It's largely about the specifics of your life circumstances. I'm in my mid-40s, so I've been through a lot at this point and there is no plausible near-term scenario short of all-out nuclear war where my life gets worse than it has been in the past. I've experienced levels of economic hardship well beyond anything I'm ever going to experience again and I ended up getting through it fine and here I am. Second, my wife is employed and also an engineer. Our finances are such that the family would be fine with only one of us working. We'd make less progress toward retirement goals, but we wouldn't lose the house or anything else. So that's an inherent safety margin that makes one person potentially losing a job not all that scary. There's also some level of perhaps just luck with timing, perhaps something bound to eventually happen as you get older, but we're not exactly living at the edge of our means here. I bought my house a long time ago and it's way cheaper than I could afford. Student loans are paid off by now. I don't even drive, so I'm not blowing a bunch on a car, and if I had to sell the car I have and go totally without, it wouldn't make much of a difference. I'd be fine making a lot less money than I currently make.
All in all, the net effect is nothing about my quality of life requires the economy or job market to be great. But for what it's worth, I'm not really all that worried about that, either. I'm specialized enough at this point that my company has great difficulty filling positions similar to mine. It's limiting in a way. I don't always love the specifics of this field but can't realistically hope to do anything different without starting at a much lower tier and sacrificing a lot of the autonomy and seniority I currently enjoy. But the upside is I'm probably fairly near last to go. My company doesn't need me specifically to have something to sell, but they need someone like me and there aren't a lot of them out there.
All in all, the net effect is nothing about my quality of life requires the economy or job market to be great. But for what it's worth, I'm not really all that worried about that, either. I'm specialized enough at this point that my company has great difficulty filling positions similar to mine. It's limiting in a way. I don't always love the specifics of this field but can't realistically hope to do anything different without starting at a much lower tier and sacrificing a lot of the autonomy and seniority I currently enjoy. But the upside is I'm probably fairly near last to go. My company doesn't need me specifically to have something to sell, but they need someone like me and there aren't a lot of them out there.