I mean from where I’m standing American culture, for the rich Americans I get along with, is incredibly messed up, where people’s base needs are met (something historically uncommon), so they focus on the higher needs (acceptance, self-actualization, impact, status).

But these higher needs are less objectively defined, and indeed perhaps only defined with reference to one’s ingroup. And then the strands of mimetic desire go awry as they are defined in an unanchored Keynesian Beauty contest. They also fail as Americans encounter scarcity which they aren’t accustomed to (in things like the number of years they can still have kids, the hours of their time they can spend watching Youtube videos, etc) or when the higher needs conflict with the lower but more necessary needs (being a vegetarian without knowing about nutrition and thus malnourishing oneself—probably happened to me; postponing kids forever because of one’s career, trading off base security for lofty ideals). And instincts simply fail to align short-term wants with long-term flourishing because they are trained in a domain where there aren’t superstimuli, and because neither culture nor biology has had enough training time in a domain of such abundance.

In that domain, new strands of strategy arise: you should exert incredible willpower to improve your beauty so that you can attract a great mate (descending into anorexia); you should align yourself with a community seeking to do the most good (EA); you should align yourself with a community that is aligned with God and improve yourself (~Jordan Peterson), etc. Because the space of strategies is so high-dimensional, people successfully displaying new strategies and seeing them through are a public good, not because their archetypes should be fully instantiated by everyone, but because they allow the masses to copy the good parts, and to see how sustained effort in one direction pays off.