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Comment by GolfPopper | Hacker News Reader

Obligatory xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1979:_History

That out of the way, I'm close to 50, and things over the last year definitely seem different in a more precarious way than anything before them. It feels closer to my memories of August 1991, or the days immediately after 9/11 or January 6th, only all the time, where I've gotten a little numb to the dissonance, but not nearly enough for it to feel close to normal. It feels like what I imagine the run-up to WWII might have felt like to those living then.

That's my perspective.

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I have a few more times around the sun, and you are not the only person with that perspective.

I've lived through crises such as Nixon, Iran-Contra, the Arab gas embargoes, the Savings and Loans (S&L) crisis, and the 2001 tech collapse, in addition to the events you've mentioned. It seems, though, that we lived through all of those, but we were able to survive the events, and we may still have been a bit dented, but we could function. We (I) didn't feel hopeless.

I think you are dead on with the observation that what we are going through now is like previously intense but much shorter-lived events, except it's going all the time. Because it's not stopping, we're not getting a chance to breathe and figure out what the next thing to do is.

I think of the previous events; only COVID-19 and the 2008 banking crisis were similar multi-year persistent events and have increasingly cemented a sense of precariousness.

I wonder why you don't add 9-11 to your list of multi year persistent events. Covid and 2008 are repeats of older crises. Meanwhile, 9-11 caused the political course of the main world power to completely change direction. Even if the event itself only caused about 3000 victim's, I'd still rate it on the same scale as Napoleon or the world wars. Trump is just the latest continuation of it.

The previous commenter had mentioned it already, and I don't think 9/11 had the same psychic shock and persistence as COVID and 2008. But I'm sure you have had a different experience behind your feeling of 9/11 as a more persistent traumatic event.

Trump is a continuation of a multi-tentacled, longer-timeline octopus that encompasses all of our collective traumatic events.

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