[flatline]

I live in a mid-sized US city and it’s hell. Seven years in, my friend group is small - but present - and there are very few activities I enjoy. It is a sleepy kind of place. Community here forms in small pockets of people who have known each other their entire lives and are not welcoming to newcomers. I have eyed a move to SF and when I last traveled there my Airbnb host commented, “this is where you come to find community.”

If a smaller town works for you then great, but for most people it’s quite the opposite, or people would not have consistently migrated to cities over the last century. There are real drawbacks to the population density but it affords so many more opportunities for…everything.

[t-3]

There's a big difference between a medium city and a small town, like an order of magnitude or three.

[bradlys]

The biggest issue is that community doesn’t always find you wherever you are. You can be outgoing, well liked, and so forth but sometimes wherever you live just isn’t going to work. We have a finite lifespan - so we can’t try every sized city and multiples of each.

My experience of living in small towns (100-20,000) was miserable. Extremely racist, homophobic, xenophobic, conservative, and so forth. Could I find a small town where that’s not an issue? Maybe but they tend to be this way. If you’re already someone who doesn’t fit into most crowds - you’re not always gonna find a welcoming scene in a small town.

My experience of big cities has also not been perfect either and I’ve lived in a few. (500k-8m) But the drawbacks of small towns are mostly gone. They’re replaced with other issues like insane competition on every front. (You’re always competing for someone’s attention and time - regardless of who they are) Cities segregate heavily even if they act like melting pots. The truth is - very little intermixing happens relative to how it should theoretically be. The upside of cities though is that there are likely more pockets of people to find a community to belong to. The downside is that it brings a lot of tribalism and exclusionary behavior. (Thus the segregation)

Overall, the USA sucks. It lacks community because we’ve decided to embrace late stage capitalism and the American identity is centered around getting fucked by the feds and capitalists. It’s no surprise that rich slave owners were writing the original rules the country would be founded on - when viewing how things are now.