Behind the latest unemployment figures showing another 500,000-plus Americans lost their jobs is a sad truth: The deeper the recession becomes, the more it touches people whose livelihoods have never been threatened by dark financial times.

Now the employment line includes workers who’ve never lost a job before and always believed experience and hard work would protect them.

Many of them are shocked and depressed — or stuck in denial. And they must confront the worst job market since the end of World War II.

Some say they will take any kind of work, no matter what it pays or where it is. Others hope they can somehow squeak by on unemployment insurance. A despairing, middle-aged man in Pennsylvania toyed with the idea of killing himself in a way that would allow his wife and daughter to collect on his life insurance policy.

In interviews across the country, the newly jobless contemplated their futures in these uncertain times.