I lived my teen years in a collapsing post-communist economy, with hyperinflation (the kind that can add 4 zeros to prices in a span of a few years), massive un

I lived my teen years in a collapsing post-communist economy, with hyperinflation (the kind that can add 4 zeros to prices in a span of a few years), massive unemployment and deep real-wage reduction. My mother struggled with a minimum wage that translated to about 80 dollars and two children, well bellow the absolute poverty line, and my father was mostly absent. In my high school and first year at the university, there were frequent days were I had almost nothing to eat at home and most days I had no cash at all, not even to buy a bread roll or pay for some copies of lecture material - so I copied them by hand. Wore the same clothes for years, passed down from my elder brother. To put it in perspective, the political polarization around me was leading people to violence orders of magnitude larger than the events of January 6, with multiple governments toppled by angry crowds, inter-ethnic violence, workplace harassments of dissenters. Don't even start me on the state of the environment. Yet, when I look back, my teen memories are not about poverty, hunger or political turbulence. That was just the way things were, we adapted. I had my ragtag crew in which I was accepted. We just didn't care about politics or the environment all that much. The most vivid good or bad memories that I hold all have to do with social interaction, acceptance or rejection and public humiliation. We certainly didn't exhibit, as a generation, the signs of a mental disease epidemic, the fist time I heard about a suicide in my age cohort was of a fellow student in the later years at one of most competitive universities in the country. Don't get me wrong, this economic enviroment devastated adults, and we had some of the highest levels of suicide and alcoholism in the world. But it just didn't affect us teens specifically, because we had no earlier reference to how things were supposed to be.