“There are so many things: You might get along with your neighbors who even live in the same building, but you hardly think about each other apart from some chatting on the staircase. No gossip about me or my family spreading across town.
But still, I meet so many people when I go grocery shopping or pick my kids up from school. I feel so much freer because everything is easily accessible. I can do almost everything walking, or I take the bike, bus/subway.
At home, I needed a car for everything. In the city, I haven’t owned a car for the past 15 years. Relatives from the countryside envied us for walking to the forest in 10 minutes, while they need a car to see nature.
Also, in the city, it’s so easy to meet other people as a parent. We just go to the next playground, and surely someone will be there to chat. In the countryside, playgrounds are abandoned, and you have to invite people home to get to know them. And now that my kids grow older, they can easily roam the neighborhood and still be kind of supervised. As a kid, we were always alone in the woods without anybody around.”
—norobotsmag
