Hey.
I never lived in a city, not talking about the huge cities like London but average 50.000 to 150.000 people cities so I figured I’d ask people on here who actually lived in a city.
I grew up in a small town and now I built a home in a few miles away from where I grew up in another smaller town and everything would be cool if I wouldn’t have “fomo”.
My town has about 1000 people living and the next larger city has about 500.000 people (40 minute drive by car or 1 hour by train). And two other smaller cities with each about 75.000 people but only 25 minute drive by car.
Now that my wife and I have settled I can’t get rid of fomo feeling.
I catch myself thinking “man if would have built in the city,…” but my wife is right. We can’t afford property in a city and heck, even if we could afford it there is no property left to buy. And then when I visit the city to go shopping for clothes or just eat out I am always glad I can leave again.
But than I wake up the next day and would think it would be awesome to have a gym in the same block, a grocery store under my flat, a nice bar or coffee around the corner where I could socialize with others. But then my wife comes again with reality: “And it all costs money. You’d be broke two days after paycheck if you live in the city how you live in it while you visit it” and then she explains that life in the city isn’t all that great and I ain’t missing out because most people aren’t more social in cities than in our town or small city next to our town.
I imagine city life kind of vibrant though. “Hey let’s host a boardgame night” and 10 people showing up. But it might not be like how I imagine it? Is city life kind of overrated or am I missing out?
I go to the bigger city maybe once a month to go shopping for clothes I can’t get here. Like for example the skater shop a few brands. A few friends and I also take the train every half a year to party a night out but take the train back home. There are many things I also don’t like about the city, for example sometimes the smell, the homeless, the traffic, and I sometimes think I’d still need a car because of groceries, visiting family in the country side where I live now so I couldn’t sell my car anyways. Now that I have “settled” I shouldn’t be thinking about this anyways but there is always this feeling I am missing something. Maybe I should have lived in a city just for a year to experience it before building, but I never had the desire to. I was always happy leaving the city and I still am happy when I can leave after a whole day in the city but maybe I’d like it longer if I’d live in it?
This feels like a topic I am going to ignore til I am 85 and then add to a list of things I regret: “Never experienced city life when I was young”.
The only thing that makes me feel good though is that all my friends that currently live in cities are searching for property out of the city and want to move back where we all grew up and all of them saying I didn’t miss anything. My wife is also saying it, so I guess they might be kind of right. I am saying “kind of right” because this might be something that only one can judge for him/herself if city is good or bad. I feel like I have no opinion on this subject and this makes me crazy.
Edit: The only big city life experience I had was three months traveling through South East Asia where I stayed like a week in Bangkok and I remember many nights in Kao San Road partying. But that ain’t anything one can do every day in the city especially if you work. That was like vacation city experience and I sure do know I was glad when I left Bangkok. The next city experience I had was Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) in Vietnam which was okay but I left it after day 3 feeling drained. The best experience I had was in Singapore. But I figure after reading all about Singapore that no city in my country could keep up with Singapore. I think I’d like living in Singapore more than in Bangkok or Saigon lol. But even Singapore was really busy…
Really depends on the city, but also quite a bit on yourself and how easy you connect with others, there’s no one-fits-all here.
City life can be vibrant, especially in university towns with a generally younger population. Tons of events, outings, pub crawls, the likes.
Question is, would you still fit in with the demographic? I’m ~40 now and live in a city with decent nightlife and fairly young population.
Do I go out a lot? Maybe once every 2-3 months. I’ll have a coffee outside every couple days, and I like to chat with the barrista, she’s a gem. Other than that? Most people my age have kids and money is tight, schedules full, energy levels low.
Scheduling board games takes weeks of effort to coordinate, and you better believe someone will cancel last minute. So unless I hang out with people 10+ years younger, I’m still fairly isolated in the sense that everybody else got their own lives to sort out.
It’s nice to have concerts in town, and great getting to the gym in 5 min, granted. But generally speaking, I don’t think it’s worth living in the city for the sake of being in the city. People don’t flock together to bars and cafes from all over town, they are the same folks who live on the block.
So if you got a pub or something in your little town, I’m sure the experience won’t be all that different…
Bingo.
Loneliness is an individual thing. Someone can be lonely in a room of 500 people.
Well when my friends and I go out to the “city” by train we go to the irish pub and we do notice the same crowd sitting at the counter. A few different folks from the close hostels but other than that it’s really the same.
We actually only go once a year now when the christmas markets open up because of “It’s always the same” feeling and we can just drink in our local bars.
Having lived in numerous US states and cities, and worked in far more, it’s really all the same everywhere.
People are people, there’s just a lot more of them in a city than a small town.
From a dating standpoint, this increases the pool of potential dates.