A troubling pandemic thought: Are THESE the good old days?

HOPE VALLEY, R.I. (AP) — News articles don’t carry Hollywood-style viewer ratings or trigger warnings. Maybe this one should.

But consider this: What if THESE are the good old days?

Depressing as that might seem after the coronavirus pandemic has claimed well over 630,000 lives worldwide, cost tens of millions their jobs and inflicted untold misery across the planet, it's entirely possible — increasingly likely, some say — that things will get worse before they get better.

Americans in particular have been optimists by nature for the better part of four centuries. But even here, a bleak dystopian vision is emerging in some corners. It's not pretty.

It imagines a not-too-distant future where we'll all look back with nostalgia at 2020 as a time when most of us had plenty of food and wine, could get many of the goods and services we needed, and could work from home at jobs that still paid us.

"This could be as good as it gets, so let’s take pleasure in what we have now,” Katherine Tallman, the CEO of the Coolidge Corner Theatre, an indie cinema in Brookline, Massachusetts, told a recent Zoom roundtable.

The pandemic continues to buffet the planet economically, dashing hopes that the worst of the joblessness might be behind us.

For 18 consecutive weeks now, more than a million Americans have sought unemployment benefits. New infections have been surging in states like Florida and California that power the economy, threatening people's health and livelihoods for the foreseeable future.

That's bad. But in online forums and on social media, futurists see the potential for worse. Much worse. Their musings aren't for the faint of heart.

It’s likely that few, if any, of their forecasts will come to pass. This time next year, we may well marvel at how swiftly this...