I lived in the country, and managed to escape. I had no idea I needed to escape, and I thought that New York was the last city on earth I’d end up in. It was polluted and crowded and dangerous, I thought. Imagine my surprise when I moved there after college and loved it! Although, like @Simone_De_Beauvoir, I lived in Brooklyn, because, as I always said, “In Brooklyn, you can see the sky!”
My brother still lives there, and my sister has lived either in Tokyo or Beijing since college. I now live in Philly.
I like Philly because it is a big city with a small town feel. My first week living here I started running into people I knew in other parts of the city. I did not ever run into a single person from my neighborhood anywhere else in the city during the four years I lived in NYC.
Cities, of course, are the most efficient way for people to live. They are the least resource intensive way to live. They are the most environmentally friendly way to live.
I think I would be bored to tears in the country. Would they even have heard of jazz out there? Do they know any kind of dancing besides Contra? Ok, I exaggerate—I’m being mean—but it is much harder to find such stuff going on in the sticks, and it happens all the time in the city.
And a decent cup of coffee or a good bagel? Forget lox. Forget fresh fish. How about the Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thai, Indian, Chinese and American style restaurants I have that are all less than three blocks away from me?
The country is nice. Quiet is nice (although I’ll never sleep in it again due to my CPAP machine). I’d love to sleep near a brook or an ocean. I’d love to be able to step out my back door and go skiing into the woods. I’ve love to have wonderful back roads to ride my bike on. But the countries charms are also its banes. Quiet means no people. No people means loneliness and boredom (to me). It’s not for me—except in small doses.