Is happiness really too much trouble?

Have alarming world events plunged you into a serious funk? Are close friends – tired of your Toxic Waste-Dump Talk Syndrome tape-loop tendencies involving endlessly telling and retelling your personal horror stories for the ten-thousandth time – urging you to "Lighten up"? Do you ever wonder why millions upon millions of Americans are still so unhappy, despite popping their Prozac and Zoloft and Wellbutrin prescriptions day and night like candy?

Let's look at what passes for happiness these days ...

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• Posting your video diary on You-Tube. Two-to-five-minute increments only. Please don't tax our attenuated attention spans.

• Blogging for the Internet. Just as the Beatles sang "Paperback Writer" – "Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?/It took me years to write, will you take a look?..." – this generation's anthem could be "Internet Blogger"– "Friends, Netizens, Countrymen,/gimme bandwidth, and in return/ I'll give you TMI, too much information, to burn ..."

Or, barring electronically baring your soul – if you have one – there's always buying stuff from the Hammacher-Schlemmer Catalog, that fabulous fantasy collection of grown-up comfort calculated surely to make SOMEONE happy, somewhere:

• Remote-control golf-ball
• Extended-reach insect vacuum
• Cordless candles
• Insulated patented evaporating cooling hat
• Human touch neck-massager
• Robotic floor-washer
• Table-top photo studio
• In-home body-fat monitor
• Roll-up piano keyboard
• Wind-defying umbrella
• Fold-flat pet stroller

Oy.

Because now, during the catastrophic Bush-Wah Quasi-Presidency, it's hard to stay cheerful, really it is, watching the world lurch toward possible apocalypse. Maybe that's why Our Keepers, aka the Military-slash-Industrial-slash-Pharmaceutical Complex, want to keep us all medicated.

So, in the ongoing science fictionalization of our lives, they've invented a $500 "Smart Pill" to transmit medical data from inside your body – which can then be used for "diagnostic" purposes. Or surveillance? This, of course, is just a baby step away from every American receiving these minuscule bionic devices at birth to track compliance with Big Pharma – til death do we part.

Wasn't it the redoubtable "Freddy from Fresno," not his real name, who says, "The body doesn't lie"?

With these new "smart pills," no need ever again to ask someone if he took his meds or not, when you can verify the answer nonverbally with this capsule-sized mechanical marvel, functional equivalent of a gastric space station.

Naturally, I'm just a little concerned where this could all end. Close readers may respond, "But you always say that." Right. And we may really be headed to medical hell in a pharmaceutical hand-basket, mightn't we? Do you realize how this device could revolutionize the entire Hypochondriac Industry parasiting the afflicted ordinary lives of the Worried Well?

Smart pills, stupid people.

Hey, is happiness ultimately impossible? That, of course, brings to mind Sandra Hochman's amazingly predictive 1976 novel, "Happiness Is Too Much Trouble": "Lulu Cartwright is a troublemaker on a pilgrimage to save souls. One morning she wakes up and finds she has been named head of the world's largest film studio."

Oh, my. Sooo 20th Century ... Fox. Where have we heard this before? Amazingly enough, four years after Hochman's novel, Sherry Lansing became the first woman ever tapped to run a major Hollywood studio. Terrific, huh?

Be careful what you wish for. You know human nature.

Successful author Laurie Colwin (1944-1992) – married, talented, famous – specialized in writing a wonderful skein of literary winners about happiness: her upbeat short story collection "Happy All the Time"; her redundantly upbeat novel "Family Happiness"; her relentlessly upbeat "Another Marvelous Thing." Newsweek commented: "The successful depiction of happiness is rare enough to qualify Colwin's [writing] as daring experimental fiction." And then, alas, she died. Under 50. I don't think that was what she had in mind.

Here's the luminous ending to her fine short story, "The Lone Pilgrim":

On the one side is your happiness, and on the other is your past – the self you were used to, going through life alone, heir to your own experience. Once you commit yourself, everything changes and the rest of your life seems to you like a dark forest on the property you have recently acquired. It's yours, but still you're afraid to enter it, wondering what you might find: a little chapel, a stand of birches, wolves, snakes, the worst you can imagine, or the best. You take one timid step forward, but then you realize you're not alone. You take someone's hand ... and strain through the darkness to see ahead.

Let's try.