> For what it's worth, I can tell you I'm being completely sincere here and I just wish the literal most privileged people in the world would look a bit around them before claiming to live oh-so-horrible lives.
You're conflating two unrelated things:
1. American's poor understanding of conditions in the wider world, and of history.
2. How Americans feel about worsening conditions of poverty and health in America, or-- frankly-- how Americans feel about anything they feel is missing in their lives.
The times when Americans have implicitly conflated those things-- e.g., after WWII when a steep increase in depression among middle class women accompanied unparalleled prosperity in the middle class-- Americans actually prolonged their own suffering instead of ameliorating it. AFAICT, trying to "jolt" oneself out of depression by convincing oneself there's no good reason to be depressed is similar to trying to drink oneself out of alcoholism.
In fact, the idea, "You don't know how good you have it," is so hammered into the American psyche that one of the most popular Netflix series-- The Queen's Gambit-- is essentially an 8-hour long refutation of that idea from exactly that same time period. I'll save you the time-- that idea does not work.
Communicating with ignorant people by telling them about your experiences can be fruitful. Teaching your own coping strategies to people even though they are only experiencing first-world problems is graceful.
One-downmanship is simply not an effective tool to achieve either of those goals.
