system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:Why are the United States and European countries considered "the west" while Russia and Asia are considered "the east?" Why is the map drawn the way it is?

This question has two parts.

1. Why are the US, Canada, South America, and Europe, the west, and why are Russia, China, and Japan the east?  If I learnt correctly, the earth is a globe.  Aren't certain countries considered west/east because that is where they were drawn?  Suppose you are in China; you would think you are in the east, right?  If you continued to go further east, you reach the United States, then if you kept going even further east you would reach Europe.  So wouldn't you think Europe is further east than China?  Well if you kept going east you're suddenly back in China, so maybe it really is further-east, but if you still continued to go east, you're in the US, which would make the US seem like the eastern-most country, and on and on and on it goes.  You can always continue going east and and claim you are further east than someone else.  Why are China and Japan considered where the east ends, and if you go further you are not more eastern, you have "restarted in the west?"

It works the other way too.  If you are in the United States, and you travel west, you would eventually be in China, since the earth is spherical.  So why was the side of the world with the US and Canada called the west, and why was the side with China and Russia called the east?

2. Who decided the map should have those two countries at their respective ends?  Why is the map not drawn with the US, Canada, and South America to the east, and with Russia and China to the west, or any other way for that matter?
gpt
It has to do with medieval Europe. Everything East of them was the East (also called Orient). The terms came into use before travel was possible across the large oceans by Europeans. 

The reason that the Americas are the West is that we are descended from Europeans. Europe colonized the Americas and left their cultures. 

Russia is also kind of a mixed place. They are physically on the Asian Continent and for most of their history were well removed from the cultures of Europe, but they also took great efforts in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries to adopt European culture, and spent most of the 20th isolating their culture from the world.