“We are led to imagine ourselves scaling the steep sides of the cliff face of happiness to reach a wide, high plat on which to continue our lives; we are not reminded that soon after reaching the summit we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.”

—Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

If you’re happy and you know it, please clap your hand. Please let me know that there are still people out there who aren’t battling with misery. Whose smiles aren’t really grimaces. Who feel some level of satisfaction with their lives.

Perhaps satisfaction is not the word. Perhaps satisfaction is a sign of complacency and in a competitive world there is no room for smugness. No time to sit back on one’s laurels and pat your back and say to yourself: self, you done good.

Perhaps it’s that misery loves company. And when you’re down, you can only see all the other people down there with you. There’s nothing like depression to make you all the more willing to wallow.

The amazing thing is that so many of the people who are constantly tired, who speak the language of self-defeat with such alarming eloquence are young, outwardly progressive people. The cool ones. They-got-their-stuff-together kind of people that others might be inclined to admire, who somehow manage to get through life not wearing their anxieties on their sleeves.

People as far as society is concerned are well adjusted. They come from what we would consider “good backgrounds.” Two parents and one or two siblings. No history of mental illness. They had flawless skin and were popular in high school. They have degrees, they are gainfully employed. They drive cars that purr gently. And they don’t have to count their pennies when they go to the supermarket. They’ve got money in the bank and do nice things with their weekends.

So why are they unhappy? Why do I know so many people my age who have therapists? Who faithfully pop their Prozac and Paxil and have been battling with clinical depression for years? Who endlessly depend on self-help books and need the constant reassurance that their lives aren’t crappy.

It’s the existential angst that we’re all plagued with right now. The moodiness and the self-doubt. The fears that keep us mired in the funk of what ifs and can’t take it anymores. Those of us who, comparatively speaking, haven’t got a problem in the world but still find it hard to get out of bed in the morning. We question our purpose. Our lives appear to have no meaning and everything seems to be wrong.

It is true of my friends and acquaintances, whether they are from Port-of-Spain or Amsterdam.

We can’t all be a generation of chemically imbalanced nuts, can we? Prescription drugs provide no lasting answer, except of course to increase the profits of all those nice drug companies who like to take advantage of people’s weaknesses.

No matter what I think of the garbage that passes for food or binge drinking or chain smoking or casual drug abuse, there’s a deeper cause for this generation of sad people.

Swiss-born author philosopher Alain de Botton, in defining this latest scourge of the upwardly mobile, socially aware as status anxiety, speaks of a worry capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives.

He suggests that status is hard to achieve and furthermore unsustainable in a situation where we aren’t born into nobility. We fear, he says, failure and the humiliation that comes with not being able to convince the world that we are worthy.

It leads me to wonder if happiness is a right or a privilege. If life is still short and brutish, the conditions not changing all that much since way back in the Neanderthal times when we had to fight off saber-tooth tigers, Flintstone style.

Yes, we might have creature comforts; we might not have to eke out a mere existence from the little at our disposal.

But it seems to me the fear is always there. The fear is a part of the human experience. The key is learning how to not let the fear rule you.

Surely, when we learn to, albeit in a corny self-help-book kind of way, feel the fear and do it anyway, maybe happiness won’t be as elusive.