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It's hardly uniquely shitty.

There's bound to be people lived through the 1906 SF earthquake as a kid, the trenches of WW1 as a young adult (1917), then the Spanish Flu (1918) and then once things started looking up for them, either the 1929 stock market crash and/or the dust bowl came and took it all away again.

Of course on the other hand, just because someone has had it worse doesn't make things not bad.



And if you survived that, you got slapped with WWII. Which in Europe and Asia could have meant complete destruction all around you.

In fact, in Asia, it didn't really improve from there for quite some time.


Yeah, it's basically 20th century Candide for much of that generation.


How about being born in 1890 in China? If you lived until 80 you’d have gone through: the first Sino-Japanese war, the Boxer Rebellion, the 1911 Revolution, the Warlord Era, the Northern Expedition and Chinese Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the second part of the Chinese Civil War, the Communist Purges, the Great Leap Forward, and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.




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