It seems like just six days ago, instead of six years ago, that the headlines were full of gloom-n’-doom about economic hardship and consumer cutbacks.

Then, for a while, the media (particularly much of the “alt” media) were back to ignoring the poor and the working families, preferring to inhabit (or imagine) a world of unlimited luxury.

Around here, this meant slick magazines and online shopping guides dedicated to the highest and best possible spending of money. It meant “progressive” local politicians who unashamedly sucked up to the upper castes, and to the merchants and real-estate developers who outfitted and supplied upper-caste households. It meant hundreds of elegant bistros and whole grocery chains dedicated to ever-dearer visions of The Good Life.

Now, though, we’ve got front-page wire stories talking about Americans’ supposed “newfound frugality.”

As if tens of millions of us haven’t been pinching pennies all along.

In my current stompin’ grounds of Belltown, the alleged Good Life has been what it all was supposed to have been about for a long time. I’ve got old condo ads from 1992 offering up fantasy visions of unparalleled beauty and elegance, quoting old British aristocrats in wedding-invitation typefaces.

Later in the decade came the big billboards with the manically grinning young couples striding happily into their utterly fabulous view homes.

But behind the marketing images, there were a lot of young couples whose parents had donated down payments, hoping to get their kids into home ownership while it still could sorta happen.

There were law-firm junior partners and hospital physicians living just beyond their means, trusting/hoping their careers would grow to match their mortgages.

There were AARP-agers downsizing from bigger homes elsewhere with more stuff in them.

There were Microsoft stock-option early retirees, who’d pinned the whole rest of their lives on the premise that their accumulated nest eggs would remain uneaten by inflation.

They, and much of the rest of us, now await whatever’s next, wondering how to stay afloat.