Which provides me the best means to earn gratuitous amounts of profit without sacrificing a proportional amount of time in general convenience? I prefer cities, myself. Their existence is a peerless example of human collectivism, self-management, and the technologies that allow for mass housing and logistics. Towns are towns. Places where in ages past were often situated in between major agricultural centers or intersections of reasonable trade. But cities ... cities are an example of where humanity has achieved a prerequisite efficiency (or abundance) not merely to obtain them, but to create more of them.
I also like the energy of cities. The lights. So much so I always found nights in the country to be almost frightening. Say what you like about light pollution, there's something calming about your apartment bathed in red or green neon whenever it is 'darkest'... in the country night is night. Can't see a damned thing in front of you, and the slither of something over your flesh as you push your way through the scrub back to a place of refuge is inherently fear-provoking.
Sure you can rationalize that it was just a slimy leaf, but good luck in not checking with your lighter just to be safe. Honestly, all the people screaming how we need to be 'closer to nature' are on drugs. Nature is entirely apathetic to your existence. It doesn't give a shit. At least if we surround ourselves with people behind buildings of rebar and concrete we might have a chance of a cuddle and a pat on the head.
I've lived in 28 cities across the world, and it never surprises how much chaos can be contained within what are often very similar systems of control that guarantee its continued existence.
Towns are organic. They rise organically, their foundations built on the reasons for their own existence. Late modern cities are purposeful, deliberate, planned, and yet ever more chaotic through its density of populations.
Whenever people go off on a spiel about humans are violent, stupid, insane, cruel, or narcissistic ... I always point to cities. Whereby humans can have the capaciy to be socially-minded, conscientious, reasonable, and 'live and let live' ... where humans are naturally reticient to turning where they live into battlefields solely because they have annoying neighbours, or because council does something you don't like near you.
If humans were half as violent as people say, cities would be perpetual nightscapes of internecine conflict, bedlam and viciousness. But time and again, cities tend to produce the most reasonable people who have a practiced understanding of how one deals with strangers or people they simply don't understand. Either with quiet apathy, or practiced patience ...
City building -- one of the few, big things both capitalists and Marxists can agree on.
