Westerners tend to see happiness and misery as opposites, and life as a challenge to minimize the negative and accentuate the positive. Easterners tend to see happiness and misery as interrelated and mutually necessary, like the yin and yang in Chinese philosophy. Indeed, studies of thousands of people have found that members of holistic cultures aspire to less happiness, pleasure, freedom, health, self-esteem, and longevity than members of individualistic cultures, although their goals for society at large are the same. Russia—which has a sociological history of being somewhat between an
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