The Way We Live Now: Slowly returning to normal. Normal is bad, of course. But still. It's comforting. Tariffs! Mortgages! Dumb criminals! Sports! Bask in the perverse pleasure of workaday doom!

Government tax revenues are down. Nobody can get a good mortgage. We're resorting to trade protectionism. Stocks are lower. Old folks can't afford health care.

What do all these stories have in common? They are almost something you would be reading in pre-recession times! I mean, yes, they are uniformly negative. But you don't see any beggars killing over scraps of bread, or hobo armies invading gated communities and burning stock certificates for warmth, do you? It's as if things are slowly getting back to normal, in an unceasingly gloomy fashion. Ha, we can laugh at the antics of dumb mob-connected criminals desperately robbing an equally desperate seller for an engagement ring! We can even talk about sports, albeit in the context of "sports franchises sure are broke these days, because of the recession."

As long as we acknowledge everything is terrible, we can pretend that everything is just fine.