That was my point, yes.
Our ancient ancestors probably did all of the following within eyesight and earshot of around 40 people:
- Eating
- Drinking
- Defecating
- Fornicating
- Bathing
- Exercising
Edit: I’m also deeply fascinated by the ability of historical sociolinguistics to give us insight into cultural attitudes towards different topics. Consider the evolution of and the attitude towards the expletives “fuck” and “Jesus Christ!”
That's fundamentally different from an anonymous mass of people in a city. I've seen and heard much more than 40 people (many of them different every day) before I even reach the office in the morning.
Either you have to trick your mind that the people who are going about the same rituals with you shoulder-to-shoulder are part of the same tribe as you: using the same bus, coffee shop, elevator.
Or you have to trick your mind that being completely alone and going hours, sometimes days, without opening your mouth to communicate with someone or exercise the part of your brain that reads facial cues or even smell the hormones of another human (good or bad) is also somehow okay.
Having done both (2 major metros, as well as suburban and WFH life), I’ve found the former to be easier for me, personally. I also find suburban and rural people to be generally more misanthropic than urban people, which of course has some selection bias. Exurban people seem to be the most misanthropic, by far (shout out Dallas-Fort Worth).
But the point is, being surrounded by people day-in and day-out doesn’t seem to me to make people misanthropic on aggregate - otherwise cities would be an even worse place to exist. It’s the humans that make it bearable.
What do you have in mind specifically?
Edit: I'm aware that statistically, there's more inventions in metropolitan areas. However I'm not sure how much of that we can really attribute to causal effects that are unique to cities, especially today. Obviously, many universities are in metropolitan areas, but on the other hand, we have many tools for remote collaboration that we didn't have 200 years ago. So I'm not sure if cities are not an outdated concept.