[azhu]

Merging research and anecdotal experience, I can say that east Asians tend to understand life in terms of duty. Happiness and satisfaction are understood as intrinsic to the fulfillment of those duties, and as a result any perceived shortcoming in emotional payoff is seen as the fault of the feeler, not the fault of the stimulus. Not happy? Just get check whatever box on the "what you're supposed to be doing with your life" list. Still not happy? Sorry, you are a broken failure. Unless you pretend like you're happy. I suspect many who subscribe to such a worldview can at least somewhat successfully make themselves happy through pretending to be happy, because acting the part fulfills yet another order of social duty. If everyone around you subscribes to this worldview, then indeed you can feel the self worth boost that comes from the authentic contribution of fulfilling your socially prescribed duties. However, if you are torn between this worldview and another whose members do not consider your fulfillment of your Confucian duties as valuable, successfully subscribing to such rules becomes much more difficult.

You see this when Asian high schoolers very much not hypocognitive of the concept of Friday night elect to spend it studying (east Asian duty mode), catch heat for it at school the next week (western mode), and then eventually go on to either build a mental model that successfully navigates the conflicting worldviews they're caught between, completely shun one or the other, or suffer a host of mental health issues as a result of being hypocognitive of what's going on in their emotional worlds and feeling deeply and intrinsically hopeless because of it.

Cultural perspectives can be seen as boss level problems of hypocognition. As the article notes, they underlie everything from the immigration-fueled sociopolitical rifts the entire developed world seems to be experiencing right now to other less globe shaking but still mysterious and wicked problems like romantic and familial relationship issues. The way forward is not to assert that any particular perspective is correct, it is to fill in the hypocognitive holes we all possess. Which is unfortunately very hard since not only are the holes invisible unless you are directly invested in finding them, but people are also naturally averse to the notion that their ideas and mental models could possibly be incomplete.

I am a super headstrong first generation child to Chinese immigrant parents. I have a host of mental health issues, and exploring their genesis through a variety of avenues has helped me begin to address them through arriving to some of the understanding I currently hold.

[Endama]

So I have two responses to your comment (which I thought was great btw).

1. I think your assessment of Confucianist culture correct, however, as a counter argument, I think that Western culture can sometimes under value the importance of duty as a facet of happiness. People, to some degree, need to feel useful to be happy. Whether its being useful enough to get a paycheck or to be able to fulfill the needs/wants of friends/family, it doesn't seem to me that the importance of duty is merely an artifact of E. Asian culture.

2. I actually think there is a third problem to the "immigration-fueled sociopolitical rifts" you describe. In my own personal experience, you can fully understand (and even appreciate) the cultural perspective of another and yet fully reject the impact said values have in your life. Understanding != acceptance. Just being you understand something cognitively does not mean that you are required to accept it as an acceptable element of your life emotionally or socially. In fact, when the situation is zero-sum (like you can only spend a certain amount of time either doing your own cultural thing or the cultural thing of another) choosing the other can signal a rejection of your own culture for that of the other, which may very well have some serious social consequences. I don't think the response of "let's just not choose to believe a particular perspective is correct" is effective enough.

[azhu]

1. I did not mean to imply that east Asian culture is inferior. I did mean to imply that it is much less emotionally comprehensive. I agree with you that the concept of duty is sensible and functional on the human race wide scale, and I was asserting that it cannot be a stand-in for all emotional fulfillment in an individual unless the society surrounding the individual also subscribes to that idea.

2. It is certain that there are many, many causes of the global immigration related tensions that we're experiencing now. I did not mean to imply that I think all are required to both understand and accept all perspectives, but rather that having such a personal goal holds plenty of progressive merit given that you think that the vector of progress lies along the direction of increased togetherness. There are merits to other points of view as well. I also urge you not to overestimate yourself, even though I personally have plenty of faith that you are personally very intelligent, and to question the emotion when you begin to feel that you understand another point of view. In my experience you oftentimes actually do not, and that feeling that you do is your brain employing the numerous heuristics its evolved to contain in order to fulfill the incredible task of synthesizing sense out of the chaotic and unfathomable complexity of all things.

Perhaps it's better to say that it would be good to endeavor to develop a perspective that is comprehensively inclusive of all other perspectives that one has encountered and can possibly foresee encountering. So rather than having a quiver of many arrows, there is merit to having a single arrow capable of hitting any target.

[wbillingsley]

That's not an exclusively cross-cultural issue. The tension between duty and emotion is fairly common in western literature.

For example, the entire premise of Lady Windermere's Fan (an Oscar Wilde play) is Lady Windermere interpreting her husband's slightly stiff and dutiful manner as disinterest. To the point where she starts suspecting him of an affair where he turns out to be looking after her mother.

Or more recently, most of the Richard Curtis movies play off similar "comedy of manners" themes as various characters find it hard to express what they feel for one reason or another.