I hope we all, over time, gain a greater capacity for empathy and compassion. As you said, individualism is vastly overrated in the US but is still important to each of us, for a time. In reality, individualism is merely a boundary we create around us, but is, in fact, imaginary. We all draw boundaries around ourselves, our families, our group of friends, our nation, etc. But those boundaries are imagined walls that keep us from realizing we are all a part of the whole. I think compassion is found by dropping or weakening the imagined wall we've drawn between us and another. And in the end, all the walls we imagine separate us from the whole will be lost, seen as imagined walls we've created, that hold us back.