Inherently Anti-social

"I've dreamt of solitude, lost in the wilderness of the country side, my fellow man, a mere memory of what I walked away from."
anonymous

What is it about cities and towns, suburbia as opposed to the 'big city'?
We buy houses in cities and those of us who can afford an added luxury purchase a cottage in a rural area. Less than rural, an area untouched. After all, the idea of a cottage is to escape the hustle of day to day life. To get somewhere quiet and peaceful, to hear the crickets chirp.
What about the people who buy their homes in areas such as this?
It's a double edged sword.
In a city you can grocery shop, go to the bank, take in a movie and go out to dinner, all without bumping into anyone you know.
In a small town, you cannot go to the corner store without seeing someone you know.
If the population is 500, chances are you know the cashier, the bagger, the guy smoking by the ice machine and the mechanic who waves from across the street.
So what is the draw?
Are we inherently drawn to other people, or inherently drawn to the idea of escaping other people?
Do I want to live in a big city because I feel the need to surround myself with people? As opposed to Erin who has bought a house in an area where the neighbours are fewer.
When I sit on my front porch in a suburban neighbourhood of Southern Ontario I see the houses like well defined cottages.
Small dwellings that house completely different people.
All packed in to an area that someone decided was going to become a community.
The old school dictionary that I rely upon defines a community as
A body of persons having common rights, interests, and priviledges, living in the same locality.
Well, aside from the obvious contradictions like the government funded housing 3 blocks away, what else falters in this definition?
Interests?
How many of us know what our neighbours are interested in?
I assume, not too many.
So then, to build a permanent residence in a rural (untouched) area, are we then a part of an anti-community?
Do these people reject the notions of what it means to live in a city?
Or are they more independent, more willing to forge than to follow?
In actuality, we all live in cottage town, some of us just feel the need to have more neighbours, some of us shy away from that entirely.
I just wonder if there's something to be said about the hunters who drink beer and shoot deer during the appropriate season, compared to the kid in the Burgundy beret who reads his words against such behaviour at a coffee house in Toronto.
Are the hunters a modern version of that and their gathering ancestors, a more highly developed quota of the population that is still intouch with the idea of what is truly important. Survival and simplicity?
Have the people of the city become so enraptured with technology and the advancement of the human race that they have lost all recognition for respect of what has gotten us here?
It's funny, we're like ants, and as I think far too often, we're like 'THE SIMS' as we walk through life fighting for what we think is important. And the city kids make fun of the townies and the townies poke fun at the freaks, but, we're all just a version of one another. Some of us have purchased cottages in an area where we're surrounded by people, and some of us prefer a stove that burns wood.
Who is better than the other?
Neither is the PC answer.
We are simply functioning in a different mindset.
We hold different values and beliefs.
We have different ideas of what we want to wake up to on a Sunday morning.
But....
in the end, it's all cottage country,
we all chose to live in this area or that, and the reasons we do it are as mysterious as the answers people actually give.
I wanted to be a fire fighter!
Well, you can't fight a house fire in an area that has 30 houses in an 2000 acre cross-section. You can, but, it's be like writing for a magazine that publishes 4 stories once every 27 years.
Communities (large cottage countries) are founded on an inability to be alone, or even in small groups. We create this idea that we need to rely upon one another as opposed to fending for ourselves.
It's true!
Imagine what the community you lived in right now was like 200 years ago.
We would all be rural, or rich.
Now, we're all rural, or urban, with the occasional cottage that turns the head of a well coiffed debutante.
Do I live where I live because I have replaced instinct with knowledge?
or because knowledge was always an upper story to the idea of instinctual behaviour?
See ya'll in cottage country!