On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve said it was going back to business as usual. No more buying Treasury bonds—the recession, it believes, is over (or, at least, bottomed out) and the economy regaining its health.

In recent weeks, others have similarly declared the end of an era, from journalists like Newsweek writer Daniel Gross to Nouriel “Dr. Doom” Roubini, who saw the recession’s start before many other economists. When Roubini predicts an end to the recession, it’s hard not to believe: The months of fear, of job loss, of savings running out, of homes foreclosed on—over! Soon!

Economists point to an expected increase in output (goods and services) by companies in the second half of this year. That’s very likely to happen, but it’s important to remember that inventories hit an all-time low in the first half of this year. Of course they’re up. Where else were they to go other than up?

Plus, a “jobless recovery,” as economists like Paul Krugman have put it, will be problematic for that output if consumers, whose spending accounts for 70 percent of GDP, don’t have income—disposable income to spend on those goods. Don’t expect much help from Americans who do have cash—they are hoarding it, pushing the savings rate up to a record 6.2 percent in June from 3.5 percent in one short year.

And to put a finer point on it, the recession’s end only matters when you get your job back. Or you can take an actual vacation (as opposed to a “staycation”) or get a good bounce on your 401K. On Recessionwire, we’ve tracked the steady push toward the recession’s end—we followed the economists’ predictions, until we began to see that macro factors are nice, but they don’t clearly reflect the profound changes we’ve undergone.

If you really want to know if the downturn is done, try this: Turn off CNBC and unplug your WiFi. Look around and take stock of what you have. Chances are, you haven’t made many purchases in a while, and you probably have no plans to. The fridge is stocked because you don’t eat out as much as you once did. Instead of your regular summer vacations, maybe you took just one—and it was cheap, or it was a staycation, or you skipped it altogether this year. Maybe you’re looking around and having a David Byrne moment—This is not my beautiful house!—because you’re living with your parents again.

Meanwhile, businesses are showing inconsistent growth. Banks are passing stress tests, delivering earnings that meet or exceed expectations (especially Goldman Sachs), and repaying bailout funds. But small businesses, which account for around half of the GDP and more than half of the jobs in the U.S., are still having a very hard time. For many, access to credit—key to growing businesses—is near nil, in part because the Small Business Administration’s plan to guarantee loans has faced a logjam similar to the administrative mess of the Cash for Clunkers program. The banks that would issue loans are also wary of what are expected to be high default rates. Adding to small business owners’ concerns is the health care reform proposal being shopped by President Obama that they say will in many cases raise the amount they already pay per full-time employee.

The downturn actually hasn’t been going on all that long. We officially entered recession in December 2007, but the layoffs rolled out over time, without impacting the entire population at once. The boom times are still a recent memory, and many folks act like they’re simply holding their breath and will return to their lush lives before too long.

But when all is said and done, we have lost billions in collective net worth—the wealth that paid for excess consumption and that helped consumer spending take up 70 percent of the GDP. Job creation isn’t expected to rebound until 2011. We’re traveling deeper into a period of economic change, even if the macro factors show it turning around. Our values will continue to evolve. No matter what the economists say about the “end” of the recession, there’s still more “recession” to go.