The recession was a black swan moment that happens maybe once or twice a generation; I'm not saying it's not going to happen again, but they're probably a 1 in 100,000 case. It was a perfect shitstorm for them in terms of how bad they were hit, how much it impacted our QoL, and how powerless they felt.

This is probably bordering on sharing too much information, but I think it's a pretty interesting story... My dad was an engineer who sold his company and leanFIRE'd at 40. My mom worked in real estate and made really good money. They lost around 70% of their net worth during the recession in both the market and real estate investments. Given that my dad was already in his 50s and a technologist who stopped keeping up with technologies, they were basically helpless.

My dad recognized how cheap real estate was in the Bay Area (I'm talking buying downtown SJ properties for 350k at auction), liquidated everything, and worked on buying a bunch of value properties in short sale/foreclosure/auction, turning around and milking them at a cap rate over 15%. He convinced a bunch of his friends/former colleagues to be courageous and invest in real estate at a time when consumer confidence was really low. They would then use my mom to buy short sale properties and, in the process, made a lot of people a lot of money.

TL;DR they became a great team and are now many times more successful than they previously were before the recession.