Historically in the US, the only happy people have been evil people. The bullies, the bigots, the thugs, the fanatics, the rapists, the slaveowners, the plutocrats. So I’ll take that as a compliment.
And what’s actually “smothering” American culture is copyright law, as it’s rendered the great majority of it inaccessible as it falls into a legally mandated memory hole and vanishes. If you don’t like modern culture and wish you could see something else, the reason you can’t is because most things not recently published have been crushed under the steamroller of copyright and effectively erased. Not “nerds”.