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.