Well I'm not happy that we have a totally incompetent government.

I'm not happy that the feminisation of our education system is resulting in kids that can't add without a calculator.

I'm not happy that housing costs such ridiculous amounts of money. My first house cost just 2 years salary. It was not much of a house, but I was happy with it.

I am happy that our food is so cheap. It used to cost my folks about a third of their income. I can even shout myself a grain fed Angus stake now & then.

I am happy with my 3 cars. Even if they are quite old, I usually have one going.

I am happy that when I walk down the paddock, my old stallion comes when called, with a friendly nicker, even if he is just after a carrot.

I am happy that my kids are all doing well, even if one is into McMansions, that is after all her prerogative.

I am happy to wake up every morning, even if it does hurt a bit sometimes. It means I'm a winner. I made it past the three score & ten.

What the hell more could I want.

Interesting to think we can make money of the ageing of Asia ? I am just waiting until 50 (not that many more years) to allow me to retire with no Visa hassles to Thailand, on a retirement visa. I am currently in Cambodia doing some volunteer work in the interim.

Personally I think that boat has sailed, Australia is way to xenophobic (they took my grandma's old age place from 'er darn 'em !) to allow that to happen and countries like Thailand are taking the middle income retirees by the "boat load". The very ones we could make money off (I know, a horrible thought for some, making money, providing jobs etc) as a business concern in Aus: building retirement villages and communities, providing them with entertainment and affordable medical care, easy retirement visa's etc (see how we fall down on just about all of those fronts ?) If Thailand ever needs more semi-skilled and unskilled workers (janitors, labourers, groundsmen, cleaners), they will just open the gates to the Burmese and Cambodians, for example. We'll drown 'em off the coast instead :)

Unless you think its flogging them walking sticks etc in which case, good luck with that, they are ahead of us in the manufacturing stakes.

40 years in construction -blue collar- work taught me clearly that those who most desperately need to go on strike for better pay/conditions, simply can't afford to do so.
Strikes in the 70's and 80's were always led by the highest paid; miners and wharfies. They could easily afford a week or 2 off.
I don't think it's the low income earners who are doing all the whinging today, either. I confess, I've been in that category for the past couple of years (business only ticking along), and I'm constantly surprised at how affordable the basics are.
Of course, things are wearing out, and very soon will need to be replaced. In that, I feel a bit like the USA.
It's -as always- the middle class that's making all the noise, and what they're cranky about is the widening gap.
The realisation that their aspirations become more expensive, and less achievable, every year.
It's all (always) about the GAP, stupid.
As middle class incomes fall, and upper class incomes rise, tempers flare.
People who have never experienced wealth find it much easier to do without than people who witnessed their parents' relative affluence and wonder why they can't have as much.
The kids buying Mcmansions today weren't around to witness their parents' humble beginnings. They see the house after the improvements, with the curtains and the carpets, and that's where they want to start.
And when we see our elected representatives giving themselves the wealth we aspire to as they achieve little or nothing, while in the same breath telling us that rises must be linked to productivity...
I'm reasonably happy with my lot. Like Hasbeen, I'm surviving.
But it still irks me that people with so much, still want more.
How much is enough?

Sorry, Houellebecq, if I sounded a tad arrogant above. I did say 'once you "perceive" something from the outside, it's hard going back in'--i.e. I don't see myself as actually occupying some transcendental realm, God-like. But I do have some hard-won philosophical perspective, and it does frustrate me that the vast majority adapt their opinions to their gendered, lifestyle or other interests and them pass them off as somehow valid in themselves.
I think a sort of sense of entitlement does pervade, but it's not generally the sense of entitlement Everald criticises, I think it's more that people take the benefits of living in Oz for granted, especially the younger generation. I'm also old enough to remember my parents dragging furniture and old carpet off the tip, my mother being menaced by the milkman for an $80-something bill--which was big money back in the 70's, and me being forced to wear my father's prison issue shoes (he was a screw) to school etc.
What I condemn is the sense of entitlement the fat cats gloat over; their the worst when it comes to myopic self-interest. Blokes like Everald and his mates, sitting comfortably on their hoards, spinning fables about themselves and condemning the sense of entitlement to things they can afford to despise.
What about the sense of entitlement of the rich. Why are they entitled to live in the clouds?

The sense of entitlement of anyone, rich or not, seems worse when they don't think about why they think the way they do, Squeers. At its extreme we see psychotics living in castles they've built in the air and they are happy – so long as they've got neurotics working to pay for them and obsessive compulsives doing the cleaning.

If someone is occupied with scratching subsistence survival they don't usually have the luxury of the time to think they have the right to be happier. The opposite to those who don't realise how good they've got it, is that they don't genuinely realise how bad it could be.

Philosophical perspectives are useful but keep reminding yourself – as someone said – 'You're not the first to think, that everything has been thought before.'

But since that was Houellebecq it might be worth examining it for hidden meaning.

I like that, WmTrevor; people should think "about why they think the way they do"--and that certainly applies to me too!
And of course we all live in habiliments of one kind or another, it's just a matter of whether we've used flying buttresses in the construction and installed dungeons and servants' quarters.
This is also worth pondering: "Philosophical perspectives are useful but keep reminding yourself 'You're not the first to think, [and?] that everything has been thought before.'
Perhaps that was Houellebecq's meaning--I don't have time to check and he's a slippery character, as you imply, who seems to delight in sophistries.
As do I! Though I try to abstain.
And, upon reflection, I am the first to think from my unique perspective (personal, cultural, political, historical); it's not so much that everything's been thought before, as what's been thought before conditions our thinking and deadens originality.
This is the problem with the deconstructionists, who've made a fetish of textual reality, a discipline out of defeatism and pessimism of the intellect. Thus today, to quote Brecht, "To live means to finesse the processes to which one is subjugated".