The other DrC and I were raised by parents and other relatives who lived as adults through the Great Depression of the 1930s. Very often over the years we’ve commented on the ways that experience permanently shaped their behavior for good and ill.
Frugality? Certainly, but also wariness, hoarding and some lasting resentments too. I have come to believe most of their generation spent the rest of their days suffering from what we now call PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder.
The 30’s were ugly and traumatic, our parents’ generation were stressed by it. Most coped after a fashion, some did not.
World War II with its dislocations and relocations, separations, rationing, and, for most at war’s end, reunions and celebrations may have helped them get over the worst of it. But not all of it, by any means.
