One thing which I think is contributing to how miserable people are in Western countries is because the societies aren't structured enough.

Conventionally, and influenced at least in part by Marxism, people judge society vertically-- meaning, how "equal" are people. So they compare billionaire hedge fund managers to single moms and thus use the term "neo-Fuedalism", implying that if society were less vertically stretched, people would be happier.

But I've discovered that society can also be looked at horizontally-- that is to say, how tightly-knit are its communities, and how strongly do its members see that they have a well-defined purpose and role within the group.

I've been reading a lot of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and while the nobility-peasant spectrum was rather vertically stretched, it was horizontally very dense. My impression from those various novels was that people-- yes, even peasants-- were much happier than in socieities like today's America, which are vertically pretty short-- even "poor" people have air conditioning, their own cars, running water, and even iPhones and flat-screen TVs-- but horizontally very stretched.

I don't think what makes the single mom unhappy is that she doesn't have a yacht like James Simons-- that would be a vertical concern. Rather, I think the source of her misery are the conditions which led her to become a single mom: a lack of good role models, a lack of religion, a lack of community, a lack of strong parenting especially from a firm father figure, and a lack of a sense of purpose. Those are all horizontal concerns.