LONDON—I’m frightfully scared, aren’t you?

Last rites have yet to be administered, but Lenin, who said “capitalists will sell the very rope from which we will hang them,” must be laughing in his sarcophagus.

After injecting sums with gazillion zeroes into the sclerotic global financial system, European-style socialism and communist China’s capitalism are sounding the death knell for unfettered capitalism.

While financial meltdown seems to have been temporarily staved off, the global recession, which every pundit says will be profound, painful and prolonged, has become frighteningly personal. We are swimming, or sinking, in uncharted waters. The usually bland Ernst & Young Item Club declared the outlook to resemble a “horror movie.”

The UK jobless total is expected to top two million by Christmas. The cost of living—winter fuel, petrol, food—is punishingly Himalayan.

Normally cool, I’m not given to panic, but the real prospect of my hard-earned savings disappearing into the plughole spooked me. Until I secured them, I was in fits of wild despair.

It’s said that we have a pessimism that makes us take our umbrellas to the beach on a fine summer day, but the portents aren’t good and without money. Honey, you’re up the creek without a lifesaving paddle!

You wish we didn’t need money so much, but as Guy de Rothschild (and he should know) said: “Everybody has some, nobody has enough. It’s the lifeblood of economy, the all-purpose tool, the instrument of success. It heals, saves, kills. It circulates, disappears and corrupts. We dream about it, hide and lose it, waste, disdain and adore it. People use it to reflect their desires, frustrations and ambitions. It’s a universal commodity, embellished with the whole range of human emotions. It’s the measure of our existence.”

As the wheels come off the economy, extravagances are falling by the wayside, except for petrodollar-rich emirs, Russian oligarchs and billionaire tycoons who have incredibly grand homes in this hugely attractive country, still enjoying douceur de vivre.

Sotheby’s and Christie’s continue to command record prices for art. Multimillion-pound yachts that are the envy of navies around the world are moored off the Solent. And, feeling flush, you could still blow the entire GDP of a small African state on lunch at Le Gavroche.

It could be we’re entering the tunnel at the end of the light. The sky hasn’t fallen, but we question our lifestyle and material greed, and now have to trim our sails to suit prevailing winds.

A barrister friend, who charges thousands of pounds just to clear his throat, said the Hail Mary every time he filled up his SUV with petrol. He has ditched it for a Mini. Cycling is in vogue; people are walking more.

Frugalistas are cutting up credit cards, paying off mountains of debt and loving second-hand frocks from eBay and Oxfam.

Instead of takeouts and restaurant meals, we’re cooking and entertaining at home, playing Scrabble, amusing ourselves with bodice-ripping TV dramas and Guy Ritchie’s and Madonna’s divorce.

Nesting, cocooning and growing your own vegetables are in. So are vacations at home, where museums, concert halls and theaters are bursting with art and culture, instead of in Barcelona or Prague.

Once a famously energetic throwaway society, we’re mending socks and things, being inventive with leftovers. Swapping clothes, goods and services on Freecycle. We’re saying “no” to some of the world’s most indulged and spoilt children, teaching them grit, gumption and delayed gratification, as befits the generation that will inherit the most humongous of national debts.

Readying ourselves for hard times, we’re budgeting and scrimping, because crass consumption is no longer aspirational—being thrifty is.

We’re tightening our belts, hunkering down and battening down the hatches, installing wood-burning stoves, wearing layers of socks, scarves and sweaters to ward off the autumnal chill and big fuel bills.

A New Yorker cartoon has the man saying to his wife: “If we take a late retirement and an early death, we’ll just squeak by.”

In these straitened times, we’ll dread one day at a time. But despite the brutal necessity of economizing, we have, as Keynes exhorted, a sovereign duty to spend, to keep the global economy moving, creating goods that create wealth.

We may be powerless to pump muscularity back into the markets, but we’re free to restore some measure of hope in this new world of simple and austere content.

So, stiffen the sinew; this cloud, too, has a silver lining. This may yet be our finest hour.