> My mother left her state job (she’d had a leading role in developing Bulgaria’s first information system for traffic control) to run the risk-assessment and anti-fraud management system of a large French bank; my father was promoted, at age 38, to medical director of his hospital. My paternal grandparents transformed their garage in a provincial town into a general store, while my maternal ones started a rabbit farm on the premises of their village property. Almost everybody, regardless of age, wanted to do something bold with their newfound freedom, to risk and experiment.

No, they didn't, maybe some of the newly well-off people wanted to do that, like the parents and grandparents of the author of the article here, and that was mostly happening because they could afford to fail because they had money, but the great, great majority of people in Eastern Europe back in the '90s most certainly didn't "want to do something bold with their newfound freedom", they just wanted to be able to, like, literally live, meaning to be able to pay the bills and to put food on the table. Both of those things (paying the bills and putting food on the table) had become impossible for many of our parents back then, my parents eventually did have to sell their one-bedroom apartment in the early 2000s because of unpaid bills.

But I get it, the children of the well-off people from the 1990s went on to study in the West and now they're back lecturing us about this and that and that other thing. Maybe they could just try and open their eyes a little more and realise how difficult and excruciatingly hard life was for the majority of us back then, people who didn't have our parents join well-paid jobs in Western companies.

I'm not Bulgarian, but I did grew up in a city just 11 kms from the border with Bulgaria, one of my first memories as a kid is going with my mum to a Bulgarian border city in order buy some stuff from there (in the mid-80s the Bulgarian stores had more diverse stuff compared to stores in Romania). I'm also about the same age as the author of the article, I think a year older, thereabouts.