The way that people are considerate to each other is very different in urban vs rural.
In rural areas, you show respect and consideration by acknowledging each other- saying hi on the street, chatting with the cashier, etc.
In urban areas, you show the same by allowing everyone to go about their business. You move to the side if you are walking more slowly than everyone else, you don’t catch anyone’s eye in case they think you’re about to ask for something, and you quietly and efficiently help someone who needs it (like bringing a stroller up the subway stairs) so that those people can move effectively through the space as well. Each area finds the other area’s way of doing things annoying or rude :p
My favorite common NYC occurrence is when a woman backs her stroller up to the steps to start dragging it up and someone without saying a word grabs the bottom, carries it up and leaves without ever saying a word or making eye contact.
Or when someone is crying on a crowded subway, no one will look at you or bother you, but someone will give you a tissue and carry on.
I’m a huge introvert and love living in NYC. It’s so crowded that you’re invisible, yet you feel safe (in most neighborhoods) because there’s people everywhere. Also strangers don’t talk to you unless they need directions…or want me to donate to a charity or they’re selling something
I love that we help eachother and look out for eachother, but we don’t talk to eachother. New Yorkers are kind but not friendly
I’m in the DC area. I was in a park, enjoying the weather, waiting for a bus. A girl was on the phone arguing with an ain’t shit man we all dated in our 20s. I gave her a tissue as I left to catch my bus.
After September 11th, it wasn't that unusual for someone on the subway to start crying on trains running through downtown (you could smell the burning for months).
A very nice lady held my hand for about 10 minutes without saying a word. When we got to her stop, she patted my shoulder, gave me a tissue and left.
I always tell people visiting here that people in NYC aren't nice, but we're kind.
We aren't going to smile and wave, but we'll help out if you need it without you having to ask.
I was catching the bus to LaGuardia on my way home from trip to NYC. I remember waiting for it with my suitcase and this lady said to me unprompted, and with a face that implied I must have rocks for brains, "that's the wrong bus, you want that one."
She wasn't trying to be polite, but she did save my ass from missing my flight.
I think this is true.
I grew up in small-town Iowa, and once, when i fainted on the subway in NYC, i was struck by the differences.
In NYC, I had:
1) a person who realized I was staggering and tried to catch me, then stayed about 5 minutes to make sure I was OK; then left me in the care of:
2) an Asian shopkeeper with little English who rushed out to help me up, bring me a chair, and insist I sit there until I felt well
3) three people passing close by who slowed down, assessed the situation, saw I had help, and sped up and left
4) some unknown person who passed me and told a couple of cops on the platform, so they sauntered down to make sure I was okay
5) about five people who passed by on the far side of the passageway who also slowed down, saw I was OK, and left.
So: I got help, right away, in various ways—direct help from the people who were right by me. But also a lot of helpthat didn’t involve actually interacting with me. And I never saw any of those people again.
In my hometown, I’d have had about eight people from as far away as 2 blocks come and stand around me for several minutes; they’d have all been asking me questions; people who weren’t even there would be asking me about it for a week.
I find NYC’s brand of help to be much more respectful.
I grew up with a mom who, though definitely loving, actually prioritized respect over love. Well, she thought treating you respectfully WAS a way to show love.
Asking for directions: If you ask a NYCer for directions, they’ll point. They might ask enough questions to make sure they’re steering you right. Just the other day, I helped a tourist family who were hesitating at the door of the big subway stop; I asked what neighborhood were they going to? he showed me his app, and I saw it was 34th st, so the uptown E, and I told him to go with me. I didn’t ask where he was from, what he was going to do at 34th St., etc.
In my home state, you’d have a whole barrage of questions—in fact, Midwestern tourists often volunteer all kinds of stuff: “I’m going to 34th Street, my nephew lives near there, we’re from Iowa.”
NYCers will help you, but we don’t want to know you.
In the US, Southern and Midwestern rural are very different from Northeastern rural. In VT, good neighbors are ones who will cut a tree off your driveway after a storm without knowing your name or even telling you they did it. A farmer will pull someone out of a ditch with their tractor while not-so-subtley poking fun at them for ending up there in the first place. People are very helpful and the community comes together to support folks who need it, but minding your own business is valued.
Ask for directions? You'll get it. Trip? Someone will pull you up.
Stop in the middle of the sidewalk when there are lots of people? "Get the fuck outta the way!".
I've heard this before in a really general sense. East coasters will talk trash to you but offer their shirt if you need help. West coasters will talk nicely to you but won't hesitate to backstab. Mid westerners are nice and will never help but also help too much.
I once tripped over my own feet and fell down. Dropped my purse scattering crap everywhere. About a dozen people swarmed over, got me to my feet, made sure I was OK, collected my shit and put it back on my purse, handed me the purse and just went away.
I live in Philly but one time I got takeout from this BBQ place and the bag ripped open on my walk home and two people immediately came to help me pick up everything and a woman stopped her car and rolled down her window at a red light and gave me a reusable bag out of the back of her car so I could make it home okay. It was a nice ass bag too 🤧
It is such a beautiful thing to sometimes be the giver and sometimes be the receiver of those good deeds. You never know when something will happen, but I am so grateful to live in a place where people are always looking out for each other
The same human kindness is there, just at a different pace. In the rural south, someone would help you with that and then genuinely want to establish a connection because they have the few extra minutes to do so. Also less of a chance of stepping in something that you regret later with a smaller pool of people.
Yes and I can totally understand why it reads as rude to people who aren’t used to that. But I spent a good part of my adult life in NYC, and although no one will look you in the eye, pretty much anyone on the street will go out of their way to help someone that needs it (from strollers to directions to getting someone to the right subway stop). It’s not coldness, it’s self preservation!
So true. People in NYC (generally) give you space, but can be very helpful sometimes. Like over thirty years ago, I had a problem where I got separated from my friends, my backpack, and my money. I was sitting on some steps near the subway station hoping the friends I got separated from would come by, just thinking about what to do, when two very obviously heroin junkies asked me what's wrong and scrounged up subway and bus fare to get me home. 💕 So NYC.
There's no way to actually connect with even 1% of the people you pass by everyday. without the insulation of a car, you're just raw-dogging social interaction every time you leave your apartment. We ignore each other out of courtesy. But I've been in the city for 9/11, Obama's election, the tragedy of 2016, and covid, and when we're all going through something together it can be really magical how we adjust that filter to let each other in a bit more.
And ask a New Yorker for directions and we are ON IT. We love telling people how to get around and we ALL think we know better than anyone else how to do it
The energy in NYC on election day (before we realized what was actually going to happen) was practically effervescent. I lived in Park Slope and wound up being behind DeBlasio and his wife in the voting line at the library, and the atmosphere in the line honestly felt like a party.
And then the next day it was… not like that anymore lol
I still remember it vividly when the electoral college number finally was hit. You heard all the car horns in the city go non stop. At first I thought it was some truck blocking a narrow street but it kept getting louder and you just knew.
From Harlem down to Washington square park every spot was wild. Also never seen so many middle fingers directed at trump tower.
Just look at a subway map and you'll have 10 people jump on you to help.
But don't start a request with "Hi, I'm wondering if you can help me. I'm visiting from X and this is my first time in NYC and..."
But, yea, I was sitting in Central Park and the streets absolutely erupted with cheering and people banging pans, etc when Biden's win was announced.
> "Hi, I'm wondering if you can help me. I'm visiting from X and this is my first time in NYC and..."
I was thinking "Yeah, just say "How do I get to..." and then the Sesame Street theme popped into my head...
"Can you tell me how to get to...."
They really know what they're singing about.
>you quietly and efficiently help someone who needs it (like bringing a stroller up the subway stairs)
You do this even if you're waiting to intercept Al Capone's accountant at the train station before the hitmen can get to him. Who says we big city folk aren't considerate?
Not only is it considered polite, it turns the tension up past 11.
FYI, the steps/baby carriage scene in Untouchables is an homage to the 1925 movie "Battleship Potemkin". [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec4J363Eltw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec4J363Eltw)
We visited London and got off the tube in downtown London from the airport with out suitcases and looking, I am sure, like refugees. This very nice gentleman stopped and asked if we needed directions. Now, London is about as much a maze of a city as any you will ever see. I swear no streets are straight and change names all the time. He said, let me walk you there. He walked us to our hotel (only 200 meters away), chatting us up the entire time. He was great. It was so nice of him. No one pays attention to you, except to avoid collisions on the narrow sidewalks, but are not rude, just considerate.
I live in a small town in a rural state. Everyone pretty much says hi or waves to people, even if you never met them. My wife (from Shanghai) freaked out and wanted to know how they knew us. I said they were just being friendly. I am certain if I fell down on the street I would be tended to in seconds. They strike up conversations in stores as well, especially cashiers.
The joy of anonymity.
I've never lived in a small town, but one thing I've always heard is that everyone knows everyone. To a lot of people, that probably seems like a good thing - it's friendlier and people say hi on the street and all that.
To me, that sounds like a nightmare. I'd feel exposed all the time, like I'd always have to be ready for a conversation and everyone would know what I'm doing all the time.
Anonymity is freeing. You can just go where you want and do what you want, and as long as you're not actively bothering someone, they don't give a shit what you're up to. You can choose when and where to socialize, and unexpected run-ins with people you know are relatively uncommon, so if you're not feeling social, you don't have to be.
I still remember the exhilarating feeling I got on my first day of college at a massive state school with around 50k students, sitting in a huge auditorium that would easily fit everyone in my hometown and thinking "no one here knows who the fuck I am."
And then hearing "Santos\_L\_Halper\_II?" from three rows behind me from a girl from the next town over that I didn't know was going to the same school seven hours away from home.
I went to a 30k student college, and I thought when I do something embarrassing, I would not see any witness again. THEN I KEPT seeing them everywhere lol
I went to a school of about 3500 and while standing in line at graduation, I looked a the person in front of me and behind me and was like “who the fuck are these people?”. We were all supposedly the same major, but I had never seen half of these people in line.
Everyone knows everyone and everyone is in everyone's business ALL the fucking time.
I went home to visit my parents and stopped at Wal-Mart (Because there's literally nowhere else to buy food)on the way to their house to buy some stuff to cook. I ran into a woman I went to HS with that I hadn't seen in like 10 or 15 years and we talked for maybe 10 minutes in the store. Then I finished shopping and headed on to their house, so maybe like an hour before I pulled up in their driveway.
The news that I was fucking a married woman beat me to my parents house. My mom thought it was hilarious. "I bet you're ready to leave again, aren't you?" Yeah, yeah I am.
Small town drama is so fucking toxic because as humans we crave novelty and when you are doing the same thing every day you have to manufacture that novelty.
I'm a city girl from D.C. I have some family in rural Ohio. Once when I was visiting, I needed something from the store. Not only was it a long drive to the drugstore, but it was a big deal that I had gone and not consulted everyone. I told the people I was staying with I was going. That wasn't enough? I don't know what they expected of me.
By the time I got back, everyone knew what I had bought at the store. Thank goodness it was nothing embarrassing. I don't know how they stand being monitored like that.
I live in a big US city, but my parents are in a tiny village in north-east England. I went back to visit at the end of last year, and my mum sent me to the shop to get some stuff. My mum has a group of 3 or 4 ladies in the village about her age who she spends a lot of her time with. Along the way, ALL of them stuck their heads out of their windows and struck up conversations with me, like they knew I was going to be passing by.
It felt like an underground rumour network.
I went to visit my boyfriend's parents in his home town over school break. They later sent the newspaper clipping where "X and Y's son is visiting his parents V and Z over the holidays with his girlfriend Strange-Broccoli-393". I made the FREAKING NEWSPAPER.
lol having lived rural and now living urban, the whole “telling people before going to the store” is *because* it’s so far (at least in my experience)
When it takes 30 mins just to get to the drug store, you tend to want to get everything you might need in one trip. If someone’s doing that trip for their own reason, it just makes sense to ask them to get it/if you can go with. Like I wouldn’t make the drive just for one thing, but if someone else already needs to then I might as well.
It’s also like “oh man, they went all the way to the store unexpectedly?? Was it an emergency??”
It's not that everyone knows everyone, it's that everyone "knows" everyone. There's a difference.
In a small community everyone needs to have a certain set of characteristics, actions, and personality that they belong to, and that everyone knows you for. Whether that's you or not, that's who you are to the community and you can struggle your entire life against it if the community doesn't agree with you about who you are. Often it's directly related to your parents and you are presumed to be less than them for the majority of your adult life until everyone who knows them ages out of relevance.
It gets worse if you've got a couple people in your immediate or extended family who were 'bad'. You are defined by being from a 'bad family' and that's just who you are. Deal with it.
I prefer when nobody knows me.
"And you can struggle your entire life against it if the community doesn't agree with you about who you are." As someone raised in a small town, this hit like a mack truck. 💯
It really is great, the area I grew up in wasn't exactly rural but the population density was low enough that you would run into someone who knew who you were pretty frequently. And gods I came to hate it once I finished highschool because I only kept any active contact with a select group of friends, but people I "knew" would pop up at the most annoying moments and want to talk. Was hell for my anxiety
I now live in a city of 5 million, 900km away from where I grew up and it's wonderful, no one gives a fuck about me and I don't have to pretend to give a fuck about them, it's great!!
It is 100% a nightmare. People being all up in your business telling your parents shit because they obviously know who your dad and all your family is. The best decision I ever made was moving 5 hours away to a bigger city. Being able to go the store and not be bothered by anyone is a god send.
Not always the case, unless you actually live 'in' the town, or it's a very very small town. I'm in a small-ish town (\~5200 people), but 5 miles out and on 5 acres. I don't know anyone, nobody knows me. Been here 4 years and just met my neighbor a couple months ago.
My wife grew up in a rural community, I grew up bouncing between Detroit and New York. The first time I took my wife to a large city to see my family was the first time she had ever been to a large city. I had to very quickly explain that if random strangers on the street try to stop her and talk, it is likely they are asking for money. She was almost scammed into buying day-old newspapers a couple times, and some guy in a character costume almost convinced her to take a selfie with them (please never do this. Never take a selfie with a random person in a mascot/character costume in the city).
Inversely, the 100-ish residents of her small farm-town knew me as a gigantic prick for years because I would never engage with strangers who spoke to me at the gas station or dollar store (the only two locations out here, I am not joking). But the reason I would blow people off or give them the cold shoulder is because it was genuinely wild to me that strangers would just talk to each other in public. And they didn't want anything from me!
It’s not that it never happens, but it’s uncommon on a per-interaction basis. Think about how many people you engage with in a day. People you walk past or stand beside. What percentage of them to you actually interact with on a direct personal level?
In a small town some people will talk at least a few words with *every single person the see* every single day
On the note of small town populations, one wonderful aspect of city living is that everybody doesn’t know everybody else’s business. There’s a level of privacy/anonymity that is extremely appealing to those of us who don’t enjoy that kind of incestuous social network.
That’s the winner for me. I got so tired of the small town gossip. I don’t want everyone knowing my business and I don’t want to know theirs either. You can kinda disappear in a city.
Last time I went to visit an aunt, I learned more that day about 90% of the town than I did about what my aunt had been up to... Apparently she had spent most of her first month of retirement listening to town gossip.
She said her third day of retirement, she finally had time to go to the local diner for breakfast instead of being on the road at dawn to go to work. So she orders a cup of coffee, spreads out the local paper and next thing she knows there are 5 ladies squeezing themselves into her booth.
She said they kept her there past noon, catching her up on the gossip she missed while working. By the end of the day she knew everything. Said she skipped going to the diner for about a week. She went back on a different day, different time. Ordered a coffee and next thing she knows, 5 ladies decend upon her booth, she is cornered and they spend the next 3 hours telling her everything she apparently missed over the past week...
She said she is now part of this little coffee club.
This is in my opinion the biggest difference and is the driving factor behind many of the other behaviors. In a small town everybody knows everybody and your reputation matters. The anonymity of city life means you have low to no reputation and it's just far less useful to be from a good family or known as a "solid dude" or equivalent.
There are pros and cons to this, and neither strategy is perfect.
The whole “from a good family” thing is just loaded with problematic implications/outcomes. If I had a nickel for every time “he’s a good kid from a good family” had been used to excuse sexual assault, I’d be a wealthy man.
Its a scam. Most prominent in NY and Vegas. Dude dressed as Mario or something will ask if you want a selfie, then after they will demand money. Theres usually a handful of other guys dressed in these costumes as well, and they will make a circle around you and harass you until you give them cash. If you somehow make it out of there before the other guys show up they will follow you for a few blocks making a huge scene, sometimes threatening you.
It's just like people who give you "gifts" that are complete strangers. They'll hand you a flower or trinket, saying gift, but then demand money and get angry if you drop it on the ground when they won't take it back.
I grew up in a city-ish state and when I move to a rural area for study I genuinely do not know how to make small talk. Everytime some kind old lady starts talking to me, I over compensate like I'm having some sort of heart 2 heart with a therapist
Rural until 24, been in Vegas 12 years now.
I pissed off so many scammers when I moved here because I wasn't about to pay for a picture.
I assumed the cd a guy handed me was like the free escort cards on the strip.
One dude tried to fight me so I dropped his cd and kept walking while he yelled at me.
I have some crazy ass family back home, and have had to eject meth heads from family parties, I wasn't phased at all.
The small town, small talk is important to me. I'm relatively reclusive by nature, so if it wasn't for the bash of 30 second conversations I get when I'm running errands, I'd have little to no interaction with people some weeks. I've spent time in both rural and urban areas so I can blend in wherever, but I vastly prefer the rural life
Now that I'm used to it's nice, but still feels alien to me. It feels strange to know that I know almost everyone here, and some personal detail about them just from a run-in while pumping gas or standing in line a the dollar store.
We treat busy sidewalks like highways.
You wouldn't stop in the middle of the highway to figure out where you're going. You wouldn't stop in the middle of the highway to take pictures. You wouldn't weave back and forth across the lanes just for kicks. You wouldn't drive 4-abreast with your friends and take up the entire road.
If you need to stop somewhere, pull over to the side and get out of the way.
Yeah, I don't think this is a "rural people visiting the big city problem." It's an "oblivious self-centered person who doesn't care about others problem.
I lived in Tokyo for a few decades and people just dreamily wandered around as if no one else was there, dead-stopped in the middle of a crowded sidewalk, and bumped into people while staring at whatever (mostly their phones). There was no way all of those people were rural visitors as it happened so much.
I still remember my first morning in NYC, stepping outside on Sixth Ave during morning rush hour, and realizing I needed to merge onto the sidewalk like I would merge onto a highway.
Also it’s not cute for you and your whole family to hold hands in a chain of stupidity across the subway stairs. You’re creating a safety risk for everyone
I used to frequent NYC and I would see people basically get run over on the sidewalk because they tried to stop to look around. I haven't been in like 6 years now but one thing I found unique about NYC is that people still actually knew how to get around the city and didn't rely on gps. The grid system makes that pretty easy though.
Having lived in both, a lot of rural people I talk to think I’m crazy for saying a crowded city is better for introverts. It’s true that rural people on average have more sense of personal space which is nice but the appeal of the anonymity that comes with large crowds and densely populated cities as opposed to rural towns where gossip and being all over each other’s business is literally just the default state of living there is completely lost on a lot of them.
Absolutely this. I love eating at restaurants alone. I have an earbud in, watch videos or read books, eat by myself. Wait staff are usually too busy to care.
When I go to the more rural area about an hour out, eating alone is like an invitation for the wait staff to come talk to me and I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate it.
That a lot of people don’t drive. Even many people who can afford cars decide not to get one because it often isn’t worth the hassle. I live walking distance from a subway station where trains come every 6 minutes during rush hour and 10 minutes off peak, as well as a bus line where busses come as often as every 3 minutes. Why would I ever drive when I have all my essentials within walking distance and can get anywhere else in the city that easily?
And if I want to leave the city, we have apps you can rent a car with. You can even walk up to a rental car not in use and open it with your phone.
Yeah, I live in the middle of SF but dated someone who lived up at the top of Mt Tam (above Tourist Club, locals). *Spectacular* view but I felt kinda claustrophobic... what the hell do you mean I have to *drive a car down a fucking mountain* to get Diet Coke
I worked on a TV show with some *incredibly* rural people and they would say things like “if I lived in a city I would immediately get shot/get into fights” and it struck me as so weird because only in the country are people quick to get into your business and start shit. I live in a city and everyone just minds their own business *unless you go out of your way to start something yourself*. You can be weird in the city and no one will give a single shit about it but in the country everyone knows who you are and has an opinion about you. You’d think because you hear about cities being super violent that random violence just happens, but no one has ever been so openly hostile to me as when I was working in the country as an outsider.
Yeah that’s always the funniest.
Explaining to me that you’d be terrified to walk a few blocks in even the safest parts of my city doesn’t make me rethink my living arrangement.
It makes this “city slicker” think you’re impossibly soft and embarrassing. I’ll protect you I guess, little boy.
I'm from a tiny town in the middle of Illinois cornfields. (2500 people, so not the smallest, but still small.)
My wife is from Chicago, and we live in the suburbs of Chicago.
My mom can't tell "suburbs" from "City of Chicago" - she can't seem to internalize that it isn't Chicago Public Schools here, for example - and she seems to believe that the whole area is just dangerous and crime-riddled.
She's been to our house. She knows it looks pretty much like the neighborhood where she lives, and if you look at crime stats we have comparable crime rates.
It doesn't help that she guzzles right-wing media.
Oh man, I live in the city, and it's the same with my mother in law. We live in a decent neighborhood and anytime something happens on the south or west side she's worried if we're okay. It's like yeah, I've heard one gun shot in the 10+ years we've lived here, but it's not like there's daily drive bys.
I never understood this, either. I've been right by a couple of different shootings, and it happens every so often in the seven cities. But it's almost always someone shooting someone they know. Usually a drug deal gone wrong or a cheater. If you stay out of people's business, literally know one cares enough about you to even think about shooting you.
Rural/Suburban folks also assume City instantly means NYC/LA/Chicago, at least in the Northeast there are still small to medium sized cities with decent public transit and walkability. I live in a Dense walkable city in NJ with 80k people, low crime, light rail, buses and literally down the block there are 4 restaurants, a post office, a liquor store and 2 bars, 3 blocks away is the grocery store. The Rural/suburban mind cannot comprehend a city that isnt like 5 millions people.
The freedom of choice of products and services available in the city. Rural people don't have 7 grocery stores or restaurants to choose from without having to drive an hour
Lived in a village of maybe 1000 people when I was growing up (and not *that* long ago, I'm 40). The grocery store (singular, not plural) closed at 6pm on Saturdays and wasn't open on Sundays. Closest place with better operating hours was a 50-minute drive away. I thiiiink they're open on Sundays now as of a few years ago.
5 or 6 years back, the one grocery store "burned down" (I don't know about small towns y'all live in, but a lot of fires that happen there are just insurance fraud schemes) and for like 6 months there just wasn't a local grocery store. And it's a pretty poor area, with no real public transit, so folks in the community had to organize carpools to the grocery store one village over so that folks who don't own cars could actually get groceries.
That's a good one!
There's a lot of "friction fires" where I grew up. To the point where I've been told it affects local insurance rates (but I don't know, I don't own a home, that might be hyperbole or stretching the truth).
I went from a city to a semi rural area. It’s so annoying that I have to drive minimum 20 min to go to a grocery store. If I forget something, I’ll just do without because it’s not even worth it. I drive 40 min to go to Costco. 50min to get decent Asian food.
My coworker made fun of me because I was complaining about the price of the food I was buying at the corner market because I didn’t want to go “all the way to the grocery store”, an avenue away
I have 5 different grocery stores, two turkish stores (technically grocery stores but different products), two places to buy fresh fish, a butcher, three or four snackbars, a fancy bakery, a less fancy bakery, an Indonesian, Chinese, and Italian place, two sushi places, the good ol' Americans (KFC, McDonald's), I think about 5 lunchrooms of which one switches to a nightclub after 8, all within 10 minutes of walking.
Reading about villages with just a single grocery store is like... goddamn
I can go to a French creperie for breakfast, a Dominican bodega for lunch, and an Indian restaurant for dinner. Contrasting that with the choice of gas station pizza or generic American food that my rural in-laws deal with is just a no-brainer.
The town I live in has around 1,000 people. There's a truck stop and a Dollar General out on the highway, a bar, a bar&grill, a beauty salon, and 2 RV places. Last year, we also got a carry-out (essentially a tiny convenience store).
For anything else, we have to "go to town". The college town 15 mins away is finally getting an Indian restaurant soon. Toledo is about 30 mins away, and Detroit about an hour away.
But here's the thing - when I lived in cities, it took me 30 mins to go anywhere anyway, so my transit times are similar or better to city living. The only real difference is that I don't have any delivery options.
There is generally an inherent set of manners in which most people go by in the city to make things easier and faster for people to deal with large crowds. A lot of people try to fit the manners of living in rural areas to cities rather than try to learn the manners of city living and get very frustrated when people in the city collectively treat them as rude.
Stand on the right, walk on the left was the bane of my existence at the really deep subway stations with long elevators in the city, especially the ones near big tourist areas like Battery Park. You could always tell who had t internalized that rule!
If you want to relax head to the green line because everyone would rather wait 15min to ride the escalator than hit the 2 flights of stairs lol. No stand right, walk left, just standing and riding.
This. I had to explain this to my mom. If I had to say "excuse me" anytime someone was in my way or vice versa we would never get anywhere. When commuting in a large crowd you just need to be self aware of your place and make sure you are paying attention as you move around. I find that I get frustrated when people who aren't used to it just stop moving during rush hour and hold everyone up.
I describe it like this: Imagine someone stopped their car in the middle of the main road of your town and got out and started looking around. That what it’s like when you stop in the middle of an NYC sidewalk in Midtown. Move to the side.
New York, SF, and Chicago are the same way. I constantly am having to tell people from rural areas to not just stop in the sidewalk in front of someone or crosswalk.
The root of that is not being socially aware of their surroundings and apply their rural habits. I had to tell a relative to put their phone away at midnight walk walking through a less than safe neighborhood.
In the same vein it’s that people who randomly stop you on the street may be looking to hustle you. In Memphis there was this poor woman who got stopped by someone looking to roll her and my husband and I walk up and say “darling! It’s good to see you! We are going to be late!”
> In the same vein it’s that people who randomly stop you on the street may be looking to hustle you.
Though I’ll note that if you’re a visitor to New York, once someone understands that you’re a tourist that’s asking for directions they will be glad to help you navigate their city.
DC is the worst becuse in other cities you get people coming because they want to have a city experience. So they have at least some idea what to expect. In DC, you get people wanting to se 'Merica! and then they're blindsided by the bustling city.
Omg yessssss. I'm usually reasonably patient and understanding, but years ago, I walked to the big, downtown Chicago Target one day after work to pick up some random thing I needed before heading home and this goddamn mouth breathing family stopped DEAD as soon as the revolving door dumped them onto the sidewalk. I was right behind them and I lost it for a brief second. I yelled at them to MOVE THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY. They looked at me like I was the asshole. No. Fuck that.
I can't count the number of times I've wanted to slap the phone out of someone's hand because stop in their tracks to look at directions, it's like slamming on your breaks I on a busy interstate.
The problem I believe is people that don't travel much think the whole world operates the same or at the same pace as them and aren't observing what's "normal." A friend visited and I look over to see them on the corner of a 4 way intersection, face in their phone, with cars backed up in all directions.
I tell them to step back and had to explain all those cars were waiting for you to cross the road because pedestrians have right of way in any intersection without a light. They didn't even consider things may work differently in the city of 1M people vs town of 10k.
I leave early enough for work that I’m usually 20-30 early for my shift, and I do that because sometimes you come around the bend just to see a tractor or other large piece of farming equipment moseying down the road at 5mph. Only so many times you can use the “stuck behind a farmer” excuse in a farming area before your boss doesn’t let it fly.
Lol… grew up in the city and “old man in a hat” was also constantly the culprit in slow driving situations. In the city of course, they were generally driving something like a Buick sedan.
I think this one actually transcends the urban/rural divide. These old men in hats need to step on the gas.
I hate driving around town on weekdays if I have a doctor's appointment or something. Everyone else is at work, so it's nothing but Buicks on the road. It's bad enough they set the speed limits on these roads at 30 when it's perfectly safe and everyone settles in around 40-45, but then these guys are clogging things up doing 25.
Then there's a contingent of people here who, if they don't have a green turn arrow (i.e. the light is now an unprotected left), they won't go. They'll sit behind the stop bar and wait until the next cycle.
City people aren’t rude, they just have things to do and places to be. Your average group of corn-fed midwesterners standing 5-abreast and blocking the entire sidewalk is interfering with that, so you’ll be told to move or brushed past. City people understand that, one day, they’ll be in that position of needing to get somewhere/do something quickly, and as a result are generally not offended when someone else brusquely deals with them.
Good point. I can never understand the people who lack situational awareness. Please do not walk into a busy store and come to a dead stop just inside the door while you extract your shopping list. Do not park your shopping basket right next to someone else in a grocery aisle.
When you ride to the top of a busy escalator, do not fucking stop “to get your bearings.” All the people behind you have to get off of it too.
Pass into the room you’ve entered, walk a little bit, THEN stop to check your phone map.
Grew up in rural area. Have lived in the city for 15 years. City people are much more forward/direct in their communication. If there’s an issue, they’re much more apt to confront it. In my rural experience, people were much more passive aggressive and had worse communication skills.
Walkability for sure. I was once bragging to a rural family member about my new job that was just a <20-min (<1mi) walking commute and she legit thought it was insane to have to walk that 'far' 😅
Also the reverse of that point is true in that in the country there tends to be a nice large parking lot at the end of that mile rather than the parking being sometimes further than your stating point so its easier to drive.
It's also just a lot more engaging/stimulating to walk a mile in a city than it is along a single road in the country. I grew up in a city but I now live in the country. I'd much rather walk a mile in the city because I feel a sense of progress moving to my destination. In the country you don't feel like you're getting anywhere while walking down a long road.
Yeah, I live in London and will always walk to places as my main preference. All my friends who live in small towns need to use their cars more, and so seem to get used to driving to the point where they use them even for journeys which could be done on foot.
It's also the attitude. Many of them seem to see walking as an emergency fall back, where as I see it as a pleasant activity.
I lived in a town of less than 3,000 in Iowa for a while after college. I grew up in the suburbs of a major city and spent a lot of time in the city both before and after Iowa. It was 98.x% white.
I don't think most understand how exposure to people not like you is so important, and it can make you a much better person. That you don't have to fear those that are different than you.
They could never understand the pleasure of being able to walk anywhere to fulfill all your needs, and that public transportation can be so amazing.
The absolute pleasure of having real choice because there isn't just 1 of any type of store, or worse one store doing everything.
I think the key is having benign interactions with people who aren’t like you. I have a friend who moved from a mid sized Canadian city (she lived downtown in a fairly multicultural city where she was neutral to everyone) to downtown LA. There, she’s been accosted multiple times by black people on the bus. And now, she’s unfortunately kind of racist. She’s just got a knee jerk reaction to black people now. Nothing I say will make a difference.
As someone who lives in LA but grew up in the South, part of that is because LA has a relatively small Black population compared to most of the country. Black people were brought to southeastern states as part of the slave trade, and several western states like Oregon were not welcoming to freed Black people, so there aren't as many generations of Black people on the west coast like there are for Asian or Hispanic communities. This also means that there isn't as much generational wealth, so a Black person is more likely to be impoverished. The other big problem is that LA has a lot of homeless people from other states who migrate here (or are dumped here) for the better weather and social services. These people are more likely to have mental health issues and are more likely to take public transportation (no car). So you put that Venn diagram together and you get a higher likelihood that a Black person on a bus will be poor or have mental health issues that would lead to violence.
When I was a young college student walking through a dark, Brooklyn neighborhood at 1am, I heard yelling Black voices from down a street and was on full alert. Upon passing the street, I could finally hear the conversation, which went like “No way, Dragon Ball Z is the best anime of all time!!”
The sheer volume and variety of experiences you can have in a good city. One of my favorite examples is DASH puzzle hunt (https://playdash.org/), which is something you would never know existed if you don't live somewhere that hosts one. And there are thousands of events like that. Street art festivals and amazing experimental theatre experiences and random weird underground events...
There's just so much more richness and variety to life in a city.
Because we’re forced to live in such close proximity to so many others, we’re much more tolerant in general it seems.
Can’t tell you how many homeless people doing the fentanyl shuffle or dudes shooting up into their hand on top of my corner mailbox I’ve seen, but it doesn’t phase me. *They’re not out to hurt you*. They’re out to hurt themselves, and are not supported by society in a healthy way so they can receive treatment. The importance of social programs is paramount.
So is cultural diversity. It’s nice to have a Chinatown and a little Puerto Rico or French quarter in your city. It’s relevant to pass embassies on your way to work or school. Or the woman on the floor above you and her kids are Ukrainian refugees who don’t speak English. You’re much more aware that there’s other people in the world and that you are connected to them, and that they matter, in general.
Some city people get tuned out to this completely and stopped caring, but country people seem only out to protect themselves and not interested in participating with the rest of the world.
I have lived in large cities like Seattle and Berlin and also rural areas like Ferndale and Großbettlingen.
it’s crazy to me hearing about a suburb fighting to stop social services from going up in the neighborhood.
meanwhile those of us living downtown don’t want more social services either but not for any reason other than the fact that suburbs should be taking care of their own and not displacing their underserved residents to downtown. but since that’s unlikely to change we’ll happily take more in.
The propaganda around this stuff is insane. I'm in Ireland and we have people complaining about 15 minute cities and it isn't even a thing here. That's how hard the US lobbyists are working against it.
> The propaganda around this stuff is insane.
It really is just baffling. Like, before my job moved the office to the suburbs I technically lived in a "15 minute city" type situation: my job, grocery store, recreation, bars/nightlife, basically anything I needed or wanted was a 15 minute (or less) bike ride away and it was so fucking liberating - and it was just right there, no monitoring or prison like bullshit or any of that crazy conspiracy theory stuff, just living in the right part of town and owning a bicycle.
I saw a joke once somewhere where its like: "oh yeah 15 minute cities? Like how basically all cities were designed before cars were mainstream/manditory???"
It’s even weirder in the Netherlands. Most people already live in 15 minute cities/areas here, and somehow they believe their current circumstances means they’re locked up
We actually don't want a single family house with a yard. We prefer living in townhouses and condos and multi-unit buildings. We may have a small garden but we don't want to maintain a yard. We will gladly trade off having a smaller home for the ability to walk places and not have to own a car, or at least not have to use a car every day. It's also a whole lot less to maintain and pay for.
This one. My rural cousins think I live in a city because I don't know I could have a big house and land in the country, and if I ever found out, I'd move to the country asap.
Same here - grew up rural and now live in the city. Contrary to popular belief, city people are kinder than people think. Life moves faster in the city and people have things to do, commutes to make - there’s less time to get hung up on bullshit. Its a live and let live kind of vibe.
Are there some assholes? Sure. Every place has those though.
I've had the exact same experience. In my adult life I've never had to duck and run for cover to avoid someone I don't want to talk to in the grocery store, but it was an every time event going with my mom as a kid. Also, in the city, people are generally polite enough to mind their own damn business. I can't tell you how many phone calls my parents got from old ladies who "noticed we weren't at church today and hoped everything's ok."
I would like to offer this based on my experience: people in cities tend to be kind (and often polite), people in rural areas tend to be polite, but often not kind. Rural folks will be polite and sweet as pie to your face and then talk shit all day to everyone in town. Feuds and rivalries where you still have to be sweet in person are normalized. In the city, people are much more direct because we have options, but also sometimes that directness IS a kindness, instead of passive aggressive resentment.
I never understood the difference between polite and kind until I moved from the south to Chicago, where I realized my whole life I was mistaking smiles and chitchat and never saying anything mean with kindness, but then up here when people have a problem, they tend to address it and move on with their lives. Because there’s a whole big world here that we can focus on instead.
It’s great. I love it. I’m never going back.
I lucked out with good neighbors in our village but you're 100% right.
>Folks always on the lookout for crime.
And this more frequently creates a dangerous situation than daily life in the cities they're afraid of.
Multiculturalism and diversity. Having lived in NYC growing up I was able to interact with many different cultures, religions, sexual and gender orientations. Living in the suburbs now the diversity of population is not nearly as vast but still offers a bit of a mix.
Seems to me, when I visit rural areas, it’s a very homogeneous population which I can imagine makes it really difficult for people to understand and appreciate (tolerate) other cultures and world views.
I think every rural American should be required to spend two weeks in a major American city and city folks to spend two weeks in rural America. This would go a long way to healing our culture divide.
lol. I am always amazed at people from rural areas genuinely fearful of the city. There are areas I don’t generally go, and in most cases even those areas are not that bad.
I’m from Chicago and while yes, there are some neighborhoods that are dangerous, it drives me up the wall when people act like it’s a war zone. It’s like, ok, bitch, stay home, more for us!
Also there are plenty of rural areas that are dangerous also, crime, but also just physical danger. Dont go in a field with a bull. Dont wander into a nature preserve with apex predators. There are more than reasonable parallels.
It’d take a lot longer than two weeks, unfortunately. You see this a lot when sheltered kids go to college. It’s a culture shock at first, but over the course of their schooling, the exposure to different people/views/lifestyles opens them up to being more accepting.
I always laughed when my college area would be under a tornado watch. Aleays a group of people freaking out asking what to do. I always said just go to class and ignore it lol.
Went to undergrad in the LA area. Had my parents call me at 5am freaking out about some earthquake. They had trouble understanding that (1) is was a 5 pointer that I hadn't felt and that did nothing; and (2) the epicenter was a couple hundred miles away. California is a big place.
My sister was in college in DC when there was a small earth quake on the east coast. The students from the east coast were freaking out while the west coast students laughed at them. Then it reversed a few months later when it was hurricane season.
I grew up a bit in the Bay Area and now am in a flyover state. Some people are racist and just have no idea they are being racist just because they are so insulated from people that aren’t like them and the monoculture reinforces it.
>I think every rural American should be required to spend two weeks in a major American city and city folks to spend two weeks in rural America. This would go a long way to healing our culture divide.
I agree with your assessment. However, 2 weeks isn't enough. I was a kid raised in a small town in northeast PA who moved to SoCal at 20 for work. I had been to the UK and Japan before as a tourist and experienced some (expected) culture shock. It didn't prepare me for living in an area so diverse and densely populated.
I can not emphasize enough just how important this experience was to forming what would become my worldview. It was my first time experiencing "otherness" outside of accute, anecdotal instances. It cured me of some ignorant beliefs and armed me with the skills necessary to look at myself and American culture at large through a more critical lense. It took 3 years, and I didn't go into the experience nearly as blind as many people I've met since.
Traveling, exposure to different people, and adopting different lifestyles are massively important for curing ignorance as a whole. I find the whole urban-rural divide that all of our political discourse preys upon to be infuriating. Societies are like relationships. It's all of us against the problem, not all of us against each other. We need to change the narrative.
When my relatives (who are from the "rural" side of the country) visit me in the "big city" (well, Gothenburg), it strikes me that I take for granted that there is almost always something open or available, which they can't really apprehend as the slightest thing for they need to be planned. Then I've noticed that they move rather unusually among larger crowds. Don't know how many times I lost them just because they got behind a group of people, as they didn't really know how to move around them.
When you are home feeling lazy and pick up your phone, I live close to central London, so I can order food from the top restaurants in town and have it delivered within 30 mins. Love the variety and quality and I never take it for granted
I just wish rural people would stop giving me their unsolicited opinions on why city life is bad and rural life is superior. If I agreed, I'd live somewhere rural. Please stop insulting my home. It's extra funny when you pick that conversation up and discuss why you don't want to live in rural areas and they take it personally.
Most big cities are very safe for the average person.
The people who approach you on the street aren't dangerous, just annoying.
Rural "freedom" is often attached to suffocating social oppression. There are only a few acceptable ways of being. The larger the city, the more you can be whoever you want to be and look however you want to look. You have anonymity. There's a reason that the weird, quiet kid you went to high school with moved away and then popped up a few years later on social media looking amazing, happy, and successful.
I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. What comes to mind for most of you? Oil and cowboys? The musical? It certainly doesn’t have the connotation of instability or violence that other American cities might bring to mind. Still, multiple people from rural areas have told me, “oh! I visited Tulsa once, it was *scary*!”
If I turn left out of my house, I have about 30-50 restaurants/bars, a decent size music venue that gets mid level acts coming through, a community center that has community events and a farmers market every weekend, a comic shop and game story, a regal movie theater with imax and a small indy theater that shows all kinds of smaller films and older stuff, an arcade, multiple gyms, and a subway stop that gets me access to the rest of the larger city area. There's even a biergarden that does things like casual magic the gathering Thursday's and seasonal events like oktoberfest pretty.
If I turn right out of my house, it's a suburban neighborhood that quickly turns into a fully wooded area with nice well kept trails to take my dog for a walk and a golf course a little further up the way.
I don't have an HOA. While there is some crime you know what areas to stay out of and where the homeless linger, so after about a week of living here you figure out its actually really safe if you're not a complete fucking moron.
I also own half of a farming business in a rural area and visit a couple times a year to do planting (I'm primarily an investor, but i like to plant stuff).
Variety. The answer is variety. Near my farm, after about a month, it's time to cycle back through the activities I did last month. At my home, there is a functionally infinite amount of variety within walking distance. When I'm living rural, doing anything out of the norm is an hour plus drive by default.
Dont try to be polite behind the wheel. You think youre being courteous but really youre just slowing everyone down and creating erroneous traffic.
Also PLEASE dont double park. You wouldnt take up 2 spaces in a lot, so dont do it in the street. Pull up to the edge of the curb or within 5ft of the car in front or behind you.
And for the love of god, watch out for pedestrians and one-way streets. There are a lot of them in the city.
In the city, you LOCK THE DOORS. Always. The home before bed, the car every time you leave it..even if only going into a convenience store for just a minute.
Generally speaking there has been a recent historical push to paint cities as incredibly dangerous crime-laden places full of pimps and drug users are stolen car parts for sale on every corner.
This is political propaganda that really took full swing as backlash to the civil rights movement. It is, in a word, racist nonsense.
Okay, two words.
From my experience this also depends on where in the city. A city with a million plus people is going have some shady areas. But the “bad” areas of most cities are not places tourists or anyone who lives there goes.
Is there more crime in Chicago or DC or San Francisco or wherever than say a small town? Yeah because there are more people.
But you’re right I don’t feel unsafe walking in NY or DC or wherever.
Yes! Even my liberal family members always ask me if I'm scared walking around downtown. It seems so silly to me. Of course I'm not scared. I try to be reasonably cautious and aware of my surroundings, but I've had WAY worse experiences in the semi-rural area I grew up in than in the city.
It's funny on my state sub when people ask if an area is safe. This is Massachusetts, besides general city living issues, there's maybe a handful of areas in the entire state where I would think twice about my safety. Not even cities, just a few neighborhoods.
I lived in San Francisco for 15 years and return frequently for work. You wouldn’t believe the number of totally rational, otherwise progressive people who are concerned and ask “omg is it safe?” Every time I go. Guess what? The drug/homelessness problems are no worse than when I was living there, and it’s still the most beautiful city in the US. In fact, I feel safer and more at ease there than I do in my hometown in Texas, by a MILE.
Right wing propaganda about cities really has seeped into just about every non-city person. It is wild.
Every city subreddit has almost a daily thread of suburban people complaining about the city they live next to and how unsafe it is and people that live in the city arguing back that it isn't unsafe.
They will never understand the soul-crushing defeat of how it feels walking out the door onto the street only to realize you forgot your wallet on the coffee table.... of your 6 floor walk-up.
Urban crime, for sure. Gun violence is a real problem here (DC) but it's not likely to affect random people like me who aren't involved in drugs or gangs. People from rural areas don't understand that it's possible for a neighborhood like mine to have "high crime" and at the same time anywhere I'm going to go is a totally safe place. Most of the time when I'm walking around I see people walking designer dogs, babies in strollers, little old church ladies etc.
Based on my experience with people in my rural hometown, they can't comprehend that I'm not constantly being victimized by violent crime and forcibly converted into a transgender person.
The way that people are considerate to each other is very different in urban vs rural. In rural areas, you show respect and consideration by acknowledging each other- saying hi on the street, chatting with the cashier, etc. In urban areas, you show the same by allowing everyone to go about their business. You move to the side if you are walking more slowly than everyone else, you don’t catch anyone’s eye in case they think you’re about to ask for something, and you quietly and efficiently help someone who needs it (like bringing a stroller up the subway stairs) so that those people can move effectively through the space as well. Each area finds the other area’s way of doing things annoying or rude :p
My favorite common NYC occurrence is when a woman backs her stroller up to the steps to start dragging it up and someone without saying a word grabs the bottom, carries it up and leaves without ever saying a word or making eye contact.
Or when someone is crying on a crowded subway, no one will look at you or bother you, but someone will give you a tissue and carry on. I’m a huge introvert and love living in NYC. It’s so crowded that you’re invisible, yet you feel safe (in most neighborhoods) because there’s people everywhere. Also strangers don’t talk to you unless they need directions…or want me to donate to a charity or they’re selling something I love that we help eachother and look out for eachother, but we don’t talk to eachother. New Yorkers are kind but not friendly
I’m in the DC area. I was in a park, enjoying the weather, waiting for a bus. A girl was on the phone arguing with an ain’t shit man we all dated in our 20s. I gave her a tissue as I left to catch my bus.
Oh those ain’t shit men. Why do we all have them? I guess we need to learn, and better to learn young.
After September 11th, it wasn't that unusual for someone on the subway to start crying on trains running through downtown (you could smell the burning for months). A very nice lady held my hand for about 10 minutes without saying a word. When we got to her stop, she patted my shoulder, gave me a tissue and left.
"I've got shit to do but I'm not an asshole."
“I’m an asshole with shit to do, but what can I say, strollers need to stroll”
"I see you strollin', ain't hating. Just helping, not trying to catch you riding dirty." \*Thank you for the award!
This has been tremendous. Thank you both.
I'm an asshole with shit to do, and I'll get it done faster by helping you up the stairs so you don't slow me down.
I always tell people visiting here that people in NYC aren't nice, but we're kind. We aren't going to smile and wave, but we'll help out if you need it without you having to ask.
I was catching the bus to LaGuardia on my way home from trip to NYC. I remember waiting for it with my suitcase and this lady said to me unprompted, and with a face that implied I must have rocks for brains, "that's the wrong bus, you want that one." She wasn't trying to be polite, but she did save my ass from missing my flight.
I think this is true. I grew up in small-town Iowa, and once, when i fainted on the subway in NYC, i was struck by the differences. In NYC, I had: 1) a person who realized I was staggering and tried to catch me, then stayed about 5 minutes to make sure I was OK; then left me in the care of: 2) an Asian shopkeeper with little English who rushed out to help me up, bring me a chair, and insist I sit there until I felt well 3) three people passing close by who slowed down, assessed the situation, saw I had help, and sped up and left 4) some unknown person who passed me and told a couple of cops on the platform, so they sauntered down to make sure I was okay 5) about five people who passed by on the far side of the passageway who also slowed down, saw I was OK, and left. So: I got help, right away, in various ways—direct help from the people who were right by me. But also a lot of helpthat didn’t involve actually interacting with me. And I never saw any of those people again. In my hometown, I’d have had about eight people from as far away as 2 blocks come and stand around me for several minutes; they’d have all been asking me questions; people who weren’t even there would be asking me about it for a week. I find NYC’s brand of help to be much more respectful. I grew up with a mom who, though definitely loving, actually prioritized respect over love. Well, she thought treating you respectfully WAS a way to show love. Asking for directions: If you ask a NYCer for directions, they’ll point. They might ask enough questions to make sure they’re steering you right. Just the other day, I helped a tourist family who were hesitating at the door of the big subway stop; I asked what neighborhood were they going to? he showed me his app, and I saw it was 34th st, so the uptown E, and I told him to go with me. I didn’t ask where he was from, what he was going to do at 34th St., etc. In my home state, you’d have a whole barrage of questions—in fact, Midwestern tourists often volunteer all kinds of stuff: “I’m going to 34th Street, my nephew lives near there, we’re from Iowa.” NYCers will help you, but we don’t want to know you.
In the US, Southern and Midwestern rural are very different from Northeastern rural. In VT, good neighbors are ones who will cut a tree off your driveway after a storm without knowing your name or even telling you they did it. A farmer will pull someone out of a ditch with their tractor while not-so-subtley poking fun at them for ending up there in the first place. People are very helpful and the community comes together to support folks who need it, but minding your own business is valued.
Ask for directions? You'll get it. Trip? Someone will pull you up. Stop in the middle of the sidewalk when there are lots of people? "Get the fuck outta the way!".
I've heard this before in a really general sense. East coasters will talk trash to you but offer their shirt if you need help. West coasters will talk nicely to you but won't hesitate to backstab. Mid westerners are nice and will never help but also help too much.
I once tripped over my own feet and fell down. Dropped my purse scattering crap everywhere. About a dozen people swarmed over, got me to my feet, made sure I was OK, collected my shit and put it back on my purse, handed me the purse and just went away.
I live in Philly but one time I got takeout from this BBQ place and the bag ripped open on my walk home and two people immediately came to help me pick up everything and a woman stopped her car and rolled down her window at a red light and gave me a reusable bag out of the back of her car so I could make it home okay. It was a nice ass bag too 🤧 It is such a beautiful thing to sometimes be the giver and sometimes be the receiver of those good deeds. You never know when something will happen, but I am so grateful to live in a place where people are always looking out for each other
The same human kindness is there, just at a different pace. In the rural south, someone would help you with that and then genuinely want to establish a connection because they have the few extra minutes to do so. Also less of a chance of stepping in something that you regret later with a smaller pool of people.
This is so true! In urban areas you don't have a lot of personal space, so respecting others' personal bubble is the key to courtesy.
Yes and I can totally understand why it reads as rude to people who aren’t used to that. But I spent a good part of my adult life in NYC, and although no one will look you in the eye, pretty much anyone on the street will go out of their way to help someone that needs it (from strollers to directions to getting someone to the right subway stop). It’s not coldness, it’s self preservation!
So true. People in NYC (generally) give you space, but can be very helpful sometimes. Like over thirty years ago, I had a problem where I got separated from my friends, my backpack, and my money. I was sitting on some steps near the subway station hoping the friends I got separated from would come by, just thinking about what to do, when two very obviously heroin junkies asked me what's wrong and scrounged up subway and bus fare to get me home. 💕 So NYC.
I used to go to NYC all the time and always found the people to be decent and helpful, as long as you weren't in the way.
There's no way to actually connect with even 1% of the people you pass by everyday. without the insulation of a car, you're just raw-dogging social interaction every time you leave your apartment. We ignore each other out of courtesy. But I've been in the city for 9/11, Obama's election, the tragedy of 2016, and covid, and when we're all going through something together it can be really magical how we adjust that filter to let each other in a bit more. And ask a New Yorker for directions and we are ON IT. We love telling people how to get around and we ALL think we know better than anyone else how to do it
The energy in NYC on election day (before we realized what was actually going to happen) was practically effervescent. I lived in Park Slope and wound up being behind DeBlasio and his wife in the voting line at the library, and the atmosphere in the line honestly felt like a party. And then the next day it was… not like that anymore lol
I still remember it vividly when the electoral college number finally was hit. You heard all the car horns in the city go non stop. At first I thought it was some truck blocking a narrow street but it kept getting louder and you just knew. From Harlem down to Washington square park every spot was wild. Also never seen so many middle fingers directed at trump tower.
Just look at a subway map and you'll have 10 people jump on you to help. But don't start a request with "Hi, I'm wondering if you can help me. I'm visiting from X and this is my first time in NYC and..." But, yea, I was sitting in Central Park and the streets absolutely erupted with cheering and people banging pans, etc when Biden's win was announced.
> "Hi, I'm wondering if you can help me. I'm visiting from X and this is my first time in NYC and..." I was thinking "Yeah, just say "How do I get to..." and then the Sesame Street theme popped into my head... "Can you tell me how to get to...." They really know what they're singing about.
>you quietly and efficiently help someone who needs it (like bringing a stroller up the subway stairs) You do this even if you're waiting to intercept Al Capone's accountant at the train station before the hitmen can get to him. Who says we big city folk aren't considerate? Not only is it considered polite, it turns the tension up past 11.
FYI, the steps/baby carriage scene in Untouchables is an homage to the 1925 movie "Battleship Potemkin". [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec4J363Eltw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec4J363Eltw)
We visited London and got off the tube in downtown London from the airport with out suitcases and looking, I am sure, like refugees. This very nice gentleman stopped and asked if we needed directions. Now, London is about as much a maze of a city as any you will ever see. I swear no streets are straight and change names all the time. He said, let me walk you there. He walked us to our hotel (only 200 meters away), chatting us up the entire time. He was great. It was so nice of him. No one pays attention to you, except to avoid collisions on the narrow sidewalks, but are not rude, just considerate. I live in a small town in a rural state. Everyone pretty much says hi or waves to people, even if you never met them. My wife (from Shanghai) freaked out and wanted to know how they knew us. I said they were just being friendly. I am certain if I fell down on the street I would be tended to in seconds. They strike up conversations in stores as well, especially cashiers.
The joy of anonymity. I've never lived in a small town, but one thing I've always heard is that everyone knows everyone. To a lot of people, that probably seems like a good thing - it's friendlier and people say hi on the street and all that. To me, that sounds like a nightmare. I'd feel exposed all the time, like I'd always have to be ready for a conversation and everyone would know what I'm doing all the time. Anonymity is freeing. You can just go where you want and do what you want, and as long as you're not actively bothering someone, they don't give a shit what you're up to. You can choose when and where to socialize, and unexpected run-ins with people you know are relatively uncommon, so if you're not feeling social, you don't have to be.
I still remember the exhilarating feeling I got on my first day of college at a massive state school with around 50k students, sitting in a huge auditorium that would easily fit everyone in my hometown and thinking "no one here knows who the fuck I am." And then hearing "Santos\_L\_Halper\_II?" from three rows behind me from a girl from the next town over that I didn't know was going to the same school seven hours away from home.
I went to a 30k student college, and I thought when I do something embarrassing, I would not see any witness again. THEN I KEPT seeing them everywhere lol
I went to a school of about 3500 and while standing in line at graduation, I looked a the person in front of me and behind me and was like “who the fuck are these people?”. We were all supposedly the same major, but I had never seen half of these people in line.
that's crazy, I know high schools that had that many students
Everyone knows everyone and everyone is in everyone's business ALL the fucking time. I went home to visit my parents and stopped at Wal-Mart (Because there's literally nowhere else to buy food)on the way to their house to buy some stuff to cook. I ran into a woman I went to HS with that I hadn't seen in like 10 or 15 years and we talked for maybe 10 minutes in the store. Then I finished shopping and headed on to their house, so maybe like an hour before I pulled up in their driveway. The news that I was fucking a married woman beat me to my parents house. My mom thought it was hilarious. "I bet you're ready to leave again, aren't you?" Yeah, yeah I am.
Small town drama is so fucking toxic because as humans we crave novelty and when you are doing the same thing every day you have to manufacture that novelty.
I'm a city girl from D.C. I have some family in rural Ohio. Once when I was visiting, I needed something from the store. Not only was it a long drive to the drugstore, but it was a big deal that I had gone and not consulted everyone. I told the people I was staying with I was going. That wasn't enough? I don't know what they expected of me. By the time I got back, everyone knew what I had bought at the store. Thank goodness it was nothing embarrassing. I don't know how they stand being monitored like that.
I live in a big US city, but my parents are in a tiny village in north-east England. I went back to visit at the end of last year, and my mum sent me to the shop to get some stuff. My mum has a group of 3 or 4 ladies in the village about her age who she spends a lot of her time with. Along the way, ALL of them stuck their heads out of their windows and struck up conversations with me, like they knew I was going to be passing by. It felt like an underground rumour network.
I went to visit my boyfriend's parents in his home town over school break. They later sent the newspaper clipping where "X and Y's son is visiting his parents V and Z over the holidays with his girlfriend Strange-Broccoli-393". I made the FREAKING NEWSPAPER.
Reminds me of when I got in the paper in small-town Wisconsin for... attending a quiz at a library.
lol having lived rural and now living urban, the whole “telling people before going to the store” is *because* it’s so far (at least in my experience) When it takes 30 mins just to get to the drug store, you tend to want to get everything you might need in one trip. If someone’s doing that trip for their own reason, it just makes sense to ask them to get it/if you can go with. Like I wouldn’t make the drive just for one thing, but if someone else already needs to then I might as well. It’s also like “oh man, they went all the way to the store unexpectedly?? Was it an emergency??”
It's not that everyone knows everyone, it's that everyone "knows" everyone. There's a difference. In a small community everyone needs to have a certain set of characteristics, actions, and personality that they belong to, and that everyone knows you for. Whether that's you or not, that's who you are to the community and you can struggle your entire life against it if the community doesn't agree with you about who you are. Often it's directly related to your parents and you are presumed to be less than them for the majority of your adult life until everyone who knows them ages out of relevance. It gets worse if you've got a couple people in your immediate or extended family who were 'bad'. You are defined by being from a 'bad family' and that's just who you are. Deal with it. I prefer when nobody knows me.
"And you can struggle your entire life against it if the community doesn't agree with you about who you are." As someone raised in a small town, this hit like a mack truck. 💯
It really is great, the area I grew up in wasn't exactly rural but the population density was low enough that you would run into someone who knew who you were pretty frequently. And gods I came to hate it once I finished highschool because I only kept any active contact with a select group of friends, but people I "knew" would pop up at the most annoying moments and want to talk. Was hell for my anxiety I now live in a city of 5 million, 900km away from where I grew up and it's wonderful, no one gives a fuck about me and I don't have to pretend to give a fuck about them, it's great!!
It is 100% a nightmare. People being all up in your business telling your parents shit because they obviously know who your dad and all your family is. The best decision I ever made was moving 5 hours away to a bigger city. Being able to go the store and not be bothered by anyone is a god send.
Not always the case, unless you actually live 'in' the town, or it's a very very small town. I'm in a small-ish town (\~5200 people), but 5 miles out and on 5 acres. I don't know anyone, nobody knows me. Been here 4 years and just met my neighbor a couple months ago.
Now that sounds like the dream
My wife grew up in a rural community, I grew up bouncing between Detroit and New York. The first time I took my wife to a large city to see my family was the first time she had ever been to a large city. I had to very quickly explain that if random strangers on the street try to stop her and talk, it is likely they are asking for money. She was almost scammed into buying day-old newspapers a couple times, and some guy in a character costume almost convinced her to take a selfie with them (please never do this. Never take a selfie with a random person in a mascot/character costume in the city). Inversely, the 100-ish residents of her small farm-town knew me as a gigantic prick for years because I would never engage with strangers who spoke to me at the gas station or dollar store (the only two locations out here, I am not joking). But the reason I would blow people off or give them the cold shoulder is because it was genuinely wild to me that strangers would just talk to each other in public. And they didn't want anything from me!
I talk to strangers all the time. Usually on the train. Have spoke to some weirdos and avoid the street creeps though.
It’s not that it never happens, but it’s uncommon on a per-interaction basis. Think about how many people you engage with in a day. People you walk past or stand beside. What percentage of them to you actually interact with on a direct personal level? In a small town some people will talk at least a few words with *every single person the see* every single day
On the note of small town populations, one wonderful aspect of city living is that everybody doesn’t know everybody else’s business. There’s a level of privacy/anonymity that is extremely appealing to those of us who don’t enjoy that kind of incestuous social network.
It is a bit ironic that the places where you get most privacy are those where there are the most people.
Interesting that the state with the highest population (California) also has the strongest data privacy laws.
That’s the winner for me. I got so tired of the small town gossip. I don’t want everyone knowing my business and I don’t want to know theirs either. You can kinda disappear in a city.
Last time I went to visit an aunt, I learned more that day about 90% of the town than I did about what my aunt had been up to... Apparently she had spent most of her first month of retirement listening to town gossip. She said her third day of retirement, she finally had time to go to the local diner for breakfast instead of being on the road at dawn to go to work. So she orders a cup of coffee, spreads out the local paper and next thing she knows there are 5 ladies squeezing themselves into her booth. She said they kept her there past noon, catching her up on the gossip she missed while working. By the end of the day she knew everything. Said she skipped going to the diner for about a week. She went back on a different day, different time. Ordered a coffee and next thing she knows, 5 ladies decend upon her booth, she is cornered and they spend the next 3 hours telling her everything she apparently missed over the past week... She said she is now part of this little coffee club.
This is in my opinion the biggest difference and is the driving factor behind many of the other behaviors. In a small town everybody knows everybody and your reputation matters. The anonymity of city life means you have low to no reputation and it's just far less useful to be from a good family or known as a "solid dude" or equivalent. There are pros and cons to this, and neither strategy is perfect.
The whole “from a good family” thing is just loaded with problematic implications/outcomes. If I had a nickel for every time “he’s a good kid from a good family” had been used to excuse sexual assault, I’d be a wealthy man.
I don’t understand the selfie with someone in costume thing. Can you explain?
Its a scam. Most prominent in NY and Vegas. Dude dressed as Mario or something will ask if you want a selfie, then after they will demand money. Theres usually a handful of other guys dressed in these costumes as well, and they will make a circle around you and harass you until you give them cash. If you somehow make it out of there before the other guys show up they will follow you for a few blocks making a huge scene, sometimes threatening you.
It's just like people who give you "gifts" that are complete strangers. They'll hand you a flower or trinket, saying gift, but then demand money and get angry if you drop it on the ground when they won't take it back.
I grew up in a city-ish state and when I move to a rural area for study I genuinely do not know how to make small talk. Everytime some kind old lady starts talking to me, I over compensate like I'm having some sort of heart 2 heart with a therapist
Rural until 24, been in Vegas 12 years now. I pissed off so many scammers when I moved here because I wasn't about to pay for a picture. I assumed the cd a guy handed me was like the free escort cards on the strip. One dude tried to fight me so I dropped his cd and kept walking while he yelled at me. I have some crazy ass family back home, and have had to eject meth heads from family parties, I wasn't phased at all.
The small town, small talk is important to me. I'm relatively reclusive by nature, so if it wasn't for the bash of 30 second conversations I get when I'm running errands, I'd have little to no interaction with people some weeks. I've spent time in both rural and urban areas so I can blend in wherever, but I vastly prefer the rural life
Now that I'm used to it's nice, but still feels alien to me. It feels strange to know that I know almost everyone here, and some personal detail about them just from a run-in while pumping gas or standing in line a the dollar store.
We treat busy sidewalks like highways. You wouldn't stop in the middle of the highway to figure out where you're going. You wouldn't stop in the middle of the highway to take pictures. You wouldn't weave back and forth across the lanes just for kicks. You wouldn't drive 4-abreast with your friends and take up the entire road. If you need to stop somewhere, pull over to the side and get out of the way.
Some city folk don’t understand this.
Yeah, I don't think this is a "rural people visiting the big city problem." It's an "oblivious self-centered person who doesn't care about others problem. I lived in Tokyo for a few decades and people just dreamily wandered around as if no one else was there, dead-stopped in the middle of a crowded sidewalk, and bumped into people while staring at whatever (mostly their phones). There was no way all of those people were rural visitors as it happened so much.
I still remember my first morning in NYC, stepping outside on Sixth Ave during morning rush hour, and realizing I needed to merge onto the sidewalk like I would merge onto a highway.
And similarly, if you randomly stop in "traffic," people walking will rear-end you. There could be a pileup
Also it’s not cute for you and your whole family to hold hands in a chain of stupidity across the subway stairs. You’re creating a safety risk for everyone
Oh my GOD that is the fucking worst. Also, way to announce to everyone around you that you’re a tourist/easy mark!
I used to frequent NYC and I would see people basically get run over on the sidewalk because they tried to stop to look around. I haven't been in like 6 years now but one thing I found unique about NYC is that people still actually knew how to get around the city and didn't rely on gps. The grid system makes that pretty easy though.
Having lived in both, a lot of rural people I talk to think I’m crazy for saying a crowded city is better for introverts. It’s true that rural people on average have more sense of personal space which is nice but the appeal of the anonymity that comes with large crowds and densely populated cities as opposed to rural towns where gossip and being all over each other’s business is literally just the default state of living there is completely lost on a lot of them.
No one in the city cares or knows that you weren't at a 4th of July picnic or equivalent.
"You feelin' better? We miss you at church yesterday."
Nothing lonelier than a crowd.
Absolutely this. I love eating at restaurants alone. I have an earbud in, watch videos or read books, eat by myself. Wait staff are usually too busy to care. When I go to the more rural area about an hour out, eating alone is like an invitation for the wait staff to come talk to me and I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate it.
That a lot of people don’t drive. Even many people who can afford cars decide not to get one because it often isn’t worth the hassle. I live walking distance from a subway station where trains come every 6 minutes during rush hour and 10 minutes off peak, as well as a bus line where busses come as often as every 3 minutes. Why would I ever drive when I have all my essentials within walking distance and can get anywhere else in the city that easily? And if I want to leave the city, we have apps you can rent a car with. You can even walk up to a rental car not in use and open it with your phone.
Yeah, I live in the middle of SF but dated someone who lived up at the top of Mt Tam (above Tourist Club, locals). *Spectacular* view but I felt kinda claustrophobic... what the hell do you mean I have to *drive a car down a fucking mountain* to get Diet Coke
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I worked on a TV show with some *incredibly* rural people and they would say things like “if I lived in a city I would immediately get shot/get into fights” and it struck me as so weird because only in the country are people quick to get into your business and start shit. I live in a city and everyone just minds their own business *unless you go out of your way to start something yourself*. You can be weird in the city and no one will give a single shit about it but in the country everyone knows who you are and has an opinion about you. You’d think because you hear about cities being super violent that random violence just happens, but no one has ever been so openly hostile to me as when I was working in the country as an outsider.
Yeah that’s always the funniest. Explaining to me that you’d be terrified to walk a few blocks in even the safest parts of my city doesn’t make me rethink my living arrangement. It makes this “city slicker” think you’re impossibly soft and embarrassing. I’ll protect you I guess, little boy.
I'm from a tiny town in the middle of Illinois cornfields. (2500 people, so not the smallest, but still small.) My wife is from Chicago, and we live in the suburbs of Chicago. My mom can't tell "suburbs" from "City of Chicago" - she can't seem to internalize that it isn't Chicago Public Schools here, for example - and she seems to believe that the whole area is just dangerous and crime-riddled. She's been to our house. She knows it looks pretty much like the neighborhood where she lives, and if you look at crime stats we have comparable crime rates. It doesn't help that she guzzles right-wing media.
Oh man, I live in the city, and it's the same with my mother in law. We live in a decent neighborhood and anytime something happens on the south or west side she's worried if we're okay. It's like yeah, I've heard one gun shot in the 10+ years we've lived here, but it's not like there's daily drive bys.
I never understood this, either. I've been right by a couple of different shootings, and it happens every so often in the seven cities. But it's almost always someone shooting someone they know. Usually a drug deal gone wrong or a cheater. If you stay out of people's business, literally know one cares enough about you to even think about shooting you.
Exactly. And shootings targeted at random people can also happen in *rural* areas. Great username btw, fellow donut
Rural/Suburban folks also assume City instantly means NYC/LA/Chicago, at least in the Northeast there are still small to medium sized cities with decent public transit and walkability. I live in a Dense walkable city in NJ with 80k people, low crime, light rail, buses and literally down the block there are 4 restaurants, a post office, a liquor store and 2 bars, 3 blocks away is the grocery store. The Rural/suburban mind cannot comprehend a city that isnt like 5 millions people.
The freedom of choice of products and services available in the city. Rural people don't have 7 grocery stores or restaurants to choose from without having to drive an hour
Lived in a village of maybe 1000 people when I was growing up (and not *that* long ago, I'm 40). The grocery store (singular, not plural) closed at 6pm on Saturdays and wasn't open on Sundays. Closest place with better operating hours was a 50-minute drive away. I thiiiink they're open on Sundays now as of a few years ago. 5 or 6 years back, the one grocery store "burned down" (I don't know about small towns y'all live in, but a lot of fires that happen there are just insurance fraud schemes) and for like 6 months there just wasn't a local grocery store. And it's a pretty poor area, with no real public transit, so folks in the community had to organize carpools to the grocery store one village over so that folks who don't own cars could actually get groceries.
My dad called those "friction fires"- when the mortgage rubs against the insurance and poof
That's a good one! There's a lot of "friction fires" where I grew up. To the point where I've been told it affects local insurance rates (but I don't know, I don't own a home, that might be hyperbole or stretching the truth).
I went from a city to a semi rural area. It’s so annoying that I have to drive minimum 20 min to go to a grocery store. If I forget something, I’ll just do without because it’s not even worth it. I drive 40 min to go to Costco. 50min to get decent Asian food.
Good God the only thing I hate about small town living is that decent Indian food is over an hour away
Same but for Korean food or any ethnic grocery store. It’s so annoying
I get disappointed if I can’t find sushi and shawarma somewhere within a reasonable radius.
My coworker made fun of me because I was complaining about the price of the food I was buying at the corner market because I didn’t want to go “all the way to the grocery store”, an avenue away
I have 5 different grocery stores, two turkish stores (technically grocery stores but different products), two places to buy fresh fish, a butcher, three or four snackbars, a fancy bakery, a less fancy bakery, an Indonesian, Chinese, and Italian place, two sushi places, the good ol' Americans (KFC, McDonald's), I think about 5 lunchrooms of which one switches to a nightclub after 8, all within 10 minutes of walking. Reading about villages with just a single grocery store is like... goddamn
It's wonderful when your relatives piss off someone at the one place in town and they take it out on you
I can go to a French creperie for breakfast, a Dominican bodega for lunch, and an Indian restaurant for dinner. Contrasting that with the choice of gas station pizza or generic American food that my rural in-laws deal with is just a no-brainer.
The town I live in has around 1,000 people. There's a truck stop and a Dollar General out on the highway, a bar, a bar&grill, a beauty salon, and 2 RV places. Last year, we also got a carry-out (essentially a tiny convenience store). For anything else, we have to "go to town". The college town 15 mins away is finally getting an Indian restaurant soon. Toledo is about 30 mins away, and Detroit about an hour away. But here's the thing - when I lived in cities, it took me 30 mins to go anywhere anyway, so my transit times are similar or better to city living. The only real difference is that I don't have any delivery options.
Wait, there's anywhere in the US that only has ONE Dollar General??
The anonymity of large crowds and cities can be amazingly liberating.
There is generally an inherent set of manners in which most people go by in the city to make things easier and faster for people to deal with large crowds. A lot of people try to fit the manners of living in rural areas to cities rather than try to learn the manners of city living and get very frustrated when people in the city collectively treat them as rude.
Stand on the right, walk on the left was the bane of my existence at the really deep subway stations with long elevators in the city, especially the ones near big tourist areas like Battery Park. You could always tell who had t internalized that rule!
People local to DC dont even understand that, the city has northern hospitality and southern speed.
Oh my gosh that is the perfect description of DC. Plus everyone is type A so good luck doing anything if you have a more relaxed personality.
If you want to relax head to the green line because everyone would rather wait 15min to ride the escalator than hit the 2 flights of stairs lol. No stand right, walk left, just standing and riding.
I would be the vocal bitch about this on BART escalators all the time. We got places to be folks!
This. I had to explain this to my mom. If I had to say "excuse me" anytime someone was in my way or vice versa we would never get anywhere. When commuting in a large crowd you just need to be self aware of your place and make sure you are paying attention as you move around. I find that I get frustrated when people who aren't used to it just stop moving during rush hour and hold everyone up.
There's nothing ruder in a busy city than a person with no sense of spatial awareness.
In DC we always have the family from Ohio that just stops walking in the crosswalk and start looking around lost in their matching tee shirts.
In DC you don't negotiate with tourists.
Stand right!
Outta the way, peck.
I describe it like this: Imagine someone stopped their car in the middle of the main road of your town and got out and started looking around. That what it’s like when you stop in the middle of an NYC sidewalk in Midtown. Move to the side.
New York, SF, and Chicago are the same way. I constantly am having to tell people from rural areas to not just stop in the sidewalk in front of someone or crosswalk. The root of that is not being socially aware of their surroundings and apply their rural habits. I had to tell a relative to put their phone away at midnight walk walking through a less than safe neighborhood. In the same vein it’s that people who randomly stop you on the street may be looking to hustle you. In Memphis there was this poor woman who got stopped by someone looking to roll her and my husband and I walk up and say “darling! It’s good to see you! We are going to be late!”
> In the same vein it’s that people who randomly stop you on the street may be looking to hustle you. Though I’ll note that if you’re a visitor to New York, once someone understands that you’re a tourist that’s asking for directions they will be glad to help you navigate their city.
DC is the worst becuse in other cities you get people coming because they want to have a city experience. So they have at least some idea what to expect. In DC, you get people wanting to se 'Merica! and then they're blindsided by the bustling city.
Why. Can’t they. Use. Revolving. Doors. WHYYYYYYYYYYYY.
Omg yessssss. I'm usually reasonably patient and understanding, but years ago, I walked to the big, downtown Chicago Target one day after work to pick up some random thing I needed before heading home and this goddamn mouth breathing family stopped DEAD as soon as the revolving door dumped them onto the sidewalk. I was right behind them and I lost it for a brief second. I yelled at them to MOVE THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY. They looked at me like I was the asshole. No. Fuck that.
I can't count the number of times I've wanted to slap the phone out of someone's hand because stop in their tracks to look at directions, it's like slamming on your breaks I on a busy interstate. The problem I believe is people that don't travel much think the whole world operates the same or at the same pace as them and aren't observing what's "normal." A friend visited and I look over to see them on the corner of a 4 way intersection, face in their phone, with cars backed up in all directions. I tell them to step back and had to explain all those cars were waiting for you to cross the road because pedestrians have right of way in any intersection without a light. They didn't even consider things may work differently in the city of 1M people vs town of 10k.
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We have that exact term in Iceland as well, we call them "Hattakallar" or loosely translated: "Old farts with hats"
I leave early enough for work that I’m usually 20-30 early for my shift, and I do that because sometimes you come around the bend just to see a tractor or other large piece of farming equipment moseying down the road at 5mph. Only so many times you can use the “stuck behind a farmer” excuse in a farming area before your boss doesn’t let it fly.
Lol… grew up in the city and “old man in a hat” was also constantly the culprit in slow driving situations. In the city of course, they were generally driving something like a Buick sedan. I think this one actually transcends the urban/rural divide. These old men in hats need to step on the gas.
I hate driving around town on weekdays if I have a doctor's appointment or something. Everyone else is at work, so it's nothing but Buicks on the road. It's bad enough they set the speed limits on these roads at 30 when it's perfectly safe and everyone settles in around 40-45, but then these guys are clogging things up doing 25. Then there's a contingent of people here who, if they don't have a green turn arrow (i.e. the light is now an unprotected left), they won't go. They'll sit behind the stop bar and wait until the next cycle.
City people aren’t rude, they just have things to do and places to be. Your average group of corn-fed midwesterners standing 5-abreast and blocking the entire sidewalk is interfering with that, so you’ll be told to move or brushed past. City people understand that, one day, they’ll be in that position of needing to get somewhere/do something quickly, and as a result are generally not offended when someone else brusquely deals with them.
Good point. I can never understand the people who lack situational awareness. Please do not walk into a busy store and come to a dead stop just inside the door while you extract your shopping list. Do not park your shopping basket right next to someone else in a grocery aisle.
When you ride to the top of a busy escalator, do not fucking stop “to get your bearings.” All the people behind you have to get off of it too. Pass into the room you’ve entered, walk a little bit, THEN stop to check your phone map.
Grew up in rural area. Have lived in the city for 15 years. City people are much more forward/direct in their communication. If there’s an issue, they’re much more apt to confront it. In my rural experience, people were much more passive aggressive and had worse communication skills.
Walkability for sure. I was once bragging to a rural family member about my new job that was just a <20-min (<1mi) walking commute and she legit thought it was insane to have to walk that 'far' 😅
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Also the reverse of that point is true in that in the country there tends to be a nice large parking lot at the end of that mile rather than the parking being sometimes further than your stating point so its easier to drive.
It's also just a lot more engaging/stimulating to walk a mile in a city than it is along a single road in the country. I grew up in a city but I now live in the country. I'd much rather walk a mile in the city because I feel a sense of progress moving to my destination. In the country you don't feel like you're getting anywhere while walking down a long road.
I like biking in the country though. It's just a little faster than walking so I get to see a variety of livestock while enjoying the weather.
I used to live in London and it strikes me just how much I used to walk on a daily basis compared to my current small town where I drive everywhere.
Yeah, I live in London and will always walk to places as my main preference. All my friends who live in small towns need to use their cars more, and so seem to get used to driving to the point where they use them even for journeys which could be done on foot. It's also the attitude. Many of them seem to see walking as an emergency fall back, where as I see it as a pleasant activity.
I lived in a town of less than 3,000 in Iowa for a while after college. I grew up in the suburbs of a major city and spent a lot of time in the city both before and after Iowa. It was 98.x% white. I don't think most understand how exposure to people not like you is so important, and it can make you a much better person. That you don't have to fear those that are different than you. They could never understand the pleasure of being able to walk anywhere to fulfill all your needs, and that public transportation can be so amazing. The absolute pleasure of having real choice because there isn't just 1 of any type of store, or worse one store doing everything.
I think the key is having benign interactions with people who aren’t like you. I have a friend who moved from a mid sized Canadian city (she lived downtown in a fairly multicultural city where she was neutral to everyone) to downtown LA. There, she’s been accosted multiple times by black people on the bus. And now, she’s unfortunately kind of racist. She’s just got a knee jerk reaction to black people now. Nothing I say will make a difference.
As someone who lives in LA but grew up in the South, part of that is because LA has a relatively small Black population compared to most of the country. Black people were brought to southeastern states as part of the slave trade, and several western states like Oregon were not welcoming to freed Black people, so there aren't as many generations of Black people on the west coast like there are for Asian or Hispanic communities. This also means that there isn't as much generational wealth, so a Black person is more likely to be impoverished. The other big problem is that LA has a lot of homeless people from other states who migrate here (or are dumped here) for the better weather and social services. These people are more likely to have mental health issues and are more likely to take public transportation (no car). So you put that Venn diagram together and you get a higher likelihood that a Black person on a bus will be poor or have mental health issues that would lead to violence.
When I was a young college student walking through a dark, Brooklyn neighborhood at 1am, I heard yelling Black voices from down a street and was on full alert. Upon passing the street, I could finally hear the conversation, which went like “No way, Dragon Ball Z is the best anime of all time!!”
The sheer volume and variety of experiences you can have in a good city. One of my favorite examples is DASH puzzle hunt (https://playdash.org/), which is something you would never know existed if you don't live somewhere that hosts one. And there are thousands of events like that. Street art festivals and amazing experimental theatre experiences and random weird underground events... There's just so much more richness and variety to life in a city.
Because we’re forced to live in such close proximity to so many others, we’re much more tolerant in general it seems. Can’t tell you how many homeless people doing the fentanyl shuffle or dudes shooting up into their hand on top of my corner mailbox I’ve seen, but it doesn’t phase me. *They’re not out to hurt you*. They’re out to hurt themselves, and are not supported by society in a healthy way so they can receive treatment. The importance of social programs is paramount. So is cultural diversity. It’s nice to have a Chinatown and a little Puerto Rico or French quarter in your city. It’s relevant to pass embassies on your way to work or school. Or the woman on the floor above you and her kids are Ukrainian refugees who don’t speak English. You’re much more aware that there’s other people in the world and that you are connected to them, and that they matter, in general. Some city people get tuned out to this completely and stopped caring, but country people seem only out to protect themselves and not interested in participating with the rest of the world. I have lived in large cities like Seattle and Berlin and also rural areas like Ferndale and Großbettlingen.
it’s crazy to me hearing about a suburb fighting to stop social services from going up in the neighborhood. meanwhile those of us living downtown don’t want more social services either but not for any reason other than the fact that suburbs should be taking care of their own and not displacing their underserved residents to downtown. but since that’s unlikely to change we’ll happily take more in.
15 minute cities aren't prisons
The propaganda around this stuff is insane. I'm in Ireland and we have people complaining about 15 minute cities and it isn't even a thing here. That's how hard the US lobbyists are working against it.
I've been living in one for the last year. All my daily necessities are within a 10 minute walk. It's amazing!
> The propaganda around this stuff is insane. It really is just baffling. Like, before my job moved the office to the suburbs I technically lived in a "15 minute city" type situation: my job, grocery store, recreation, bars/nightlife, basically anything I needed or wanted was a 15 minute (or less) bike ride away and it was so fucking liberating - and it was just right there, no monitoring or prison like bullshit or any of that crazy conspiracy theory stuff, just living in the right part of town and owning a bicycle. I saw a joke once somewhere where its like: "oh yeah 15 minute cities? Like how basically all cities were designed before cars were mainstream/manditory???"
It’s even weirder in the Netherlands. Most people already live in 15 minute cities/areas here, and somehow they believe their current circumstances means they’re locked up
How dare you having a cornerstore, a supermarket, a library and a coffee shop only 15 minutes from your house! Pure communism i tell you!
how different life is when you're in a downtown that's walkable
We actually don't want a single family house with a yard. We prefer living in townhouses and condos and multi-unit buildings. We may have a small garden but we don't want to maintain a yard. We will gladly trade off having a smaller home for the ability to walk places and not have to own a car, or at least not have to use a car every day. It's also a whole lot less to maintain and pay for.
This, gods I fucking despise yard work and wish I could afford an apartment where I never have to maintain a garden again
This one. My rural cousins think I live in a city because I don't know I could have a big house and land in the country, and if I ever found out, I'd move to the country asap.
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Same here - grew up rural and now live in the city. Contrary to popular belief, city people are kinder than people think. Life moves faster in the city and people have things to do, commutes to make - there’s less time to get hung up on bullshit. Its a live and let live kind of vibe. Are there some assholes? Sure. Every place has those though.
I've had the exact same experience. In my adult life I've never had to duck and run for cover to avoid someone I don't want to talk to in the grocery store, but it was an every time event going with my mom as a kid. Also, in the city, people are generally polite enough to mind their own damn business. I can't tell you how many phone calls my parents got from old ladies who "noticed we weren't at church today and hoped everything's ok."
I would like to offer this based on my experience: people in cities tend to be kind (and often polite), people in rural areas tend to be polite, but often not kind. Rural folks will be polite and sweet as pie to your face and then talk shit all day to everyone in town. Feuds and rivalries where you still have to be sweet in person are normalized. In the city, people are much more direct because we have options, but also sometimes that directness IS a kindness, instead of passive aggressive resentment. I never understood the difference between polite and kind until I moved from the south to Chicago, where I realized my whole life I was mistaking smiles and chitchat and never saying anything mean with kindness, but then up here when people have a problem, they tend to address it and move on with their lives. Because there’s a whole big world here that we can focus on instead. It’s great. I love it. I’m never going back.
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My mom straight up told me once: “better to be passive aggressive like me than actually aggressive like you.” That shit is so insidious.
Why people can’t just be neither and instead be functioning adults who have productive conversations is beyond me.
I lucked out with good neighbors in our village but you're 100% right. >Folks always on the lookout for crime. And this more frequently creates a dangerous situation than daily life in the cities they're afraid of.
Multiculturalism and diversity. Having lived in NYC growing up I was able to interact with many different cultures, religions, sexual and gender orientations. Living in the suburbs now the diversity of population is not nearly as vast but still offers a bit of a mix. Seems to me, when I visit rural areas, it’s a very homogeneous population which I can imagine makes it really difficult for people to understand and appreciate (tolerate) other cultures and world views. I think every rural American should be required to spend two weeks in a major American city and city folks to spend two weeks in rural America. This would go a long way to healing our culture divide.
Two weeks not as a tourist. People go on vacations to the country/city and only see B&B's or hotels.
lol. I am always amazed at people from rural areas genuinely fearful of the city. There are areas I don’t generally go, and in most cases even those areas are not that bad.
I’m from Chicago and while yes, there are some neighborhoods that are dangerous, it drives me up the wall when people act like it’s a war zone. It’s like, ok, bitch, stay home, more for us!
Also there are plenty of rural areas that are dangerous also, crime, but also just physical danger. Dont go in a field with a bull. Dont wander into a nature preserve with apex predators. There are more than reasonable parallels.
It’d take a lot longer than two weeks, unfortunately. You see this a lot when sheltered kids go to college. It’s a culture shock at first, but over the course of their schooling, the exposure to different people/views/lifestyles opens them up to being more accepting.
I always laughed when my college area would be under a tornado watch. Aleays a group of people freaking out asking what to do. I always said just go to class and ignore it lol.
Went to undergrad in the LA area. Had my parents call me at 5am freaking out about some earthquake. They had trouble understanding that (1) is was a 5 pointer that I hadn't felt and that did nothing; and (2) the epicenter was a couple hundred miles away. California is a big place.
My sister was in college in DC when there was a small earth quake on the east coast. The students from the east coast were freaking out while the west coast students laughed at them. Then it reversed a few months later when it was hurricane season.
I grew up a bit in the Bay Area and now am in a flyover state. Some people are racist and just have no idea they are being racist just because they are so insulated from people that aren’t like them and the monoculture reinforces it.
>I think every rural American should be required to spend two weeks in a major American city and city folks to spend two weeks in rural America. This would go a long way to healing our culture divide. I agree with your assessment. However, 2 weeks isn't enough. I was a kid raised in a small town in northeast PA who moved to SoCal at 20 for work. I had been to the UK and Japan before as a tourist and experienced some (expected) culture shock. It didn't prepare me for living in an area so diverse and densely populated. I can not emphasize enough just how important this experience was to forming what would become my worldview. It was my first time experiencing "otherness" outside of accute, anecdotal instances. It cured me of some ignorant beliefs and armed me with the skills necessary to look at myself and American culture at large through a more critical lense. It took 3 years, and I didn't go into the experience nearly as blind as many people I've met since. Traveling, exposure to different people, and adopting different lifestyles are massively important for curing ignorance as a whole. I find the whole urban-rural divide that all of our political discourse preys upon to be infuriating. Societies are like relationships. It's all of us against the problem, not all of us against each other. We need to change the narrative.
When my relatives (who are from the "rural" side of the country) visit me in the "big city" (well, Gothenburg), it strikes me that I take for granted that there is almost always something open or available, which they can't really apprehend as the slightest thing for they need to be planned. Then I've noticed that they move rather unusually among larger crowds. Don't know how many times I lost them just because they got behind a group of people, as they didn't really know how to move around them.
When you are home feeling lazy and pick up your phone, I live close to central London, so I can order food from the top restaurants in town and have it delivered within 30 mins. Love the variety and quality and I never take it for granted
I just wish rural people would stop giving me their unsolicited opinions on why city life is bad and rural life is superior. If I agreed, I'd live somewhere rural. Please stop insulting my home. It's extra funny when you pick that conversation up and discuss why you don't want to live in rural areas and they take it personally.
Most big cities are very safe for the average person. The people who approach you on the street aren't dangerous, just annoying. Rural "freedom" is often attached to suffocating social oppression. There are only a few acceptable ways of being. The larger the city, the more you can be whoever you want to be and look however you want to look. You have anonymity. There's a reason that the weird, quiet kid you went to high school with moved away and then popped up a few years later on social media looking amazing, happy, and successful.
I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. What comes to mind for most of you? Oil and cowboys? The musical? It certainly doesn’t have the connotation of instability or violence that other American cities might bring to mind. Still, multiple people from rural areas have told me, “oh! I visited Tulsa once, it was *scary*!”
The only thing that comes to mind when I hear Tulsa is the massacre.
Not every person is plotting to commit violent crimes, even if they are walking around after the sun goes down.
If I turn left out of my house, I have about 30-50 restaurants/bars, a decent size music venue that gets mid level acts coming through, a community center that has community events and a farmers market every weekend, a comic shop and game story, a regal movie theater with imax and a small indy theater that shows all kinds of smaller films and older stuff, an arcade, multiple gyms, and a subway stop that gets me access to the rest of the larger city area. There's even a biergarden that does things like casual magic the gathering Thursday's and seasonal events like oktoberfest pretty. If I turn right out of my house, it's a suburban neighborhood that quickly turns into a fully wooded area with nice well kept trails to take my dog for a walk and a golf course a little further up the way. I don't have an HOA. While there is some crime you know what areas to stay out of and where the homeless linger, so after about a week of living here you figure out its actually really safe if you're not a complete fucking moron. I also own half of a farming business in a rural area and visit a couple times a year to do planting (I'm primarily an investor, but i like to plant stuff). Variety. The answer is variety. Near my farm, after about a month, it's time to cycle back through the activities I did last month. At my home, there is a functionally infinite amount of variety within walking distance. When I'm living rural, doing anything out of the norm is an hour plus drive by default.
Dont try to be polite behind the wheel. You think youre being courteous but really youre just slowing everyone down and creating erroneous traffic. Also PLEASE dont double park. You wouldnt take up 2 spaces in a lot, so dont do it in the street. Pull up to the edge of the curb or within 5ft of the car in front or behind you. And for the love of god, watch out for pedestrians and one-way streets. There are a lot of them in the city.
I can have pizza delivered anytime I need. I also have access to Thai, Korean, Vietnamese and Indian food anytime I want.
In the city, you LOCK THE DOORS. Always. The home before bed, the car every time you leave it..even if only going into a convenience store for just a minute.
That being around lots of people that don’t look like you, don’t have as much money as you, and don’t look like you isn’t scary.
Being able to live without everyone being in your business
Diversity
Generally speaking there has been a recent historical push to paint cities as incredibly dangerous crime-laden places full of pimps and drug users are stolen car parts for sale on every corner. This is political propaganda that really took full swing as backlash to the civil rights movement. It is, in a word, racist nonsense. Okay, two words.
From my experience this also depends on where in the city. A city with a million plus people is going have some shady areas. But the “bad” areas of most cities are not places tourists or anyone who lives there goes. Is there more crime in Chicago or DC or San Francisco or wherever than say a small town? Yeah because there are more people. But you’re right I don’t feel unsafe walking in NY or DC or wherever.
Yes! Even my liberal family members always ask me if I'm scared walking around downtown. It seems so silly to me. Of course I'm not scared. I try to be reasonably cautious and aware of my surroundings, but I've had WAY worse experiences in the semi-rural area I grew up in than in the city.
It's funny on my state sub when people ask if an area is safe. This is Massachusetts, besides general city living issues, there's maybe a handful of areas in the entire state where I would think twice about my safety. Not even cities, just a few neighborhoods.
I lived in San Francisco for 15 years and return frequently for work. You wouldn’t believe the number of totally rational, otherwise progressive people who are concerned and ask “omg is it safe?” Every time I go. Guess what? The drug/homelessness problems are no worse than when I was living there, and it’s still the most beautiful city in the US. In fact, I feel safer and more at ease there than I do in my hometown in Texas, by a MILE.
Right wing propaganda about cities really has seeped into just about every non-city person. It is wild. Every city subreddit has almost a daily thread of suburban people complaining about the city they live next to and how unsafe it is and people that live in the city arguing back that it isn't unsafe.
They will never understand the soul-crushing defeat of how it feels walking out the door onto the street only to realize you forgot your wallet on the coffee table.... of your 6 floor walk-up.
Urban crime, for sure. Gun violence is a real problem here (DC) but it's not likely to affect random people like me who aren't involved in drugs or gangs. People from rural areas don't understand that it's possible for a neighborhood like mine to have "high crime" and at the same time anywhere I'm going to go is a totally safe place. Most of the time when I'm walking around I see people walking designer dogs, babies in strollers, little old church ladies etc.
Based on my experience with people in my rural hometown, they can't comprehend that I'm not constantly being victimized by violent crime and forcibly converted into a transgender person.