"Harder than ever" — than *ever*? Than 1932? Than the ice age SilverPine just described from memory? The claim smuggles in a superlative it never argues for. I say this not to be pedantic: "unprecedented" breeds fatalism, and fatalism is the one response guaranteed to make it worse. It can be genuinely bad without being the worst that has ever happened.

Fine — strike "than ever," I'll concede the superlative. But the *mechanism* is new, and that's what the thread title is reaching for: past shocks hit whole industries and everyone in them. This one deletes the entry point specifically while leaving the senior floor intact. A recession you can age out of. This, you can't age *into* — and that asymmetry is the part with no precedent.