If you’re a man and a Baby Boomer, you’ve got it made

SO older men are the happiest? Well, duh. The employment and property market was all in their favour, and their wives did all the work at home, writes Alana Schetzer.

Male Baby Boomer: What a fantastic life I have! (Pic: iStock)

CONGRATULATIONS, Baby Boomers, you have won the generational lottery.

With your free university education, affordable housing, negatively-geared investment properties and ability to earn the pension that you can spend on endless golf holidays and cruises, you really have been dealt with a blessed deal.

A recent survey measuring the happiness of Australians came out this week and it proclaimed baby boomer men were the happiest of any person in the country. Of course they are! What exactly do Baby Boomers have to complain about, except how a digital television works?

According to the Australian Unity Optimism Study, men in every age group are happier than women, and baby boomer men (generally, Victorian, full-time worker, university-educated and the type of person who plans ahead) are the happiest of all.

This really isn’t surprising.

Baby Boomers are the generation that could afford to buy a house at the age of 21-year-old and be working in a non-skilled industry. Baby Boomers left university without HECS debt. Baby Boomers managed to find full-time work without having to do half a dozen unpaid internships, some of which were really jobs that bosses didn’t want to pay for.

But why are men so happy and content and their lady counterparts less so?

It probably has something to do with that the fact that a majority had wives who stayed home and raised their children and looked after the house. It’s so much easier to feel good about life when you’re partner is at home, taking care of all that pesky cooking and cleaning.

You go to your full-time job that includes full entitlements such as holiday and sick leave, then go home to a dinner already made and the kids already bathed.

While baby boomer women have also done very well, this is the group that is facing rising rates of poverty and homelessness following divorce, because many of them worked in the home.

Male Baby Boomers are happier than their female counterparts. For obvious reasons. (Pic: iStock)

Hugh van Cuylenburg, founder of The Resilience Project, stated that anyone can achieve the same level of contentment and bliss if only everyone else rewired their brain to “scan the world for the positive”.

Sure.

Or maybe being happy has something to do with Baby Boomers, who make up one quarter of Australia’s population holding more than half of the nation’s wealth.

Of course, everyone likes to make out that their success or happiness is a result of working hard and perseverance. But sometimes, a big dose of luck is involved that allows some people to do better than other people. Sometimes that’s down to knowing the right people, being in the right place at the right time, and being born at the right time to the right parents.

For many Millennials, luck is in short supply. Yes, we have iPhones, can get almost any food delivered within 60 minutes and have easy and affordable access to Bali, but the bread and butter issues — jobs, income, security and housing — is only achievable to those who have an income that can be compared to Bruce Wayne.

Maybe if we pooled all of our old iPhones together, we could use them to build a house that was affordable.

But it’s not all bad being a grumpy and dissatisfied Millennial. The latest season of iZombie was fast-tracked to Australia and those temporary pink and blue hair colours are quite fun.

But then again, Millennials won’t be able to retire until they’re 70 and if economic conditions continue to putter along at the current rate, then retirement will probably be bumped up to 80 or whenever you simply drop dead on the job.

Baby Boomers aren’t greedy or taking away anyone’s happiness, but it would be nice for them, especially those oh-so-happy men aged 48 to 67 to acknowledge that they’ve had a lot of luck and society has given them a lot of favours.

Maybe then Millennials will have something to smile about, too.

Alana Schetzer is a Melbourne-based journalist, writer and editor.