there is a balance. and it's really hard to maintain. japan, korea, china, taiwan. they're all collectivist, confucuian/buddist influenced countries where the ideology was always "the nail that sticks out will be hammered down"  this has always lead to very orderly societies but it has also lead to a boiling point and war.  you see the cracks if you go to these countries. i lived in japan for 2 years and at first you get there and it's this unbelievable utopia, and don't get me wrong i think it's one for quite different reasons compared to the us people that visit. i don't marvel at the clean trains, punctuality or basically free healthcare and schools. i marvel at the effort to detail and passion and standard by minimum wage employees. i marvel at the collective fact that there is no real corruption, japanese corruption to me is like peanuts compared to croatian corruption. we here had a war and our people are still less united and less proud to be croat then japanese. in my country during communism there was many jokes like "whats the fastest car? the companies" (because you don't give a fuck about damaging it on bad roads) nobody gave a fuck about the collective in communism. meanwhile japan is hyper capitalist and they give incredible fucks about public things.  people think us is capitalist and consumerist, it's not even close to japan/korea/china. japan has so much trash thats produced to just be consumed and throw away with literally 0 real world value it's extreme. the us has nothing like it.  anyways my point is this collectivism and pretending to care is incredibly mentally taxing, that social battery people like to say is exactly that. it's acting not how you feel but how you should. and a lot of people from china, korea, japan don't want to act like that all the time. a lot of them flee because of it.
Croatia