I seem to remember the birth rate went up after 9/11, I wonder if we are in for a boom in Christmas babies.

I am not so sure. 9/11: concerns USA and terrorist organisations. Vietnam: USA and Vietnam Cold War: This comes close to world wide concern.

I was just thinking that this pandemic is freaking me out more then 9/11. I lived in California during 9/11, and while the event was certainly jarring, it didn't change my day to day behavior. At the moment I'm in Spain under quarantine, and it's not clear to me what will happen in a week or a month.

For me the most disruptive moment of my life was the 2008 financial crisis. I ended up homeless for a bit, and I was not prepared for that.

I don't wish to downplay those events but their impact was quite limited when we consider entire humanity.

This is a more stressful event than those three together.

The Vietnam War lasted for almost 20 years, killed over a million people, wounded millions more, and involved 7+ countries.

The Cold War lasted 40 years, almost resulted in world-wide nuclear war on multiple occasions, and dictates the US's extremely consequential foreign policy decisions (and the bedrock of US culture) even to this day. It is hard to overstate how influential the Cold War was and is to the US, Russia, China, and many Latin American countries.

HIV killed millions of people per year as recently as 2005, and it started out as a completely unknown infection with no known transmission mechanism that primarily attacked communities at extremely high social risk.

This pandemic will be an economic catastrophe for years that we'll feel a decade from now and it will kill many people until a vaccine is in widespread use, but it sure as hell is not "more stressful" than those events combined.