Total population / total land area is an irrelevant statistic for country comparison. By population-weighted density the United States isn't significantly less dense than Western Europe.

Unfortunately, directly comparable, prepared numbers are difficult to come by. The 3 most memorable sources I've found are:

* https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th... - Discusses (introduces?) the concept of "lived density" and provides graphs for Europe. I'm not sure how well the author was familiar with related work regarding population-weight density, which seems to be the more correct term.

* https://ssrn.com/abstract=3119965 - A low-level analytical discussion regarding population-weighted density as a metric.

* https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01167 - A COVID-19 pandemic-related paper which incidentally includes comparable population-weighted density metrics for both Western Europe and the United States.

I haven't looked into things since 2018 (excepting taking note of the 2020 COVID-19 paper), but IIRC census.gov has some population-weighted density numbers somewhere based on MSA and census block (tract?) proximity. It's not easily comparable to available European statistics, but it might be a good place to start if you want to play around with U.S. density numbers.

Maybe there have been better resources published since the above.

More and more Americans have been finding out how poor they are or are getting (relatively) in recent decades.

That’s a sweeping comparison. I’ve visited both and my take would be that Europeans have a higher standard of living than Americans. But that’s just a hunch, I’d be interested to see a breakdown by specific metric and class.

I'd take data over an anecdote or hunch.

Specific breakdowns are harder to find, but top of line numbers are pretty easy to find in a minute on Google: https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#place=country%2FUSA%2...

I’m not sure GDP is a reliable national wealth indicator in countries with very high levels of inequality and cost of living. Certainly not as a comparator. Plenty to google on that too. This isn’t a criticism of your point - more that we need a better set or metrics to evaluate “wealth”.

Dutch to you, to!