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Comment by arcanemachiner | Hacker News Reader

Which one was the second one? I'm assuming the first and third are the Great Recession and Covid.

Probably 9/11. The resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were largely fought by Millennials (with some gen-z nearer to the end, I think—but the initial invasions heavily involved "elder millennials" [EDIT: and x/y "cuspers", especially for Afghanistan], with younger millennials involved in the long middle period). Though Vietnam (among other wars, but it seems most-comparable) was easily within living memory at the time, so I'm not so sure about "once in a lifetime" for the wars. That kind of wildly-successful attack on the US, though—that part might more-or-less qualify.

Millennial bingo:

  2008 financial crisis

  2020 pandemic (& Brexit)

  2022 war start + highest winter temperatures ever recorded 

  2023 economic downturn and layoffs

Who knows what the future holds.

What is 2022 war? The US did not enter a new armed conflict in 2022.

And you forgot 2001 dot com crash

>The US did not enter a new armed conflict in 2022.

It didn't?

US looks rather involved in the 2022 Ukraine-Russia war from my peasant POV.

Russia is not fighting the US military, but they are fighting US military vehicles etc

The US exports military vehicles all over the world, and often is fighting against forces using them, in actual wars (as opposed to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which is between Russia and Ukraine). We gave $18 billion in military equipment to the Taliban last year. That Ukraine has US military equipment means very little.

The US is providing security assistance to Ukraine, and condemns Russia's advance, but the US is not fighting a war in Ukraine

Naive at best! US has been actively pushing Ukraine against any kind of negotiations. It is not about security here it is about geopolitical power dynamic in EU.

Almost every war everywhere is fighting with AK's somewhere in the mix, often on both sides. Arms is a very dirty industry and many governments play it, often with proxy dealers to allow them to be arms (da-dish) length and offer plausible deniability. Very often, a superpower or country ends up being shot at with the weapons it provided years or decades earlier.

Who said anything about the US? Russia did, and we in the EU are feeling the effects of this 2022 war on our doorstep.

And most millennials were a bit too young to be directly affected by toe 2001 crash but the older gen definitely felt it.

Don't forget 2001, we were also around for 9/11. It's the first major event I remember.

And I actually missed the 2008 financial crisis because I was in college and insulated from it.

I’ll take all four over a decade long global depression, flu that killed 2% of the globe, and two world wars in the same timeframe.

maybe 9/11 + Iraq war, not sure... losing count at this point

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