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Aviv Russ feels like the cards have been stacked against his generation — and he’s not wrong.

Russ is a millennial, the infamous cohort of people born between 1981 and 1996. He graduated from Boston-based Emerson College in 2009, just as the Great Recession gutted the jobs market for years.

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He spent his first few years after school fighting for low-paid work as a production assistant. His mentors told him, “‘Dude, you missed the good years by like five years,'” he said.

A decade later, just as he had built up savings and was preparing to buy a house, the 31-year-old is out of a job again. The coronavirus outbreak has dried up production gigs in Hollywood, where he works.

No age group will escape the pain of the current economic slowdown, but millennials were already on more precarious financial footing than their elders. They left college with unprecedented levels of student debt and missed out on crucial years of wage growth because of the 2008 downturn.