Some will find this view tendentious, but as an immigrant (been here since age 6) having had a lifetime to ponder why life in America in general is so depressin

Some will find this view tendentious, but as an immigrant (been here since age 6) having had a lifetime to ponder why life in America in general is so depressing and anxious, I lay a lot of the blame at the foot of the automobile-sprawl built environment that predominates in much of the US. I really do. To be sure, it's braided with other trends in the breakdown of societal institutions, civic engagement, etc. in ways where cause and effect can be difficult to disentangle. I was fortunate to spend my elementary school years in one of the small number of places in the US that isn't just shopping strips, stroads and subdivisions--though I was intellectually aware that a lot of the country was precisely and more or less exclusively those things. But then, around the beginning of high school, we moved to a place that much more resembles how much of Middle America lives. The mental-emotional health contrast was very stark. The car sprawl affects teenagers especially strongly, since they are dependent either on access to an automobile (or a willing chauffeur) for absolutely everything. The lack of anything describable as a public realm in most of the US, the overpowering but unarticulated sense of not really having anywhere to 'go', a world largely without consequential destinations, interesting architecture, intimations of human activity, a social space in which to comprehend seeing and being seen, and healthy spontaneous interactions seems to me to lie at the root of a lot of other pathologies. That's the single biggest societal ill that stands out to me, based on my life experience, at least.