No, this crazy and contentious election is not responsible for Americans’ angst, stress, discomfort, unpleasantness or sense of unease.

But it’s a symptom.

That’s the opinion of Josh Misner, who teaches interpersonal communications and other related subjects at both North Idaho College and Gonzaga University.

“We’re struggling in this country for a few different reasons,” Misner said, “but regarding the election, one thing Americans want to feel is certainty. We want things to be black and white.

“We’re comfortable when things are easy to define, as they were in the 1950s and into the ‘60s. But now we’ve reached a very uncertain time generally, and this election obviously is cause for immediate uncertainty.”

Misner was responding to questions about widespread discord with the looming election, but also to the longer-range results of the 2016 Happy Planet Index.

The HPI was developed a decade ago by the international New Economics Foundation to study and rank countries’ “happiness” based on four metrics — life expectancy, well-being, inequality of incomes and sustainability (based on ecological footprint).

In this year’s rankings, Costa Rica topped the HPI chart (as it has several times), but the shocker is that the United States checked in at No. 108 of the 140 countries considered.

That hardly sounds happy.

“The United States has a problem with economic inequality,” said Ric Marks, founder of the HPI Index — which is used as a barometer by many multinational organizations. “In 2010, one in six Americans lived below the poverty line.

“On top of that, the inequality of incomes score is one of the highest among Western industrialized countries, meaning that well-being and life expectancy are only high for some.”

Marks also called the United States’ ecological footprint “astonishingly high,” in part because of reliance on fossil fuels — meaning that even the current, rather nervous quality of life could decline further.

Are we really that unhappy, as the ranking seems to show?

Misner basically agreed, and said: “Americans of this era believe things are great if they have a lot of stuff. Then when they get all that stuff and still don’t feel happy, it’s unsettling.”

The reason for all the uncertainty, Misner said, is because we are “...smack dab in the middle of the fourth ‘communications revolution’ in human history.”

Misner explained that the first revolution was development of an alphabet so humans could move to a written language; the second was invention of the printing press in the 1500s, allowing for information to be widely shared; and the third came with the industrial revolution — providing the advent of radio, TVs, cameras and other devices to once again widen communication.

“We don’t know about the first revolution,” Misner said, “but the second and third caused widespread anger, a schism in the Catholic Church, and two bloody world wars that killed millions. There was a lot of misery until the world adjusted.

“Now here we are in the fourth revolution — this technological overwhelming of all communication — and we are very, very uncertain and nervous about it.

“The United States is a young country, so such uncertainty hits us harder than older societies in Europe, who have been through so much — and places like Asia, which have seen everything.

“So here we are, at a place of uncertainty and tension — where instant communication makes things more stressful instead of making us more at ease.

“This election is just a great example of that, because the Internet and other types of sudden communication have made it the ultimate uncertainty.

“That’s not a comfortable feeling. Put it with unhappiness over the proven division of income, and you can see why the uncertainty and fear of change is so painful.”

Overall, things sound incredibly grim – no matter the result of this bitter and confusing election.

Yet Misner remains an optimist.

“To be happy,” he said, “we have to become more comfortable with change, and Millennials — who are the future — are much more resilient than older Americans.

“You would hope that Millennials will be somewhat like the Costa Ricans who seem to be so content, as you see in those rankings. They are curious and fascinated by change, rather than having a fear of it.

“I feel pretty confident that the generational movement will create a happier population in the United States — but it’s obviously not here yet.”