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If you're one of the more than eight million people who have tuned in to the live-streaming Shiba Inu Puppy Cam, take a deep breath and steel yourself for some bad news: Puppies grow up.

That means Autumn, Ayumi, Amaya, Aki, Akoni and Ando, who turn eight weeks old today, will soon be leaving their adorable puppy pile and heading to new homes.

Puppy Cam addicts will not cope well with being cut off, I fear.

"I know they have loving homes waiting for them but I can't bear the thought of clicking on here one day and not seeing them," Luanne10 fretted in the comments on UStream.tv, the site that hosts the Shiba Inu feed, which started when the puppies' San Francisco-based owners set up a webcam to keep an eye on the litter when they had to leave the house.

Still, there have been cute animal webcams before. So why has this Puppy Cam taken the world by storm? Why these puppies? Why now?

Let's let Phred explain. In response to a cynic named Shawn who dared ask on the Ustream blog what the big deal was with the Puppy Cam, considering similar feeds have existed for a while, Ustream member Phred replied heatedly: "The big deal, Shawn, is that we can watch these puppies NOW. The economy wasn't in the toilet 10 years ago and I didn't need a fix of puppy sanity all day long. ... Right now, we need puppies!"

Well said, Phred. We need puppies now more than ever. Global financial markets are collapsing, the loonie is down, pink slips are the new holiday bonus, real-estate markets have tanked, at the current rate of investment growth I will be able to afford retirement in about 200 years, and everything generally seems to be going to - hey, look! Ando is wrestling with Aki, and Ayumi just put all her paws in the air and stretched! Awww....

Puppy cam addiction provides a mindless escape from the real world, but our fascination with cuteness goes much deeper. Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, in 1949, first identified our "awww" response as an evolutionary adaptation that helps ensure the survival of the species by prompting adults to nurture their helpless young. The checklist of universal cute signifiers - disproportionately big heads, stubby limbs, clumsiness, round body shapes, shortened noses - should sound familiar to Shiba Inu Puppy Cam watchers.

The strength of our attraction to cuteness may be one of those economic bellwethers, like long hemlines and Spam sales. After all, the top-grossing movie star during the Great Depression was none other than chubby-cheeked, button-nosed Shirley Temple.

"When people are feeling vulnerable, and they're in a level of denial about it, this is how it will come out. They're replacing their own feelings of vulnerability with a safe version," explains psychotherapist Karen Romine, who practises in Santa Monica, Calif.

This makes sense. Which would you rather confront: the vulnerability of your stock portfolio to falling oil prices or the vulnerability of six roly-poly puppies learning to walk?

Like anything, you can go overboard with this hobby. If you've erased all your web bookmarks except for Cute Overload and you refuse to talk to your stockbroker in anything but Lolcat-speak (My portfolio haz a sad! I can haz dividend?) then you've got problems.

But as an everyday coping mechanism, it's better than beer for breakfast. "It's a good, positive way of self-soothing," Ms. Romine says.

Just don't mix up fantasy with reality. Delve into the archives of DailyPuppy.com to get your fix when the Shiba Inu cam disappears, but no matter how hard the withdrawal pangs are, don't run to your nearest pet-adoption centre.

Puppies on a webcam never chew your shoes, pee on your rugs or hit you with expensive vet bills - that's part of what makes them so adorable.