Our greed culture is the root cause of this. You can trace the distancing of Americans back to when Ronald Reagan gave away the store to the rich and businesses went from valuing their workforces to seeing them as a disposable drain on their bottom lines. We were encouraged to applaud successful greed and condemn failure to be greedy enough.
A house divided cannot stand. When we aligned our values with "turn the bull loose" capitalism by destroying social supports and public education, we created an entire underclass of exploited citizens, the resentment rose between the have a little and have nothings, we decided to compete against one another instead of cooperating as a society would, and now a lot of us have a zero sum mindset of "If someone else is losing, that must mean there's more for me!"
The happiest nations on Earth are heavily taxed because everyone in those societies understand that their society rises or falls together. That is a foreign concept in the United States, with the have everything's having no allegiance to the society that facilitates their succes, they just want to take while giving nothing back, and with the power their wealth provides, they're permitted to.
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/happiness/
Everything will continue to decline until we reign in our greed class and stop them from dividing us with the bully pulpit of all major media that they own toxifying everything we see with social wedges to keep us divided so we don't look up.
This is not a society anymore, it's a bunch of rugged individuals at each other's throats with a tiny owner class using their power to maintain that hatred and division to maximize private profit because their greed is insatiable. All this suffering, because a handful of asshole families with unethical levels of wealth demand to trade humanity for ever more currency, disgusting.
