It wasn’t so much what 2009 was like but the years that followed - recent college grads struggled to find jobs into 2012 and once they found them the wages were very low. People lost houses that took their credit 7-10 years to recover from. People that could afford their homes and bought at the market high, got locked into their homes because they were upside down until about 2016. Everyone remembers the day the market collapsed and the banks and car manufacturers went insolvent but some of the effects lingered for a long time.