“You Could Power The Globe With The Hatred I Have”: 30 Things About Recessions Many Don’t Realize

Seeing your friends and coworkers be pulled into the corner meeting room by HR, only to emerge 10 minutes later with a 1000 yard stare as they grab a box and putting their pictures of their kids, plants, and other stuff into it.  


If you have any empathy, you feel terrible that their entire life just got abruptly changed in a blink of an eye.  And if you have any self-awareness, you then instantly realize how precariously close you are to it being your turn.


A deep recession like 2008 is miserable, so you could power the globe with the hatred I have right now for everyone involved with, or are cheering on, intentionally pushing us off an economic cliff.

That the only way out of it and the only way to end it is to quickly and thoroughly get democrats back in control.

You can look at the historical record on this going back to the Great Depression, every recession aside from a mini one with Carter began under republican rule and was then fixed with democrat regulation.

There’s a trend now on TikTok of genz asking millennials how they got through the Bush Jr recession, know what we did?..we f*****g ended it by voting for Obama. We didn’t blather on about the lesser evil, we showed up and voted.

Some people lives will be ruined and they will never recover, just because they were an unlucky one. They will see no mercy, and always be told it was their own fault, that they lost everything, despite doing everything they were supposed to.

How quickly your average family can go from feeling like a secure middle class family to being absolutely destitute. It takes most people about a month.

People lose their jobs, sure. You expect that. But people lose their homes too. And some of those people have no safety net, nowhere else to go. Those people wind up maybe living in their car, or at a shelter, or worse. And it's because of policy choices by elected officials somewhere.

That many people will be brainwashed into blaming everybody for their lot in life except the people actually causing it.

America is so afraid of socialism that we will let families with children be homeless. In Vegas, the tunnels were full of families. Also, so many pets were homeless. We had roaming cat gangs who had feral kittens.

How quickly a micro business that you’ve spent years building can disappear.

The 2008 recession was interesting for me because I was young and poor, but had a ton of older wealthy clients at work. I couldn’t believe how many of them went from extreme wealth to losing everything. No amount of money made them untouchable. One of my clients took his own life when he lost everything. I remember being in constant fear that the business I worked for would go under because eventually there was almost no clients coming in. I think you can’t grasp the magnitude of fear and loss during that time unless you were old enough to really experience it.

I hope you love your job, because if you don’t get laid off, you’re going to be working there for many more years with no raises and no new job prospects on the horizon.

The jobs are just gone.

Like, not the jobs you're qualified for and generally work in are gone, that can happen pretty much anytime, but like there are *no job openings anywhere.*

As a result, a lot of migration happens. People move around looking for jobs, or they move places where their money will go further.

I’m more interested to know what an economic boom is like, feels like I’ve seen nothing but recession all my working life.

Showing up to test for a single county job that pays $12/hour with 500 other people who passed the initial screening.

That people can do everything “right”. Have more than the suggested amounts in the bank, be debt free, and be at the wrong place at the wrong time and end up bankrupt and homeless without having done anything wrong. Just one failure *around* them, a business, a bank, a job, a medical emergency, and it can all come crashing down and burn through any prep you may have done.

How ruthless some people will be in taking what they want from others.

And how close some communities will become when facing a common adversity.

There’s a lot of “antiwork” style content on Reddit. If we hit a recession, and unemployment skyrockets, a lot of people are going to see just how much worse that can get. A lot of people who weren’t alive in 2008 don’t know the leverage the recent low unemployment numbers had given folks. And the Great Recession happened under Obama, who pushed for consumer and labor protections. Now it will be under Trump, who is completely gutting OSHA, the NLRB and the CFPB.

They’ll be some states allowing some INSANE labor practices. Imagine what employers will get people to agree to, when the unemployment rate has doubled and it’s legal to replace workers on the factory floor with literal children.

How slow it starts, and then how fast it cascades.

In 2008, my husband lost his family’s decades old construction business. He couldn’t even get a bag boy job for a few years. Unemployment was $275 a week. I took on 2 jobs (nursing) so we didn’t lose our house. His credit is still messed up as he borrowed from personal credit cards to make payroll and pay for supplies. Families up and down our block lost homes. No one was in any restaurant or store. No one bought a home or car. So scary.

You are not going to f*****g believe how hard it's going to be to get a job. Hardly anyone will be hiring, for years on end. On the rare occasion that someone can't avoid hiring, you're gonna be looking at 500 applicants for one empty position. You won't be able to get a gig at McDonald's, because they can get someone with 20 years experience with fully open availability who will work for less than you.

Won’t have a friendly government, will have significantly more sovereign debt, and won’t have allies. Foreign countries had a significant impact on stabilizing the US.

If this continues and we hit a recession, it’s likely going to be so much worse.