Maybe you’ve seen them in the commercials for mutual fund companies where they’re usually pictured sipping wine in Tuscany. Or you might have caught them baring their souls in magazines talking about how they gave up the corner office and the six-figure bonus because their dream was to go to clown school. The baby boomers have discovered that there is more to life than just straight work, and they want to talk about it. It may not make you teary to hear their stories, but listen up anyway. There’s 77 million of them or so, and they set the trends. I know, I know--Gen Y is a big group too and it’s your turn to do that, but bear with me for a minute.

The Boomers shaped the work world you are hacking your way through right now. There were a lot of them so they competed against each other madly, offering to do stupid things like work all weekend every weekend or accept a pitifully low number of vacation days. (If you want to make a European laugh, tell him that the typical American worker gets 10 days off a year but doesn’t get around to taking them all anyway). Then they raced around madly getting their kids (that would be you, actually) to all kinds of activities instead of telling them to just go play outside. No wonder that the Boomer glory years brought us Lunchables and instant-Jello.

But here’s the thing: it is all about the unwind. Even with fitting in clown college, the boomers are going to have time to make Jello from scratch. That might not matter very much if Gen Y was going to take over from them in the mad race, but you’re not, are you? You have nothing against work but you’re crazy enough to figure that you can do it and have a life, too. Put the two trends together and you get what I call “The Leisure Economy.”

It’s a pretty powerful transition and you’d do yourself a favor by thinking about how you can profit from the Leisure Economy. If you’re a Gen Y, here are some things to think about.

1. Make Sure You’re Among the Leisure Envied (Even if it Means You Won’t Get to Cancun this Year)

You get it: you want a life that includes – well, life. Maybe you want to be home with your kids (when you have them) part-time or full-time for a while, or maybe you want your partner to be able to do that. Or maybe you want a sabbatical long before you hit mid-life. Maybe you think middle-management is yucky and you don’t want to be promoted to it, thanks very much.

Boomers and Xers smirk and roll their eyes when Gen Ys say stuff like that, and sometimes they mutter nasty words like ‘groceries’ and ‘mortgage payments’ too. And true, when you get around to having kids you’ll be staggered at just how much money they cost, week after week after—well, how many weeks 'til they leave for college? But some Gen Ys are going to get to enjoy their own personal leisure economies, and not just because they are trust fund babies. Leisure-envy will be rife, so make sure you’re on the right side of it.

If you know you want a leisured life by say 30 or 35, sit down and think about what you need to do now. Maybe it means passing up on that vacation that you really, really, deserve and sticking the money into a nice bond fund now. Maybe it means choosing a house that does not take every bit of your household salary for the next ten years to pay. If you don’t want to make those sacrifices, fine – but realize you’ll pay with your time in a decade or so.

2. Maybe Go to Clown College Now (if That's Your Dream)

Okay, it’s great that people are shucking the corporate life for clown college, but wouldn’t it have been better if they had just headed for the circus in the first place? Then again, it made sense for the Boomers and the Xers to make some conservative choices in terms of their jobs. After all, they lived through decades when layoffs and restructurings became par for the course and the unemployment rate seemed to be headed in only one direction.

Now it is true that the U.S. is probably headed into a nasty recession now (although I’ll skip giving any commentary on that since it would just depress us all) but it is also true that the unemployment rate is unlikely to head into the stratospheric levels for clever college graduates. So if you want to try something else for a while – well, try it. The happiest workers are those for whom work and leisure feel pretty interchangeable, meaning that they live the leisure economy every day.

One warning however: following your passion may put you in conflict with number (1) above, which involves stashing a nest egg for leisure later. So decide where your priorities lie, and go for it.

3. Teach a Boomer to Fish

The leisure economy offers lots of yummy ways to make money, and specifically ways to make money off the Boomers. And as I say in the book, the greatest growth industry is going to be education. Sure, that means the ivory towers but it also means education in just about anything, from knitting to scuba diving to home repairs.

So teach a Boomer to fish, or actually, teach them anything. The Boomers didn’t have time to learn how to do much beyond work and basic home stuff, but now they have time to find new passions. So look for some weird new hobbies (crochet anyone?) and think about whether you can profit by being part of them, whether it is in terms of the actual teaching or through selling crochet hooks on the Internet.

4. What Would You Change in Your Company if People Had More Time? Go Ahead and Change it Now.

You don’t have to be a business owner to think about the what the leisure economy means to your company’s product. If you’re trying to shine in your career, float the concept of the leisure economy. If nothing else, it is so radical a departure from the ‘everyone is time-crunched’ assumption that people are going to remember you.

Let’s say you’re in retail: suggest ways to keep people in your stores once they come through the door. The Starbucks model of cushy chairs, newspapers and an inviting atmosphere may not be right for everyone, but for neighborhoods rife with Boomers, even fast food outlets need to think about retaining their visitors.

And by the way, keep in mind that there are going to be lots of different kinds of leisure-ites. From the ones who are indulging a passion for gourmet cooking using high end ingredients, to the ones who are glumly cutting up their own carrots because they can’t afford the pre-cut ones anymore, the leisure-ites are going to span a wide income group. Keep that in mind, and remember that whatever their level of disposable income, they will still have more disposable time.

5. Put Your Money Where the Leisure Is

There are a lot of ways to put the leisure economy into your portfolio, even if at this point the idea of a investment portfolio is pretty laughable. No, I’m not telling you to put your life savings into a golf course chain or a scrapbooking store. But think about what might do well in the leisure economy, and stash some of your cash in there. And we aren’t just talking about just stocks either. One of the things that will happen as the leisure economy takes shape is that people will cash out of the suburbs and look for bucolic small towns which have both low housing prices and Starbucks. Those meccas might be where you want to invest your own housing dollars.