[somenameforme]

Your prediction is extremely intuitive, but there's a bit of a surprise here. People in rural areas tend to experience substantially less loneliness than those in cities. I'll link to a random study [1] showing this, but I'm not saying this because of that study. It's a well known result that's been repeatedly and consistently demonstrated.

I think the probable reason is pretty straight forward. When there are "too many" people in an area there's a really good chance any given person you encounter is someone you'll never encounter again, or sporadically at best. So you start seeing other people as something more like NPCs. We obviously understand other people are other people, but given you'll probably never see this person again any sort of encounter is generally going to be exceptionally superficial.

And even if you try to change that, it's probably not going to be reciprocated. If somebody in a small town wanted to kick up a conversation with and get to meaningfully and really know me, I'd happily reciprocate. Go to their house for a beer or even dinner? Sure, why not? If it happened in a large city, I'd expect he's probably a scammer or just not all there. In either case, I'm going to be looking to end the conversation and move along ASAP.

So you get this paradoxical scenario where people surrounded by orders of magnitude more people end up lonelier than those with far fewer faces about.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30609155/

[tomtheelder]

I would propose a different hypothesis: that populations in urban areas might be more itinerant and much more likely to be removed from family structures.

[flangola7]

I wonder why rural people have less empathetic world and political attitudes then. That is also paradoxical.

[tomtheelder]

I think that one is pretty straightforward: homogeneity. I grew up in a much more rural area than I live in now, and you just don't get your perspectives and views challenged very much (unless you happen to be outside the norm, in which case your life can be extremely difficult).

[somenameforme]

I don't think most really realize how neglected rural communities are. It can take something like a miracle to get the government to fund paving a road off the beaten path. Now put yourself in their shoes, and imagine how it feels when you see a government sending hundreds of billions of dollars to countries half way around the world.

This is why things like 'America first' resonate so strongly with rural communities. It's not some jingoistic message, let alone some sort of a secret dog whistle for some sort of a race nationalism thing. It's just people seeing tremendously large amounts of money and interest being spent on things like countries halfway around the world, with little to nothing to show for it all domestically.

[oblio]

The thing is, depending on what kind of rural community type we're talking about, there's no amount of money available in this world that could save them.

Even if you could theoretically build all that infrastructure, the maintenance burden would just crush you 20 years down the line, it would crush your kids and your grand kids.

The real tragedy is that cities are unaffordable.

[somenameforme]

With all due respect, you have to appreciate that nobody everybody thinks as you do. People in rural areas don't want to be "saved", and the vast majority have no interest in moving, let alone to a city - especially in current times, regardless of cost. Surprisingly there was a very recent poll on this exact issue [1].

As for maintenance, I'll elaborate on that story. People on the road of this town had been petitioning the government for years to get their road paved. Each time it'd rain, the road (made of mostly compacted dirt) would get into pretty rough shape. There'd been several accidents precisely because of this, particularly with kids, and it was also pretty rough on people's vehicles. People, as in people - not the government, would patch it up, but that'd take time, and it was non-trivial.

The government clearly had no interest in paving the road, so eventually the people raised the funds themselves over a rather lengthy period of time, and then paved the road themselves. As for maintenance, spot repairing potholes is a whole lot easier than dealing with part of a road getting washed out by rain. It wasn't cheap. And so things like this really make you wonder why you're paying taxes. And then you see headlines of a government and president seemingly gloating about sending hundreds of billions of dollars to countries half way around the world. It just doesn't inspire positive feelings, and makes the government seem desperately out of touch.

[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/america...

[int_19h]

It's not really less empathetic, it's just more parochial (i.e. empathy tends to be reserved for the in-group).

Conversely, I find that urban politics often produce the kind of "empathy" where people say things in the abstract that are in line with empathy, but it doesn't translate to actual person-to-person interactions - i.e. it's more of a play act.

The "monkeysphere" concept comes to mind, and it does make me wonder sometimes if true empathy can even be scaled to large and diverse populations in principle.

[throwaway2037]

I felt the same in NYC. It was a weird combination of aggressive and impersonal. I frequently felt lonely.