When folks a couple of decades older than I am talk about their parents, they often talk about how their parents were a product of the Great Depression, and even once the economy was going strong, they never really started to spend much money anyway. Their frugal habits were too ingrained to break.

What kind of economic crisis would it take for our nation to once again produce a generation that averse to spending money? Hopefully, the economic crisis we are facing today will never reach that extreme, because I imagine that the driving force behind remaining frugal, even after the tough times are over, is fear.

I found myself searching for a job offer during the autumn of 2009. Even with an accounting degree, it seemed there was a terrifying chance that I would not be able to get a public accounting job after college.

Once I secured a job offer, the recession just didn’t seem to hit me too hard. It still mostly remains stories on the news, or friends of my parents’ colleagues who have had to walk away from a mortgage. And on top of not being directly affected, I have a strong foundation of faith in the stock market, built on the teachings of finance and accounting professors that promote the security of the stock market and tell us that even the riskiest stocks will pay off if you have a long enough time horizon.

There is some disconnect between me and the tough economic reality that many people in the U.S. are facing as a result of this contraction. When I was in high school, we had an assignment to find someone in our town who was alive during the Great Depression and interview them about their life. The woman I interviewed had lived out on a farm for most of the Great Depression, and did not recall being too affected by the crisis. I hope that by writing down my thoughts here, I will at least remember the fear that hits me every now and then, because I can see myself in 10 years looking back and thinking I was not at all affected either.

For the most part, I have faith that it cannot last forever, and certainly by the time I’m 60 or so we should have already cycled back to a strong economy. Sometimes though, I feel that fear that makes people save all their money under a mattress, and never hire anyone to do anything they can do themselves.

I think back to a memory I have from childhood. I remember watching some movie, that must have been about a family during the Great Depression. All I remember is the scene from the day the stock market crashed. The father comes home, and all their money is gone! gone! It was all in the stock market because that’s what the “thing to do” was. The mother goes “Oh well, at least we have my savings from working part time in the bank. That’ll get us through the tough times.” But it turns out that, against her wishes, the father had taken that money and invested it too. I remember thinking of this man as a kind of drug addict - that he must have been too attracted to the allure of playing the market to think clearly. In my child’s interpretation of the scene, I equated this man to a gambler who stole his family’s last savings to go to Las Vegas once more. What kind of person would be dumb enough to have put all of their money in this “stock market” thing, I wondered.

But now, of course, over 85% of my “assets” (just cash and mutual funds) are in the stock market (via the mutual funds.) And honestly, I think that hoarding too much in cash is just silly. That will just guarantee that your money loses value. Luckily, I don’t have anyone depending on me, and I don’t have much money overall anyway, otherwise I’m sure I’d have some sleepless nights where I worry about making the right decisions with my money.

How has the recession affected you? If you didn’t lose your job or your home, does it still make you feel nervous sometimes? Do you share my confidence that it has to eventually get better, not matter what the government does? Or do you worry that a wrong move in this crisis could send us on a downward spiral that will last decades?