAIT. I HAD NO IDEA THAT IS HOW REFINANCING A CONDO WORKED! WHAT IN THE WORLD. OH MY GOSH OUR ENTIRE SYSTEM IS JUST A STUDY IN HOSTILE FINANCIAL ARCHITECTURE.
And I HEAR YOU, balancing gratitude with frustration at a morally bankrupt system can be difficult. When we were in Oakland we lived in about 700 sq ft (2 bed/1 bath) with five humans and I felt that was tight. I think it might have been enough room if we could've paid all of our bills. But we just seemed to lack space everywhere and so everything felt too little.
I had just started dating my now-husband, and we were 6 months to a year from graduating college with degrees in poetry. We were every "Millennials are failures because____" article. We lived at home with my family, we worked as baristas despite our fancy degrees. We failed to launch, or something. There was pressure to join linkedin, go on informational interviews, take unpaid internships. Because that's literally all there was. No jobs to even apply to. That time was so central to how I understand myself. It's falling in love and setting myself for a lifetime of lost earnings. I went into publishing, which was facing its own identity crisis over the launch of ebooks & kindles.
A few years ago (maybe 2018 or so), I was having dinner with a friend my age, who is now an adjunct and writer. Speaking of her students (who I had just guest-lectured about my career path) she said to me, "You know, they don't remember 2008 at all. They were kids. The ones who do remember are inevitably lower-income, and will say things like 'yeah, we lived in a nice house, but then we had to move into a smaller apartment.'" I now make a point to ask my assistants what they remember about 2008. Most say "oh, I was in elementary school, I don't remember anything." They tell me it didn't impact them at all. Ancient history. It's in seeing their lack of precarity-mindset that makes me realize how deeply my worldview was shaped by 2008.
Wow. I am feeling a lot of things based on this very insightful observation! Like! It's good that a lot of kids were ultimately insulated from the fear and trauma. But OF COURSE poor kids in America were not. And when they were not, that had lasting impacts - externally and internally. And as adults they are *still* dealing with those repercussions as they enter another crisis. Impact on impact on impact. Also,I can tell you got a graduate degree in poetry because this is a poem - "It's falling in love/ and setting myself/ for a lifetime/ of lost earnings."
In fall 2008 I was starting my senior year of undergrad, starting to happily work on my history thesis about women and garden history, and planning to spent a year or so after graduation working in my college library before going to graduate school for library science. But I had a huge amount of student loans and a minimal family safety net, so my plans changed as I sat on my couch and watched the markets crash over and over on the news. Everywhere I had thought about working seemed to have a hiring freeze when I graduated in 2009. My college's career services were useless, but my academic advisor told me that in recessions, utilities and social services kept hiring, so that's where I focused. I spent a year in an Americorps position funded by Recovery Act money and have stayed in nonprofit social services since. I did get that library degree a few years later, working full time while I did it because that's the only way I could avoid adding an untenable amount to my student loan debt, but I shouldn't have. I still have so much financial anxiety from my experience of the 2008 crisis. I probably always will.
A thesis about women and garden history sounds so lovely. Did you ever get to finish it? I'd love to read it. I am seeing again and again in the comments how lives were changed this way, but somehow that similarity makes each story stand out more, not less. I just keep thinking about everything we lost as a collective - every book, every play, every piece of research, every dream deferred. I am grateful you are in social services. I am sorry the way you got there was so rocky.
I remember all of this so clearly. Were you in the next room? Sitting on the couch watching everything crash (also the class of 2009). Looking to one another saying "what does this mean?" The joyful thesis. The hiring freezes. Student loans. Volunteer work, because it was the only work. Lifelong financial anxiety. Solidarity. Solidarity. Solidarity.
I was still in high school. My dad lost his job in 2007. He’s in finance but he’s worked at a lot of tech companies. We spent the next summer making bread, eating through food storage, picking apples and cherries from friend’s trees, and taking all the leftover food from a church friend who was moving. I remember worrying about my dad not having a job. I know my parents were very stressed out. But I also remember the fun of working together. We pitted the cherries in the backyard and our hands were red from the juice. My mom’s rolls with the sesame seeds on top are still some of my favorites.
My grandpa's biggest memory about the Great Depression was how much fun he had walking through LA with his uncle, selling peanuts to people on the street. They never sold very many. He only realized later that they tried to sell peanuts because there were no jobs and the pantry was nearly bare. I think if there was a world where he got to walk with his uncle like that, while also coming home to enough food in the house, he'd have been very happy. I love that your family was able to sustain each other, in more ways than one.
I was halfway through college in New York City in 2008, and handling (poorly) the repercussions of an abusive relationship and a lot of friend group upheaval. I remember that collapse feeling apocalyptic. It felt like 9/11 all over again, like a rug being hauled out from underneath me. I understood, without really having to be told, that opportunities were going to be thin on the ground, that the adult world I had been trying hard to figure out my relationship to, had run out of answers and credibility. It made me reckless, and it made me uncompromising.
I think that whole friend group felt it. They were all in their early/mid twenties and had been assuming financial success was there for the having, was assured. Suddenly we were all the Lost Generation, and we behaved like it. And why not? The future had been canceled.
I don't think I ever recovered that sense of possibility. I don't mean to say it was optimism. I didn't want the jobs that I might have been able to get had that crash not occurred. But it felt as though the world contracted in ways it was not prepared to accept, and it still isn't prepared to accept them. We have been told "Oh, everything is *fine* now" for almost fifteen years, and the fact that it seems like no one (at least in this thread) seems to really have believed it? I think that speaks well of us.
I was a junior in high school when 9/11 happened and I do remember thinking - will anything ever be okay again? And in some ways, 2008 did seem like an answer, "No." And to be dealing with that answer while also enduring an abusive relationship - I am so sorry. "It made me reckless, and it made me uncompromising." is a FUCKING good line and I hope you use it in your memoirs someday.
I finished undergrad in 2007 and went directly into an MFA. In dance. Totally stable LOL! I had no loans from undergrad (academic scholarship--bananas to even IMAGINE these days! Especially bc my family's expected contribution on the FAFSA was "$0" and usually now that means your "financial aid" package comes w/about $10-20k in loans per year, but I digress...), so I figured I could take out as much loan $ for an MFA as my peers had taken out for undergrad, no big deal. It would even out.
The fancy private school I did my grad studies at was just north of NYC and we were living in the Bronx. My partner left a stable if underpaid job to join me. Our first indicator that the economy was crashing was that with 5 years of graphic design under her belt...she couldn't get ANY work in NYC. No one was hiring. She started freelancing, doing odd jobs. Mostly pet sitting. Then people started getting laid off. They got unemployment. She got nothing. We were living off my student loans in a mouse infested apartment. It took MONTHS to realize that we should probably defer *her* loans for a while bc we were living on mine.
We got married the summer of 2008 for $2k in Niagara Falls, CA, bc NYS had just said that it would recognize gay marriages that were performed legally elsewhere. I bought a white sun dress off the rack at The Gap and the $60 felt like a huge splurge. We didn't have a photographer or a dance floor. But hey--we're still married and now have gorgeous twins! It feels important to note that bc we weren't married (or able to marry) when Jen traveled across the state for my opportunity...she couldn't get unemployment when she left her job.
It also feels absolutely wild to note that, while we are in some ways astonishingly unaffected by the current boiling crisis (we own our home, our payments are reasonable, we have few if any other major expenses, her job is stable, we have no retirement accounts, anyway...) I am ONCE AGAIN finishing grad school while rich people burn dollar bills and my industry implodes. At least this time around I'm less naive...I TRULY thought from 2007-2009 that I had made a BRILLIANT choice going to a fancy private grad school bc we live in a consumer economy and how are people supposed to consume things if they have no money?! I thought they would HAVE to forgive student loans. I thought it would be the fastest, easiest way to juice the economy. I thought I was going to get an $80k MFA for next to nothing. Instead I'm now $130k in debt. Or maybe more. I haven't checked my total balance in a while. Sigh.
The way you realized what was happening - first no jobs, and then the lay off and then no unemployment for self-employed people. Phew. I RELATE to this. And I can just see you paying for that white sun dress and it's just such a beautiful hopeful fraught moment. Wow. I hope you write about it at length someday. I'm glad you got your MFA in dance. And I think it should have been affordable. We need dancers. Give your twins a hug for me.
I need to preface this by saying this was in Ireland: I was working as a bookseller, and we were already in trouble because of Amazon and e-readers. I used to count the previous days takings every morning and just watched the numbers go down day after day, week after week.
Meanwhile our head office was sending us 200 copies of something they got deeply, deeply, discounted and expecting us to somehow sell them all.
I knew we were really in trouble when we hadn't updated the £Sterling price conversion charts for magazines in over six months. Customers were pointing out that the Euro was strong against £Sterling so why hadn't our prices changed? I made the mistake of asking the CEO about it and he blew up at me. Three days later some dudes from Deloitte walked in a couple hours before closing and told us the company was in receivership. My manager had the day off and I remember them telling me to close the doors and get the staff together, but most of all I remember them making me open and count the safe, reconcile the tills, and balance the cash, while they watched me. That was what finally made me cry. And I cried all over their cash. And then when everything was balanced I handed them the keys and walked out, across the road to a pub and had WTF just happened pints with my co-workers.
All around me I could see that people didn't have disposable income anymore, businesses were shuttering, and there were no jobs for people to interview for because everything was shrinking.
I was lucky because my job was very low-paid, and I'd spent years living on welfare in the early aughts, so there wasn't a huge change for me. I'd been there before, after all.
Weird that having experience with poverty was now a plus.
Friends who had done well during the Celtic Tiger years were hit far harder than me. Young people who had graduated into nice jobs and bought houses with long mortgages and furniture on hire purchase were entirely underwater. It hurt to watch.
I really hope none of us ends up back there again, and I thank you all for sharing your stories. And thank you Meg, for giving me a space to share mine.
Orla, I read your story as I’ve been waiting to pick up my kids from school and now I am crying in front if their school. God DAMN those men for making you count their ill-gotten money. And God* bless you. *or whatever it is that keeps the celestial lights on
I got married when I was 21 years old. Which means I was a little 22 year old in 2007, when the crisis started. We didn't hit the bottom of the crisis until March 9th 2009, one month after I had my first baby. The recession didn't end until that summer.
But the recession ending didn't mean everything was suddenly fine. We'd all fallen a long way and many of us had lost a lot on the way down. Or we were newly adults and had not yet had much to lose. But we were having a hard time getting anything - jobs, housing, security, groceries - for the first time.
I think the clearest memory I have of that moment is standing in line at a grocery store, trying to keep my baby from crying while trying to add up the cost of the contents of my cart before I got to the check out. Swaying and counting, swaying and counting. Putting back anything we couldn't afford, trying to remember to include tax, kissing the baby and then biting my lip.
We had a $50 a week grocery budget. I couldn't nurse, so we had to buy formula too. On good weeks, I didn't have to include the formula in the grocery budget. On bad weeks, I did. My baby required one of those *special* formulas, so each canister was about $32. So on the bad weeks, we $18 to feed Riley and me. We were very young and Riley was still in school. But the possibility of a life lived abundantly - the security of *enough* - in the future felt closed up.
I felt like I'd always be swaying and counting. and I was terrified I'd never figure out how to make our needs and the numbers add up. Even once the crisis was over and the climb out of the recession was complete, I'd find myself swaying and counting. But it was different. The possibility of abundance - in the best sense of that word - came back.
Over the past weekend, I've felt that old closing fear return. And I feel determined to not give into it. Financial crises are constructions of our current economic model. There is enough for everyone, there always has been. And I am going to spend my life proving those numbers add up. It's what we do to each other in the name of capitalism that doesn't.
I've just begun to let go of that "swaying and counting" mentality in the past few years. We're a two income household! By every metric, we're super stable! We should be doing fine! I don't have to budget every last penny!
But, oh, that old closing fear returning. My husband works for a tech start-up based in Silicon Valley so everything with SVB felt a little like life flashing before my eyes. How quickly it could all come crashing down. And this time we have three kids and a mortgage.
We always swore we'd be ready when the next recession came and it doesn't feel like we are. We are only 38 and it feels like there hasn't been time. And same, he's in tech, we've got three kids and a mortgage. And my income is a *writer's* income which is ummmm not stable or super profitable. So the panic. It's there.
I have two empty rooms, more toilet paper than anyone needs, stockpiles of peanut butter, an obscene amount of canned tuna, fiber internet and a full heart.... there’s always a backup plan ❤️😀
I grew up dirt poor and no matter how much I have in the bank accounts (I know...) or what it says on paper, I’ve never lost that feeling of always being on the edge of poverty... I don’t think that feeling goes away and it returns like a tsunami when news like the banks failing or a recession looming or 2008 happens... I know I’m not hungry or cold or unhoused... but the terror of poverty lingers...
Riley experiences this too. He says he is constantly terrified of not being able to pay bills and buy groceries. The fear is just always there.
I was privileged enough to weather the 2008 crisis just fine, but we have always been very conservative in our financial affairs. My brother, on the other hand, really went down the economic doomsday rabbit-hole early in the naughts and 2008 just confirmed his view that the world economy was on the verge of collapse. So he invested in gold, as in actual gold coins, which are sitting in a vault in Switzerland. He died in January and we now have the task of figuring out how to get them and sell them. Judging by the state of his house he was ready for the apocalypse, but what we don’t quite get is - if the world collapsed economically, exactly how was he going to access this gold from the US? We found many things (many many things) in his house , but no rowboat. (I can joke about it but honestly, knowing how frightened he must have been, it's heartbreaking. He was such a bright guy and he was so influenced by these a#@hat bloggers that the world was ending and we never realized just how bad things had gotten for him.)
Elizabeth, I've been reading your comment over and over again. It's like a short story, and such a sad one. I just ache for him. We all want to be safe. And so sometimes we put things in safes. I am so sorry for your loss. I am so sorry for your brother's pain. Thank you so much for trusting us with this - his story and yours.
We were six months into my husband's launch of his own construction company and construction were we live DIED. I was teaching my second year. Our mortgage was $1500 and my salary was not quite $30k a year -- less because everyone had to furlough a couple days in order for no one to get fired.
We had three kids: 3, 5 & 7 years old. Paying the mortgage and childcare meant we rotated what other bills we could pay, never skipping the same service two times in a row. Feeding the fam included a lot of pasta (Mac & Cheese primarily). I'm not sure I have fully worked through what I need to work through because there are things that show up in daily convos now that launch FEELINGS.
RE: things that show up that launch feelings? Oof. Yup. We were in different life stages, but there are still things that trigger me to this day about that time. Honestly? I'm still angry.
I did therapy for 4 1/2 years and took ten months off. Then I started again with a different therapist and boy am I realizing that an awareness of something that hurt isn't the same as healing from that hurt.
I have SO MUCH WORK to do.
Oh my gosh. To be in construction when the housing bubble burst!
My dad was a small insurance broker for medium size companies. His biggest client was New Century - the mortgage company that went into Chapter 11 and sparked the first panic. When that happened, he lost nearly everything. It was excruciating.
I don't know how to work through that kind of trauma. I guess it just lives with us. And we try to keep it from hurting us or those around us.
In September 2008, I worked as a fundraiser for the University of Washington (in Seattle, also former home of Washington Mutual the bank failure that was bigger than Silicon Valley Bank). I had just finished a huge fundraising campaign (I believe it was $2B in 5-6 years?) and we had a huge party for donors scheduled to celebrate. It was hugely awkward because getting a bunch of rich tech and finance people together to pay each other on the back was a super bad look during the same week John McCain was suspending his presidential campaign to be in DC during the crisis. So a lot of donors left the party pretty early--I got hugely drunk, asked my boss’s husband to teach me how to ballroom dance (half my colleagues thought I was flirting with him), and got my car towed because I had to take a cab home and I had parked where tailgating was happening for a football game the next morning.
The year after that, I went back to school to become a lawyer and then went to work for a labor union. I don’t want my livelihood to be about sucking up to rich people ever again.
1. I think getting hugely drunk is a totally acceptable way to process a global financial meltdown. 2. "I went back to school to become a lawyer and then went to work for a labor union. I don’t want my livelihood to be about sucking up to rich people ever again." This is incredibly bad ass and I love every single part of it. I'd love to hear about your work with labor unions.
I was 2 years from graduating high school during the last crisis, and my family had just moved to Germany for my dad's work. At that point, at 16, I was of course mostly wrapped up in my teenage affairs: leaving behind my girlfriend, navigating queerness and living abroad, but the financial crisis loomed like a giant flashing warning sign all the same. I remember feeling insulated from it, over in Europe, and also very very aware of it because I was going to graduate into the world that it created. It was the beginning of the conversations for me about college and scarcity and choosing a major that would make money rather than doing something that I loved. I had privilege, because my family was spared and my dad was in the military, which was pretty stable; but I was scared all the same, and that fear definitely followed me into my college days.
Jordan, this is such a needed and fascinating perspective. I wonder how much Germany's (relatively) strong social safety net helped create a feeling of insulation? I know that you didn't use that safety net because your family was there because of the US military. But I wonder if the environment created by that net still helped insulate. And I really love how you articulate that insulation didn't keep fear from going with your into college. I think that's a very important point - that even people who were not adults when the crisis happened have been haunted by it.
I'm very sure it did! Not only did Germany's safety net help, the US Embassy's helped. They pay attention to things like cost of living and pay accordingly. One summer, for an internship, I biked around Berlin with the person who would become my spouse and we wrote down the costs of various food things in different stores, to help calculate how much the embassy's cost of living stipend should be. So money was front and center but also strangely abundant in a way that felt like it had an end. I got to college in 2010, and so much of me & my peers' talk about money was this weird dichotomy of "thank god we weren't like the folks two graduated two years ago; we're lucky" and "but it's going to happen again, right?" So bizarre! It almost reminds me now of the greater glacial epochs we live in, like a little spring among a bigger period of glaciation.
It definitely haunted us. We were so steeped in college the early rhetoric of what would become hustle culture, and now it looks so much like a lot of panicked people going "maybe if I work harder, it won't happen to me. you should work harder too and then you'll be safe!"
This was meandering but wow, very interesting thoughts!! thank you for opening up this space: it's so important.
And adding that it feels even scarier and more precarious now because my spouse and I are both trans, visibly and clearly so, and we also just bought our first house, and I am a freelance illustrator. They work in tech. We have woven ourselves a big safety net based on the fear from the last recession but oh, am I nervous.
In 2008, I was a couple of years into college and not paying that much attention. My husband and I have talked about how clueless we were at the time, compared to just how much it would consume our attention now as married-with-kids-and-a-mortgage-30-somethings. But then? We were more consumed with deadlines and stipends and pulling all-nighters and planning our weekends.
That is until the following summer, when I NEEDED an internship between my junior and senior year to graduate with my interior design degree. And all of the internships seemed to have vanished. We were the first class to try to get placed after the crisis hit. I landed an internship, but mine was incredibly boring. I learned almost nothing and paid around $1200 for 3 "credits" for the privilege to do so. It probably goes without saying that this internship was unpaid. Not just for me, but for almost everyone in my class of 30.
I finished out my senior year and graduated in 2010. Into a world that had imploded on itself. Do you know the first thing that gets cut when businesses and people don't know if/how they're going to hang on? Things like interior design. No one, and I mean NO ONE was hiring. Graduates from my university only a few years before had gotten 4-6 job OFFERS. I sent out over 70 resumes, called these places, showed up in person, etc. to...crickets.
To stop myself from writing 1000 more words, I'll just end by saying that my career would have looked entirely different had I graduated just five years sooner (or maybe even 5 years later). I entered college into something that had been considered stable, and exited into something that had blown up in real time. A honors graduate who had done everything "right" and ended up with debt, a degree, and no job prospects. That sentence-It's almost laughable how common my story is. Almost.
I teared up at that last "almost." My goodness. I see you. It is absolutely wild that the way the US labor market works so often is "get experience in your 20s in your chosen field or never work in that field for the rest of your life." The impact this has on everyone, but especially women and other marginalized groups, is well-documented but almost always ignored. It's almost always five years too soon or five years too late, even when there isn't a recession.
Fall 2009 waves at Spring 2010 (I walked that spring though--I had too many credits & my scholarship ended so I had to leave a semester early).
I went through all the same things you did. It was truly hell. I have literally cried myself to sleep recently thinking of that "5 years sooner/5 years later" wage loss.
Same graduating class as you. I did two years of AmeriCorps and remember it feeling inconceivable to have a “real” job that paid decently.
I was working at a big newspaper, where I'd been for three years, and they were doing layoffs. I felt expendable and was shocked when I wasn't. I was in a bad marriage that would have become worse if I'd stopped bringing in money (there was a part of me that wanted to take a buyout and run away with it). It was scary and the journalism industry has never recovered from it - a lot of us changed gears and became good at doing a lot of different things, but I don't think any of us ever stopped feeling expendable.
I am so sorry about the bad marriage. And I am, always, so sorry that surviving bad marriages requires security we so often fail to provide in America.
My friends who were in newsrooms during the crisis always cite it as one of the inflection points that led to the end of living wage journalism. The consolidation the crisis led to has never stopped.
"I don't think any of us ever stopped feeling expendable." This is a really succinct, poignant way to sum up what happened to so many people - a permanent, internal shift. You, of course, are necessary. And I am glad we all know it here.
Thank you Meg! And thanks for providing a place for us to get out these feelings.
I am out of the bad marriage and in a much, much better and healthier relationship now. I'm still in the industry, but as a freelancer, and on my own terms. I'm fortunate that both of these things are true.
This was so bracing and beautiful. This in particular: "Because no matter what happens in the next 15 minutes or 15 days or 15 years, your stories are the story that really matter."
Emma, thank you.
My story is not terribly interesting but I graduated college in May of 08 and moved to NYC for a paid internship with a labor union that August that was supposed to be intern-to-hire. But we all know what happened. The weird thing is that there were people hauling their desk accoutrement out of Lehman downtown and I really had no idea what was happening because I was negotiating being 23 and adjusting to living in nyc on very little money. Then my union had a hiring freeze and I was scrambling to find a job, which did lead me down particular paths I'm not sure world have happened otherwise.
I also came here to recommend Matt Stoller and his anti-monopoly substack, BIG, which does some very smart reporting on the intricacies of government regulation and business: https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller/p/fire-the-fed?
Thank you so much for this recommendation! And your story *is* incredibly interesting because it's yours. And also because it did really change your life, even if you didn't quite see it at the time It's bringing up something I hadn't totally realized about myself - it took me a long time to realize that things were much harder than they usually were because it was all happening just as I started navigating life as an adult. I conflated economic crisis with "being in your twenties" for a very, very long time.
Yeah, I do think it helps you realize that good times in the economy are temporary. And that good times for one person might mean bad times for another, which was certainly true during the pandemic.
Hahahaha sob. I had just bought my first house, an 800 sf condo, at a lovely 5.75% interest rate. I got a first time homebuyer LOAN, because in those days it was a loan and not a tax credit. We have since paid it back, but yeesh. The market absolutely plummeted weeks after we purchased, and we were underwater for 12 of the 15 years we've lived there (yes, still there!). Because it is a condo and financing depends on the condo association's finances and not just our own, we've never been able to refinance. So now, 15 years later, we still live in an 800 square foot condo with a 5.75% interest rate, but now with 2 kids, 1 dog, and 3 cats. It's small. We are slowly paying down our mortgage and who knows, we may be able to move one day!
I know these are all first world problems, and I tell my kids that when they gripe about sharing a room and not having a yard. Many many many people have much less than we do. I work hard to be grateful for what we DO have, but it is a choice and often somewhat of a stretch. Sigh.
WAIT. I HAD NO IDEA THAT IS HOW REFINANCING A CONDO WORKED! WHAT IN THE WORLD. OH MY GOSH OUR ENTIRE SYSTEM IS JUST A STUDY IN HOSTILE FINANCIAL ARCHITECTURE.
And I HEAR YOU, balancing gratitude with frustration at a morally bankrupt system can be difficult. When we were in Oakland we lived in about 700 sq ft (2 bed/1 bath) with five humans and I felt that was tight. I think it might have been enough room if we could've paid all of our bills. But we just seemed to lack space everywhere and so everything felt too little.
I had just started dating my now-husband, and we were 6 months to a year from graduating college with degrees in poetry. We were every "Millennials are failures because____" article. We lived at home with my family, we worked as baristas despite our fancy degrees. We failed to launch, or something. There was pressure to join linkedin, go on informational interviews, take unpaid internships. Because that's literally all there was. No jobs to even apply to. That time was so central to how I understand myself. It's falling in love and setting myself for a lifetime of lost earnings. I went into publishing, which was facing its own identity crisis over the launch of ebooks & kindles.
A few years ago (maybe 2018 or so), I was having dinner with a friend my age, who is now an adjunct and writer. Speaking of her students (who I had just guest-lectured about my career path) she said to me, "You know, they don't remember 2008 at all. They were kids. The ones who do remember are inevitably lower-income, and will say things like 'yeah, we lived in a nice house, but then we had to move into a smaller apartment.'" I now make a point to ask my assistants what they remember about 2008. Most say "oh, I was in elementary school, I don't remember anything." They tell me it didn't impact them at all. Ancient history. It's in seeing their lack of precarity-mindset that makes me realize how deeply my worldview was shaped by 2008.
Wow. I am feeling a lot of things based on this very insightful observation! Like! It's good that a lot of kids were ultimately insulated from the fear and trauma. But OF COURSE poor kids in America were not. And when they were not, that had lasting impacts - externally and internally. And as adults they are *still* dealing with those repercussions as they enter another crisis. Impact on impact on impact. Also,I can tell you got a graduate degree in poetry because this is a poem - "It's falling in love/ and setting myself/ for a lifetime/ of lost earnings."
In fall 2008 I was starting my senior year of undergrad, starting to happily work on my history thesis about women and garden history, and planning to spent a year or so after graduation working in my college library before going to graduate school for library science. But I had a huge amount of student loans and a minimal family safety net, so my plans changed as I sat on my couch and watched the markets crash over and over on the news. Everywhere I had thought about working seemed to have a hiring freeze when I graduated in 2009. My college's career services were useless, but my academic advisor told me that in recessions, utilities and social services kept hiring, so that's where I focused. I spent a year in an Americorps position funded by Recovery Act money and have stayed in nonprofit social services since. I did get that library degree a few years later, working full time while I did it because that's the only way I could avoid adding an untenable amount to my student loan debt, but I shouldn't have. I still have so much financial anxiety from my experience of the 2008 crisis. I probably always will.
A thesis about women and garden history sounds so lovely. Did you ever get to finish it? I'd love to read it. I am seeing again and again in the comments how lives were changed this way, but somehow that similarity makes each story stand out more, not less. I just keep thinking about everything we lost as a collective - every book, every play, every piece of research, every dream deferred. I am grateful you are in social services. I am sorry the way you got there was so rocky.
I remember all of this so clearly. Were you in the next room? Sitting on the couch watching everything crash (also the class of 2009). Looking to one another saying "what does this mean?" The joyful thesis. The hiring freezes. Student loans. Volunteer work, because it was the only work. Lifelong financial anxiety. Solidarity. Solidarity. Solidarity.
I was still in high school. My dad lost his job in 2007. He’s in finance but he’s worked at a lot of tech companies. We spent the next summer making bread, eating through food storage, picking apples and cherries from friend’s trees, and taking all the leftover food from a church friend who was moving. I remember worrying about my dad not having a job. I know my parents were very stressed out. But I also remember the fun of working together. We pitted the cherries in the backyard and our hands were red from the juice. My mom’s rolls with the sesame seeds on top are still some of my favorites.
My grandpa's biggest memory about the Great Depression was how much fun he had walking through LA with his uncle, selling peanuts to people on the street. They never sold very many. He only realized later that they tried to sell peanuts because there were no jobs and the pantry was nearly bare. I think if there was a world where he got to walk with his uncle like that, while also coming home to enough food in the house, he'd have been very happy. I love that your family was able to sustain each other, in more ways than one.
I was halfway through college in New York City in 2008, and handling (poorly) the repercussions of an abusive relationship and a lot of friend group upheaval. I remember that collapse feeling apocalyptic. It felt like 9/11 all over again, like a rug being hauled out from underneath me. I understood, without really having to be told, that opportunities were going to be thin on the ground, that the adult world I had been trying hard to figure out my relationship to, had run out of answers and credibility. It made me reckless, and it made me uncompromising.
I think that whole friend group felt it. They were all in their early/mid twenties and had been assuming financial success was there for the having, was assured. Suddenly we were all the Lost Generation, and we behaved like it. And why not? The future had been canceled.
I don't think I ever recovered that sense of possibility. I don't mean to say it was optimism. I didn't want the jobs that I might have been able to get had that crash not occurred. But it felt as though the world contracted in ways it was not prepared to accept, and it still isn't prepared to accept them. We have been told "Oh, everything is *fine* now" for almost fifteen years, and the fact that it seems like no one (at least in this thread) seems to really have believed it? I think that speaks well of us.
I was a junior in high school when 9/11 happened and I do remember thinking - will anything ever be okay again? And in some ways, 2008 did seem like an answer, "No." And to be dealing with that answer while also enduring an abusive relationship - I am so sorry. "It made me reckless, and it made me uncompromising." is a FUCKING good line and I hope you use it in your memoirs someday.
I finished undergrad in 2007 and went directly into an MFA. In dance. Totally stable LOL! I had no loans from undergrad (academic scholarship--bananas to even IMAGINE these days! Especially bc my family's expected contribution on the FAFSA was "$0" and usually now that means your "financial aid" package comes w/about $10-20k in loans per year, but I digress...), so I figured I could take out as much loan $ for an MFA as my peers had taken out for undergrad, no big deal. It would even out.
The fancy private school I did my grad studies at was just north of NYC and we were living in the Bronx. My partner left a stable if underpaid job to join me. Our first indicator that the economy was crashing was that with 5 years of graphic design under her belt...she couldn't get ANY work in NYC. No one was hiring. She started freelancing, doing odd jobs. Mostly pet sitting. Then people started getting laid off. They got unemployment. She got nothing. We were living off my student loans in a mouse infested apartment. It took MONTHS to realize that we should probably defer *her* loans for a while bc we were living on mine.
We got married the summer of 2008 for $2k in Niagara Falls, CA, bc NYS had just said that it would recognize gay marriages that were performed legally elsewhere. I bought a white sun dress off the rack at The Gap and the $60 felt like a huge splurge. We didn't have a photographer or a dance floor. But hey--we're still married and now have gorgeous twins! It feels important to note that bc we weren't married (or able to marry) when Jen traveled across the state for my opportunity...she couldn't get unemployment when she left her job.
It also feels absolutely wild to note that, while we are in some ways astonishingly unaffected by the current boiling crisis (we own our home, our payments are reasonable, we have few if any other major expenses, her job is stable, we have no retirement accounts, anyway...) I am ONCE AGAIN finishing grad school while rich people burn dollar bills and my industry implodes. At least this time around I'm less naive...I TRULY thought from 2007-2009 that I had made a BRILLIANT choice going to a fancy private grad school bc we live in a consumer economy and how are people supposed to consume things if they have no money?! I thought they would HAVE to forgive student loans. I thought it would be the fastest, easiest way to juice the economy. I thought I was going to get an $80k MFA for next to nothing. Instead I'm now $130k in debt. Or maybe more. I haven't checked my total balance in a while. Sigh.
The way you realized what was happening - first no jobs, and then the lay off and then no unemployment for self-employed people. Phew. I RELATE to this. And I can just see you paying for that white sun dress and it's just such a beautiful hopeful fraught moment. Wow. I hope you write about it at length someday. I'm glad you got your MFA in dance. And I think it should have been affordable. We need dancers. Give your twins a hug for me.
Thank you, Meg. I was so calm when I wrote our story…but your response made me choke up. Hugs to your girls, too.
I need to preface this by saying this was in Ireland: I was working as a bookseller, and we were already in trouble because of Amazon and e-readers. I used to count the previous days takings every morning and just watched the numbers go down day after day, week after week.
Meanwhile our head office was sending us 200 copies of something they got deeply, deeply, discounted and expecting us to somehow sell them all.
I knew we were really in trouble when we hadn't updated the £Sterling price conversion charts for magazines in over six months. Customers were pointing out that the Euro was strong against £Sterling so why hadn't our prices changed? I made the mistake of asking the CEO about it and he blew up at me. Three days later some dudes from Deloitte walked in a couple hours before closing and told us the company was in receivership. My manager had the day off and I remember them telling me to close the doors and get the staff together, but most of all I remember them making me open and count the safe, reconcile the tills, and balance the cash, while they watched me. That was what finally made me cry. And I cried all over their cash. And then when everything was balanced I handed them the keys and walked out, across the road to a pub and had WTF just happened pints with my co-workers.
All around me I could see that people didn't have disposable income anymore, businesses were shuttering, and there were no jobs for people to interview for because everything was shrinking.
I was lucky because my job was very low-paid, and I'd spent years living on welfare in the early aughts, so there wasn't a huge change for me. I'd been there before, after all.
Weird that having experience with poverty was now a plus.
Friends who had done well during the Celtic Tiger years were hit far harder than me. Young people who had graduated into nice jobs and bought houses with long mortgages and furniture on hire purchase were entirely underwater. It hurt to watch.
I really hope none of us ends up back there again, and I thank you all for sharing your stories. And thank you Meg, for giving me a space to share mine.
Orla, I read your story as I’ve been waiting to pick up my kids from school and now I am crying in front if their school. God DAMN those men for making you count their ill-gotten money. And God* bless you. *or whatever it is that keeps the celestial lights on