I think that’s what’s changed though, as GP asked, people want to define recession as closer to the social wellbeing than a metric like gdp that is divorced
Doesn’t this kinda create a problem though? Like a recession implies economic slowdown, but social wellbeing can decrease while the economy is fine.
For example, a plague or severe weather might make the average person have a worse standard of living, but if the economy isn’t net affected, it seems wrong to say we are in a recession.
Our vocabulary is too limited then. I know average people only use the word recession when things are compounding negative towards their personal finances / economics AND they feel like most people they know are dealing with the same. They don't claim it's a Katrina/Harvey/[any storm name] recession, they know the differences and that storm driven struggles are usually localized / temporary with a known amount of work to rebuild - average joe feels helpless in a macro-recession as it's only going to be solved in time and/or with help of politicians they don't trust.
Plagues are a weird example, because I can't think of any situation where a plague would not affect the economy - and it should effect it negatively. I think COVID effected it negatively, we just chose to have a financial long COVID and drag out what should have been a financial disaster without all the government programs. Instead of economic collapse and starvation, we chose to massively spend money knowing it would be paid in time through inflation and also knowing it wouldn't get reallocated in an even way as pre-COVID. (That's my take, I don't know if there's any validity to it but it's just my gut feeling.)