I doubt most of Western Europe would agree with you. They seem to feel a lot happier and healthier. They have better social mobility, and less household debt.
I don't think the problem is growing expectations. Being able to own a home and affordably raise a family are extremely old expectations. If anything, people seem to be forced into compromising more and more.
> They seem to feel a lot happier and healthier.
On average I would agree. I didn't see extreme poverty like I saw in the US and cost of living is a lot better when you consider that quality of everything is higher; especially in terms of food.
> They have better social mobility,
My experience is that this is not the case. Germany had almost no mobility at all. Even startups are structured in such a way that you can barely even see the CEO, let alone talk to them and society is structured to protect incumbents through regulations and bureaucracy. The only people who get rich in such system (like in Crypto sector) are extremely crony. Feels like they have some really weird agenda. The whole country feels like a giant money laundering scheme.
As for France; the salaries for software engineers were really low last time I checked. Might as well drive an Uber.
If you look at international poverty stats, the fraction of the US living on $30 per day or less is almost identical to Sweden
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-share-on-less-tha...
If you change the threshold to $4.20 per day or less, US poverty is relatively high by European standards, but not a dramatic outlier (less than 2x that of Sweden). Almost 99% of the US population is still above this threshold.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-th...
My theory is that poverty in the US tends to be more urbanized, so people see it more. Wealthy Europeans live in the city center; wealthy Americans tend to move to the suburbs.
Also, a lot of people from Hacker News will visit San Francisco, which is basically considered to be a joke by the rest of the country.
USAFacts says 0.22% of the US population is homeless:
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-homeless-people-are-i...
I hypothesize that it matters a lot for visibility where the homeless people are residing.
My opinion as an American is that excessive complaining is one of our country's biggest problems. Generally speaking, things are going fine in this country, except the bit where we're developing AI that's gonna kill everybody.
American households consume by far the most in the world on average: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...