And as for the stock market, you could buy Westpac shares yesterday at a snip under $17 offering a fully-franked yield of nearly 8.4% which grosses up to about 10.9% - and some people think it's hard being an investor right now. They wouldn't know Christmas if Santa smacked them in the face with reindeer dung.

In some ways the national psyche - and therefore consumer confidence and therefore consumer spending and therefore the economy - is suffering the after effects of a media and political conspiracy to have us believe things were crook in the lead-up to the last election.

Sooled on by battlers-champion tabloid media, the successful candidate said "let me tell you something, working families are doing it tough", so many times, we came to believe him. The reality is that "working families'' always do it tough on a relative basis. A couple with a baby or two trying to get by on a single average income has never had it easy and never will. For most, it's a stage that's worked through and survived into reasonably comfortable middle-class middle age. The present generation of "working families'' though is spectacularly better off than its predecessors with more government assistance on tap and much more chance of being "working'' as opposed to unemployed.

It is a Gen X and Y thing that no one much under the age of 33 or 34 has been in the workforce when it was turning down - it's been that long since the business cycle actually turned in Australia. And we have a whole generation of management that has never been in charge of anything more than their lunch money when things were genuinely tough. Similarly the "housing affordability crisis'' grew legs and ran largely unchallenged when it was more a matter of a housing desirability crisis coinciding with the piercing of a speculative bubble pumped up by the usual cheer squad of real estate spruikers, urgers and industry associations.

The nadir of that particular cycle of self-pity was an SMH article about poor little rich kids finding it hard to live in Sydney's most affluent suburbs: "The situation is particularly dire for young people who have grown up in well-located suburbs. Without the support of parents to help stump up a deposit, finding a home near family and friends can be difficult.'' Oh, my heart bled for them.

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the international economy and certainly Australian growth is slowing and will slow. But as Treasury Secretary Ken Henry told us again on Wednesday and Peter Hartcher reminds us today ( ), there remain good reasons to be relatively optimistic about Australia's outlook. That can be a bit tricky though when we convinced ourselves life was hard during the very best of times.

The stock market seems to have already priced in a severe domestic recession. The Westpac share price example indicates a fear that Australia's most conservative bank might not be able to maintain its dividend - a fear that is at odds with the bank's guidance. But with examples like that around, anything less than a severe recession means there's plenty of upside down the track for investors who can stomach the volatility. Let me tell you something, we can all do with that dose of Harden Up.