> They're killing themselves because, what, their Starbucks allowance is too small?
If we're going to use simplifications of this cartoonish level, a more accurate (but still uselessly simplified) one probably would be "because they are surrounded by people for who think they should be happy because of the size of their Starbucks allowance".
> They're living better lives than 99% of humanity through all of history.
From the perspective of people who think that quality of life is identical to material riches; but while those things might be generally correlated, they aren't the same thing, and its quite possible to have low quality of life with plenty of material riches. And the fact that lots of people fail to recognize that exacerbates the problems of people who experience low quality of life while having material riches.
No, the rest of the world is happy with earning a living, having their health, and keeping themselves surrounded by family and friends. Weirdly enough, most of the world takes those last two items (family and friends) for granted, while Americans tend to throw away the last three (health, family, friends) for the sake of careerism.
“It was not their irritating assumption of equality that annoyed Nicholai so much as their cultural confusions. The Americans seemed to confuse standard of living with quality of life, equal opportunity with institutionalized mediocrity, bravery with courage, machismo with manhood, liberty with freedom, wordiness with articulation, fun with pleasure - in short, all of the misconceptions common to those who assume that justice implies equality for all, rather than equality for equals.”
― Trevanian, Shibumi
If we're going to use simplifications of this cartoonish level, a more accurate (but still uselessly simplified) one probably would be "because they are surrounded by people for who think they should be happy because of the size of their Starbucks allowance".
> They're living better lives than 99% of humanity through all of history.
From the perspective of people who think that quality of life is identical to material riches; but while those things might be generally correlated, they aren't the same thing, and its quite possible to have low quality of life with plenty of material riches. And the fact that lots of people fail to recognize that exacerbates the problems of people who experience low quality of life while having material riches.