kontextmaschine:

That’s a good read, and a good question.

The immediate impact - I was a few years out of college in LA at the time, and I remember that we as hipsterish young people in the big city were in high demand as “influencers” and so brands would underwrite all sort of free parties and just give us free alcohol, that had been a little ridiculous but it ended with the crash.

Also I did kinda lose a job, I wrote some video game manuals for a contact at THQ. Which was, to hear her tell it, fat and lazy and redundantly staffed. In the wake of the crash they trimmed staff, her included, but it eventually collapsed anyway.

On a longer scale, I moved to Portland in 2011, and any influence of the national economy on my life was swamped by the local specificity, booming from the low income/low cost-of-living “where young people go to retire” Portlandia to today’s increasingly grinding Seattle South.

And that’s really part of the back-to-the-city trend that predated ’08, Williamsburg was the thing while I was still in college, maybe you can tie it back in if you read the 2008 crash as the failure of sprawl development as an economic engine.

That’s the direct impact, so arguably no, it didn’t impact me that much.

It did deeply affect me in the wake seeing how challenges, individual or collective, that would have had money thrown at them if it was available resolved instead as hits to like “social peace” or “trust” or “belief in legitimating narratives’, realizing these things were fungibly tradeable against raw cash and had only existed as an epiphenomenon of good times in the first place. That really hadn’t been a thing in the golden womb I had lived in from since I came to awareness, and that’ll stick with me.

I’m rereading OP’s question, and reading into the “honest question” preface, realizing it implies the possibility of a dishonest, threatening question, realizing the threatening question is “did the ‘08 financial crisis even impact you?”

And if the answer is “eeeh nah?”, maybe I am your class enemy for it? (sorry)

I mean there was definitely an expectation that you could live a normal life such that over time you built some domain for yourself that existed before the crash that it seems doesn’t anymore

(maybe that’s part of the new left-claiming family values social conservatism, that having a family and simply watching children grow at a rate of one day per day is at least an achievable accomplishment still)

And I parse that loss more in terms of a loss of meaning than a shortage of money-as-abstraction-of-survival, cause I literally have less debts to pay, while it’s all fungible, I get that

I don’t want to put all of that on ‘08, though, I made that reblog the other day about how you could see all these things intruding in the early ‘90s until the peace dividend and the internet bought us some decades.