Quality over quantity, right?

The article thinks the problem is declining quantity, but I'm unconvinced. Americans have always been low on quality, since as far back as slavery and native american genocide.

If anything I think the "meditation" mentioned in the article is a really good sign.

I suspect it might be the smaller quantity in general.

90% of everything is crap. 90% of everything that remains is still crap. With the endless yammering cut out, there is simply a lower volume of garbage competing with your limited bandwidth and attention.

> Americans have always been low on quality

I'm intentionally stripping this out of your provided context, because I don't think aligning the sentiment with atrocities helps. Obviously this is coming from an outside observer's point of view, so take it with a grain of salt - from what I've seen, the American culture is obsessed with self-promotion and hustle. Peoples' ear canals are flooded with demands for attention, and everyone is incentivised to drown out everyone else.

Almost as if the agreed solution to the needle-in-a-haystack problem is "more hay".

Unfortunately, there is evidence that the provided context greatly matters. Here's a quote from the book “The Sum of Us”, by Heather McGhee.

>He was building on global comparative research by Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff, which found that “societies that began with relatively extreme inequality tended to generate institutions that were more restrictive in providing access to economic opportunities.” Nunn’s research showed that although of course slave counties had higher inequality during the era of slavery (particularly of land), it wasn’t the degree of inequality that was correlated with poverty today; it was the fact of slavery itself, whether on large plantations or small farms. When I talked to Nathan Nunn, he couldn’t say exactly how the hand of slavery was strangling opportunity generations later. He made it clear, however, that it wasn’t just the Black inhabitants who were faring worse today; it was the white families in the counties, too. When slavery was abolished, Confederate states found themselves far behind northern states in the creation of the public infrastructure that supports economic mobility, and they continue to lag behind today. These deficits limit economic mobility for all residents, not just the descendants of enslaved people.

That "public infrastructure" mentioned includes healthcare and welfare, contentious issues in the US even today. Without them, we get inequality, hustle culture, and the US dropping in that list of "Happiest Countries in the World".