I recently had the opportunity to visit Athens, Greece, to shoot a video of a Greek packaging company. It was my first time in Greece, and I was able to talk to some of the people who were affected by the widely reported economic crisis that hit Greece after the 2008 recession—and to some extent continues to affect Greek individuals and businesses.

Like many others in Europe and around the world, I had heard, watched, and read the stories about the “Greek Depression”—or “The Crisis”—how hard the country had been hit, and how the European Central Bank was forced by the governments of the European Union to lend money to the Greek population in exchange for the Greek government enforcing some really tough regulations aimed at correcting some of the problems that led to the crisis. I knew the headlines—but not how the crisis had really affected people and companies.

From a distance, the situation seemed bad enough, but discovering how it had been for individuals living there was honestly a kind of wake-up call for me. Without going into too much detail about the crisis itself (see here for the full story), simply put, Greece spent more money than it collected, running up large deficits and unsustainable debt. From almost any perspective, spending was out of control. What about having your retirement before you turn 50? What about spending two or three times what was necessary on public infrastructure simply because nobody cared enough to question it? And on and on. To some extent, it looked a bit like Venezuela and while Greece was a socialistic country in the 1970s, even by that standard spending was out of hand. Still, Greece was the birthplace of democracy and the way most modern societies works today.