A Tea Cup, An Empty Room, and the Cure for the West’s Loneliness: What China Taught Me About Civilization
Decoding The 700-year-old cognitive blocks between Chinese and Western civilization
I have always had a certain wiring. Before I was ten, my first clear memory is of standing up to a bully on a soccer field, my small voice telling him he could not take our ball. The feeling was pure and simple: what he was doing was wrong, and someone had to say so. That instinct never left me. It was there in high school, when terror could not stop me from confronting the toughest guy in school, who was threatening my Jewish friend. He never showed. It was there in the cafeteria when, after seeing the pain in his eyes, I challenged the popular kids for picking on a socially awkward boy. To protect the vulnerable, to stand with the bullied—this felt less like a choice and more like a compulsion. It was the core software of my soul.
So the desolation I felt from visiting a psychiatric floor of a hospital in Toronto 21 years ago and walking past rooms of patients empty of visitors, flowers, and cards, with the hum of fluorescent lights as the only lullaby, and encountering my wife’s vacant stare still haunts me. Perhaps it was because people were too afraid to visit, fearing they might say something wrong? Already hollowed out by her plunge into the depths of post-partum despair/suicidality after the birth of our son, keeping him safe from her compulsions to end his cries and her PTSD from an electro-convulsive therapy treatment gone wrong, I was surprised to find myself left to face this alone. Feeling people were retreating, the experience was one of emptiness and numbness. Still, it was too painful to accept that this had become the norm in my Western, hyper-individualistic society. For 17 years, I kept her safe—all while working, parenting, and slowly disintegrating. We now have the biological data to prove this sensation isn’t metaphorical. Studies led by researchers at UC San Diego found that long-term spousal caregivers exhibit cortisol levels and physiological stress markers comparable to those of combat veterans with PTSD. Friends and family vanished. Not out of malice, but because hyper-individualism had taught them that suffering was private and that care was optional. Seven years on, the stress from coping alone, stroke, then heart attack had begun to take its toll. They weren’t just bad luck; they were the logical, physiological conclusion of a system that expects one individual to perform the work of an entire village – without the village’s support. It wasn’t until two more years of healing that I was able to overcome the guilt and “escape” such an impossible situation. I moved to China in 2013 to be one of the first long-term professors in one of its Four Great Ancient Capitals, Nanjing.
The deluge of Chinese visitors in a hospital in Nanjing a year later; my boss, his wife and daughter, my office and student assistants, and my students, many of whom brought fruit or flowers and stayed for hours, was overwhelming, especially for mere kidney stones. “Was it that I was a celebrity?” I asked my student assistant Ji. “Not at all, when I’m in the hospital in my hometown, I let as few people as possible know to avoid too many people from visiting,” she explained. How could people in a culture so different, who ate such strange food and whose language I couldn’t read or speak, care so much for a foreigner with Anglo-Saxon roots? The difference was nuclear; not a single one of my Western friends from Nanjing’s expat bars visited. Every single visitor was Chinese.
After returning for a follow-up a few days later, I shared a room with a young boy, whose mother visited from dawn to dusk, daily. After my office assistant asked her to ‘look out for me’ when he couldn’t be there, suddenly she was pouring my tea, sharing her home-cooked food with me, and forbidding me from walking barefoot – I had found the community that had been eluding me.
Two hospitals. Two visions of humanity. In Toronto, my mentally ill wife and fellow patients sat in rooms with open doors, devoid of visitors, cards, and flowers. I encountered the limits of our individualism. I found that our cultural emphasis on self-reliance can, in a crisis, curdle into isolation. I began to wonder if we’ve perfected the language of compassion but lost the practice of it. In Nanjing, strangers poured tea and shared home-cooked meals with me for hours. And that is why the care I received in China was so disorienting, and so healing. For the first time in years, the protector was protected. The one who always stood up was now being held up. The system I had been taught to see as oppressive and collectivist expressed, in its everyday actions, the very value I had championed my entire life: the unconditional defense of the weak. The irony was not lost on me. In seeking to heal my body, I had found a salve for my soul.
I had not just experienced different hospitals, but exposure to profoundly different civilizations. Lying in that Nanjing hospital bed, surrounded by a buzz of effortless care, I couldn’t help but wonder: What creates this difference? Is it the structure of a society? The pressure of daily life? Or simply a different understanding of one’s duty to a stranger? It was such a profound experience that my already intense interest in the differences between individualism and collectivism became an obsession. I became hyper-conscious of every nuance in every interaction. I keenly questioned my Chinese students and professors for clarity, researched and cross-examined Deep Seek during the rest of my nine years of teaching in China, across three cities and two provinces, including seven years in China’s “holy land”.
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that we’re all connected. Marianne Williamson, New York Times bestselling author of, A Return to Love suggests as much in her praise of famed Gabor Mate M.D. and son’s critique of the lack of links in society between “the individual and the social and the emotional contexts within which our lives unfold” in their NYT bestseller, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture (2022, p.2). Their critique is focused on modern Western society, but the same applies to any culture that prioritizes economic output and materialism over human emotional needs. The difference is that Mate and Mate go beyond earlier critiques about anxiety, loneliness, social fragmentation, and opioid addiction to reveal the biological impacts of disconnection.
Alienation
My exposes reminded me of what sociologist Robert Nisbet, in Quest for Community (1953), identified as a core historical process in the West I had read about during my PhD: the rise of a modern, powerful centralized state in concert with the dissolution of older, intermediate social structures, which he called alienation. We have become atoms, where relationships are transactional and optional. The concept of alienation in Western thought has a long history, dating back to Plato, but it was Karl Marx who popularized the idea.
According to Nisbet (1953), alienation comprises four pillars: alienation from the past, alienation from place/nature, alienation from property, and alienation from community. Alienation from the past occurs when historical continuity, tradition, and inter-generational wisdom are lost, and our lives become a series of disconnected moments, leading to a sense of rootlessness. Alienation from place and nature transpires when we transition from a rooted existence in a specific, known community and landscape to a mobile, abstract relationship with geography, and we develop a sense of living “anywhere”, leading to a lack of belonging and sense of stewardship. Alienation from hard property arises when we shift from owning (a home, a workshop, land) as an extension of self and a source of independence, to renting (both physically and metaphorically) from large, impersonal corporations or landlords. This creates a sense of dependency and a lack of tangible investment in our surroundings. Lastly, and most critically, is alienation from our communities. This involves the disintegration of our families, neighborhoods, churches, guilds, and other associations that stand between the individual and the state, leading to a landscape of atomized individuals, connected by digital networks but often disconnected from a tangible, supportive, obligational community. Consequently, the only fundamental pillars that remain in modern Western society are the state and the market, both of which are distant and impersonal.
Care Infrastructure
The care infrastructure in both civilizations was open, but while my room in China included friends and a stranger who poured my tea, in the West, they were empty. Pouring tea originates from the 2500-year-old Confucian notion of “ritual propriety”/“appropriate conduct”. Ritual propriety involves performing formalized social rituals and customs that cultivate personal virtue and foster a harmonious, stable social order. This makes illness in China a communal invitation and directly contrasts with the West’s aspiration for freedom, which makes abandonment socially acceptable. This isn’t inconsequential, as 72% of Americans report suffering chronic loneliness (Cigna, 2018). While finding an “apples to apples” comparison is difficult, numerous studies show significantly lower rates of self-reported loneliness in China compared to Western nations. Loneliness, consequently, isn’t merely a cultural preference but civilizational malnutrition.
Family/Community Engagement
Engagement in China involved all-day maternal care, including food rituals, whereas in the West, it was largely absent. In China, with its strong emphasis on blood ties and filial piety/showing respect for elders, family/community engagement is a cosmic duty.
Stranger Participation
In China, a stranger provided an all-day maternal presence, whereas in the West, strangers were absent. This comes from the Chinese concept of yi (义) (righteousness/justice), a core ethical concept in Confucian philosophy, rooted in the idea that what’s morally right is based on one’s role and relationships, regardless of whether anyone is watching. The absence of strangers in the West, in contrast, reflects its limitation of ‘community’ to mere activity partners. In contrast, community in China, as part of Ren (仁 ) (benevolence, loving relationships, and acting humanely), is a biological obligation.
Underlying Philosophy
The underlying philosophy of care in the West embraces the concept of individual pathology and the need to isolate and medicate. In contrast, in China, the body is regarded as a microcosm of Tianxia (“all under heaven”) in which balance is dependent on the social ecosystem. Correlative cosmology, systematized during the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 CE), is based on the concept of cosmic resonance between humanity and the universe, where the body’s structure and processes mirror the state and cosmos. For example, the heart-mind (Xin) is the ruler governing the “body’s kingdom”, and “lower” officials represent other organs, each with a function for maintaining order. The body’s channels (Jingluo), or blood vessels, mirror rivers and roads on earth. Consequently, health and social harmony are parallel states of proper, aligned function within their respective systems. In the West, the body is a machine; in China, it’s the planet in microcosm.
The Lens of Alienation
Where it felt like all four of Nisbet’s bonds had collapsed in Canada – place (hospital as non-place), past (no ancestral guardianship), community (vanished family and friends) and hard property (no flowers/cards), in China, I had been plugged into a communal mainframe. My illness was not my problem; it was a community event that triggered a pre-programmed Confucian care response, as expressed by the stranger who insisted on pouring my tea! I had felt both the impacts of alienation as a consequence of the West’s internal crisis and the community of care in China that healed me. This motivated me to develop my Super-Civilization Framework to decode and contrast the civilizational DNA of China and the West. My objective was to create a model that actively seeks to rebuild the layered, intermediate structures that Nisbet laments the loss of, so that the West can learn and heal from them. This is part of a broader quest to reveal and interpret China’s logic, values, and operating principles.
How China’s Civilizational History Diverged from the West’s
China’s historical path has differed from the West’s in three key ways: continuity, the primacy of relationships, and harmony between humans and nature. First, Chinese modernity was consciously built on a bedrock of thousands of years of continuous civilization, whereas the Enlightenment, modernization, and postmodernism ruptured the West’s relationship with the past. As a result, in China, the past is a source of identity and lessons, whereas in the West, it is often viewed as a “foreign country.” Second, whereas the individual in the West is celebrated, in China, it’s the relations between people that are primary. For instance, the Confucian concept of guanxi (关系) philosophically signifies that humans are not isolated atoms but a function of their relationships (ruler-subject, parent-child, husband-wife, friend-friend). Lastly, the ancient concept of harmony between humankind and nature (天人合一, Tiānrén héyī) in China still exists, as exemplified by the modern-day idea of ecological civilization 建设 (shēngtài wénmíng jiànshè). In contrast, in the West, man and nature remain separate.
Humans have both individual needs, such as the need for self-expression, and collective needs, like the need for belonging. While each civilization’s institutions emphasize one set of needs to the detriment of the other, neither is superior. Just as creativity in the West is an outcome of individualism’s emphasis on self-expression, China’s communal firewalls against Nisbet’s four plagues are the outcome of collectivism’s focus on community. The lesson I brought home wasn’t about geography. It was a simple, searing reminder of the power of a simple phone call, an offered meal, a moment of presence. It made me ask myself: How can I be more like that Nanjing mother for someone else in their moment of quiet crisis?
Ultimately, I unexpectedly found healing in China, the very place the West had been demonizing. I had arrived subconsciously influenced by decades of demonizing headlines. I expected efficiency, perhaps. Technology, certainly. But I did not expect this – this deep, effortless warmth, including all the assistance (strangers accompanying me to help me negotiate trains and subways, professors lining up at banks with me for hours, and tellers instructing me on how to circumvent China’s rules for transferring money), during the one and a half years I had lived in China before my hospital admission. However, the greatest irony was that I had to travel to the very place my own culture had taught me to fear to finally feel safe.
In the quietest, most painful moments, my mind circles back to a question that brings no peace: Was it me? Did I, the boy who always stood up to the bully, simply surround myself with people who would not stand up for me?
But I’ve come to believe that’s the wrong question, a trap set by the very individualism that left me stranded. It asks me to blame individuals for a sickness of the collective. The people I called friends were ordinary products of our world. They were raised to value their independence, to prioritize their nuclear families, to see a crisis like mine as a private matter. They were following the unwritten rules of our society, rules that equate offering help with intrusion and receiving help with shame. They were emotionally ill-equipped, trapped by culture and fear, given the seriousness of the situation.
The failure was in the water we were all swimming in—a culture that had forgotten how to be a village. The few who said ‘no,’ made a conscious choice. But the many who simply faded away were following a script they did not even know they had. My journey has led me to believe we need to rewrite that script altogether.
I am afraid to write these words. I am afraid of the labels that will be thrown my way, of having this bedrock-level disappointment I carry be dismissed as bitterness or ingratitude. To express this feels like a betrayal of the home I once loved, and it risks the very condemnation I already feel so acutely.
However, my mind refuses to let this disappointment go. It is the fossil record of a fracture, the evidence of a promise that was broken. And if I am to be honest about the healing I found, I must first be honest about the wound. To shy away from this would be to build a house on a foundation I refuse to acknowledge.
So I write this not to blame a nation, but to acknowledge a pain. I write it because I know I am not the only one who has felt this silent abandonment. And I write it in the hope that by naming this disappointment aloud, we can begin a conversation that is less about accusation and more about the kind of world we actually want to build—a world where such a deep sense of letdown does not have to be a normal part of getting sick, or growing old, or caring for someone you love.
Super-Civilization Framework (Actionable Insights)
This is where my Super-Civilization framework moves from theory to practice. It’s not just about understanding China; it’s about learning from its ancient social protocols to heal our own broken societies.
- For Business: “Train leaders in ritualized care (e.g., tea ceremonies as trust-building, not just networking) to build resilient, loyal teams.”
- For Healthcare: “Design ‘communal recovery wards’ that leverage family and community as active healing agents, not just visitors.”
- For Leadership: “Move from incentive-based management to stewardship-based leadership—the idea that a leader’s role is to maintain the harmony and health of the human ecosystem they oversee.”
