An interesting dichotomy between big cities vs small towns has come up and being discussed the replies to this. Interesting that it is a very North America-centric perspective.

Go to South Korea or Japan and you'll find rural villages that are more densely packed than cities of 100,000+ in USA and Canada. This density allows for shops and convenience stores to be easily accessible and walkable in every neighbourhood, which nudges towards social interaction. Rather than sprawling everywhere, neighbourhoods are built with the same density as elsewhere (with small apartments, large apartment towers, and/or multifamily housing).

On the other end, megacities like Seoul and Tokyo are really just cities of many neighbourhoods with similar density to the rural towns, with a few areas that are more densely built and populated than others (typically centered around geographical or transportation features). Most neighbourhoods in Seoul or Tokyo feel the exact same as any neighbourhoods in "second tier" cities. (In fact, many "suburbs" of Seoul are more densely packed than Seoul itself due to legacy building heights!) But the smaller towns just don't have subway access to megacity-only amenities.

I suspect that a lot of folks who enjoy North American big city living would do just as well in a smaller East Asian town (aside from cultural and language difficulties).

This is a really interesting tangent to go off on. I wonder if the reason for this is that Japan and Korea never really had a frontier the way the US did. I think the idea of a wide open wilderness, yours if you can tame it, contributes to a desire and expectation of a giant living space, all to yourself.

I don't know about Korea, but in Japan, most of society grew up around castle towns, and with the exception of post-war suburban development, those towns are still the same towns they have today, so population is distributed roughly the same way as in medieval times.

Consider that in the US you could immigrate west and the government would give you land if you set up a homestead, at least in the mid 1800's.

There's also a literature reference to I think Little House on the Prairie where the father sees another family coming into the valley and decides they need to pack up and leave.

There is a long history of US travel out west to get land and space regardless, or maybe because, of how far away from others you can get.

I have the excact opposite experience. The closer you live, the more people protect their privacy sphere around them and more often avoid real connections with people they run into, like neighbors. After we moved from living close in the city to outside the city limits, with way more space around us, we went from "hello" when meeting a neighbor to now stopping up and talking for real and taking a real interest in eachother, helping eachother out, etc.

I agree that in smaller places such interactions happen more organically. But you are still bound to who happens to live in the vicinity.

In the big city I do have less interactions with neighbors, but on the other hand, whatever my interest is and however fringe, I will find likeminded people.

I reckon it depends a lot on how far away your interests are from the norm as well as which and what part of the city you are living. The neighborhood I'm in, people do spent quite a lot of time in the corner cafes, restaurants and park and are open to make new friends, instead of just leaving the apartment to go to work.

I think it's the difference between those who look for similar people versus those who prefer complementary people.

Naturally everyone does both but in the RPG of life some rogues tend to hang out in the rogues guild in town while others want to be out in a dungeon alongside wizards and warriors.

That's funny. I grew up in a tiny town, and the gossipy busybodies just disgusted me. I literally heard a rumor about a family member before I heard the actual story from them once.

Panty-sniffing busybodies with nothing to do but mind other peoples' business are a major reason I've lived in cities since I had the option.

This is very similar to my experience. I moved from an apartment complex in a city, where everyone was - and wanted to be - anonymous to a village, where people are way more open and genuinely interested in each other. Quality over quantity. Stopping by for a chat, coffee or beer, joining for a walk or bicycle ride, helping out or asking for help etc is something natural here, while in the city would have to be arranged days in advance.

> This is one of the main reasons why I prefer living in big cities.

Big Cities also amplify loneliness and make it more crushing when you just keep getting lost in the crowd.

Concrete jungles with more traffic than trees are also a depressing drain upon the soul.

My ideal sweet spot is Small Towns near a Big City that you can dip into once every weekend or so.

I don’t know about that being such an absolute. Personally, I feel pretty connected with people just being around them even if we aren’t interacting directly with one another.

It’s also fairly easy when living in a big city to know your neighborhood well enough that if you don’t want to be alone you can expect to run into one or two of a certain few people at different locations.

Like I know of I got to x,y,z coffee shop I can run into acquaintances of set X, Y, Z. If I want to grab a night cap at bar a,b,c I am run in to set A, B, C. And if I just want to be alone I can just wave and say hi.

You just succinctly described why I decided to dip out of a big city into exurbia when the pandemic started. I figured that if I'm going to be lonely, I may as well do it in nature.

Turns out that being alone in nature (as I realized in college) actually doesn't make me feel lonely. This is going to sound kinda weird, but I actually feel a sense of togetherness and belonging being near trees, dense foliage, animals. I wonder why this is? I'm sure there are millions of years of evolutionary evidence to answer my question, but it remains fascinating to me.

I've noticed this as well. Just the thought of being alone in a quiet forest with the sounds of the leaves rustling and the birds chirping, and the smell of the conifers puts me in a relaxed state of mind. I've noticed also that my mind almost reflexively anthropomorphizes the organisms around me, and I have a nebulous hypothesis as to why this is.

Consider this: those who become blind later in life often experience visual hallucinations (Charles Bonnet syndrome). It seems like there is something like a vision module in the brain which, when under-stimulated, starts producing its own content.

Maybe we have a social module as well, which, when under-stimulated by social interaction, starts hallucinating that non-human objects and organisms have human sentiments, and we feel a sense of affiliation as we might toward a human. The happy difference is that there is never a risk of negative social feedback from trees, rocks, or chipmunks, in the same way that there is a low risk of negative social feedback from very young children or kindly old ladies, toward whom I at least also tend to feel a reflexive sense of affiliation.

Thus, the feeling of togetherness we experience in nature is a result of our hallucinating social agents that never give us negative social feedback.

Moreover, exercise and the outdoors make you feel energetic and refreshed for other reasons, and when you feel good, the threshold stimulus for affiliative feeling is certainly lower.

This sounds great to me, but could you give an example of the sort of town you mean? I am only really experienced with NYC, which due to geographic and traffic constraints, just seems difficult to dip into more than once a month.

I'm not aware of any in NA, but I have a few places staked out in Europe and Asia to potentially retire in. What I was talking about depends on efficient nationwide mass transit, which I assume is generally better in smaller countries.

If you live in or around Princeton NJ you can live in a nice college town that's about 1.5 hours from NYC by train or 50 minutes to Philadelphia by car.

I hear ya. Very well stated. I think that the reasons you just stated is why I’m having a hard time adapting after moving from the big city to the small town.