Patients, acquaintances, and friends often ask me if city people have a special personality, trait, or talent, and whether there is a skill that makes a person particularly good and belonging in the city. In my opinion, this is a question I can answer quickly: yes!
There are definitely big city skills, and although these skills are not enough to make someone a big city person or a city pass, they may make them the right type of city, and they will make densely populated big city life more attractive, maybe easier.
—Mazda Adri, Cities and Stress
Ability to possess and participate
Actively perceive the surroundings and participate in the people and things around them
First of all, you need to have a hunting instinct – culture doesn't go to you, it needs to be sought out, it needs to be used, and whoever has it, the city is good for whom.
And "possession" means that we can occupy the city where we live to a certain extent. This refers not to possession in the material sense, but to the conscious feeling that the city is to some extent its own, along with its people, its culture, its taverns, its playgrounds, its trees, its sidewalks. This means not being afraid of the city, but being able to get out of the house and be confident that you can organize what you need and want.
You can start with possession from the doorstep in the easiest way by getting acquainted with the neighbors around you – who lives here? Who works here? Where and where do I feel more comfortable? Did I speak to the salesman? Which of my neighbors am I curious about and who will I talk to?
Stills from "Late Night Canteen"
For those who feel strange in the city, I would advise them to cross social boundaries or personal routines a little somewhere to give themselves a sense of possession, such as going to work on roller skates, going to a show or attending an association that you don't usually have much contact with: singing, dancing, cooking, rowing, or tap dancing.
Of course, the ability to possess and participate also means that people are responsible for "his" city and know how to treat the property they can use well.
The ability to be alone without being alone
Solitude is something that can be affordable
You know, solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. Solitude is actually a state that is needed occasionally.
Most people enjoy the occasional time alone, because finally there is time to care only about themselves, comb through their thoughts, understand experiences, organize their memories, and take a break from their social lives. It makes sense to us, and this solitude is our own choice, and it can end at any time.
But one thing must be clear: solitude is a luxury, a gift, something that we want to be able to afford. Not everyone's desire to be alone can be understood by family or relatives, and for a long time, not everyone had a door of their own that could be closed behind their backs. For example, parents with young children, when their families need their attention after returning home from work in the evening, usually they do not have the opportunity to be alone at all.
Stills from "The Grace of the Hedgehog"
For many people, it becomes easier to be alone if we know that there is life all around us. But if you're worried about getting caught up in it and can't end this solitude on your own, or if you're having a hard time being yourself, or if you're worried that life will go on without you, then being alone is going to be a problem.
I advise those who have difficulty being alone to consider this concern when looking for a suitable way to live. For example, it is wiser to choose a small house in a central location than a detached house in the suburbs, and a shared apartment in a social center area is better than an apartment in a cozy neighborhood that no one knows.
The ability to handle anonymity
Don't pay too much attention to the people around you
One obvious difference between large cities and rural areas is the degree of anonymity.
Anonymity is what many people who move to big cities seek, but it is also something that many urbanites fear. Anonymity in big cities is a veil for some people, which can be hidden from being supervised, anonymity can make people escape social surveillance, and for some people it means freedom, doing what they want to do, giving up what they want to give up, so anonymity is also equivalent to the tolerance of the city - to accommodate different lifestyles, to tolerate different sexual orientations, to tolerate eccentric dressing styles and many other things.
There are many protagonists in literature who choose to leave small places with narrow morals, or traditional rural conditions, and go to big cities to pursue unmonitored personal development. For these people, if he wants to, he can sneak into the city.
However, this way of living is not for everyone. If you're timid or introverted, then living anonymously in the city can bring you a sense of strangeness and loneliness, and at this time, anonymity means that you'll feel helpless and powerless more quickly because it's hard to overcome that to talk to strangers. For the fainter, it takes a lot of effort to ask for help from strangers on the street, such as asking for time or directions.
The ability to travel
Preferred bikes, mixed use of public transport
How and how to move around the city well is particularly important for comfort. I've asked a lot of people, what's the most stressful thing for them? When do cities put pressure on them? Almost everyone's answer is related to travel, mainly related to traffic congestion.
In general, driving around a city is extremely unpopular, and a city's quality of life depends largely on the choice of transportation it provides to its residents.
In fact, many European cities invest a lot of money to expand the mobility of cities, and the flow portfolio is the key word in it, and the choices offered have also increased, and every time of the day, every person, all kinds of luggage, clothes and every mood can have corresponding choices. People who use these wisely will get a lot in the city.
In my circle of friends in Berlin, many people have driver's licenses, but they haven't had their own cars for years. But they all have bikes that comfortably handle most trips within a five-kilometer radius, of course, when the weather is good. With a radius of more than five kilometers, they use a mix of taxis, trams, subways, light rail, and car-sharing.
Stills from "The Taste of Plum Chicken"
Overall, most of my friends are very satisfied with their way of getting around, being able to solve almost any travel problem for any length of the road in a reasonable amount of time without any obstacles. This feeling promotes the possession of the city and makes people have a special "sense of ownership" of the city. Cities that can provide citizens with such an option, and as far as possible unrelated to their financial resources, have made a great contribution to the quality of urban life.
Tolerate complexity
The other side of high convenience is high risk
Cities are inhabited by people from different backgrounds, and a variety of completely different knowledge, skills, ideas, and interests collide and influence each other, constituting the complexity of society.
People in a city also bring with them different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and sometimes, different languages and dialects collide with each other, which constitutes cultural complexity.
There is also the complexity of space: offices, living spaces, sports fields, schools, cafes and administrative buildings, all alternate in different limited spaces.
So it's a big picture book with every city's details, all intricate and closely coordinated, as long as the participants are kind to each other and understand the diversity of their interests. This complexity determines the economic power and creativity of a city, but it also makes it sensitive, and each of these factors can trigger changes in the entire system through chain reactions or interactions.
The complex system of the city has an infinite number of aggregate states, which I would like to call functional complexity. Every factor, such as traffic on the road, has a variety of characteristics, "quiet", "congested", "blockade"...
Stills from Alice in the City
Judging exactly what a city really is like is derived from a variety of different individual characteristics, and city dwellers must cope with this great diversity. So cities are really like the complex brains of humans, themselves very complex with countless cells connected to each other, organized into networks, and only when they interact in highly complex forms can they develop their full capacity.
Often, growing up in a city we learn to deal with complex environments where the same location or situation may have completely different characteristics (such as "dangerous" or "harmless"), and most of the things around us have both advantages and disadvantages, just as cars can bring us comfort and speed, but also can cause us serious injuries.
Psychological flexibility
Improvisation + Buddhism + creativity
People who are flexible and able to adapt well to changing environments have a more relaxed time in the city.
Cities are constantly changing, always building, rebuilding, relocating, opening and closing doors, and once the plan changes, it is necessary to make different choices again - in people's minds, the larger the city, the more frequent the change. This applies both to the private sector, such as the planning of leisure time, as well as to the public domain.
Dealing with permanent change, not letting yourself be overwhelmed, and making decisions without a complete picture, is psychological flexibility that requires people to take certain risks in action and when making decisions, and it means creativity and ingenuity in coping with the vagaries of life in big cities.
Ambiguity is also used to describe ambiguous situations. "Ambiguity" refers to the flexibility to deal with the daily obstacles of urban life and to accept unpredictable states, such as unexpected encounters with unpassable people, power outages, or a series of traffic controls and building construction on driving routes.
Ambiguity also means not getting angry about something you can't change, but rather accepting it and finding a good solution. At this time, creativity is very useful, but only people with free brains and no life will be creative.
People who are tolerant of ambiguity can tolerate the ambiguity of explanations or explanations, and even tolerate contradictions without reacting angrily or angrily. But the lack of tolerance for ambiguity, which can sometimes be accompanied by psychological problems and mental illness, can be found in people with emotionally unstable personality disorder, the so-called borderline personality disorder. They tend to think "black and white", and it is difficult to understand well that people will have different feelings at the same time, such as happiness and anger may coexist at the same time, and it is difficult to recognize that negative situations also have their advantages.
Tolerance for ambiguity also includes the ability to delay the satisfaction of needs. For example, people who are hungry during an interview will postpone eating, and this demand is closed after it is perceived, because it is known that the situation is not suitable for satisfying hunger. People who cannot tolerate ambiguity can hardly calm themselves down in such a situation, and it is difficult to be sure that they have a better time to eat in the foreseeable time.
Therefore, growing up in ambiguous and uncertain conditions may also be an important advantage of the city. Tolerating uncertainty, learning to deal with the strangeness of others, and being able to deal with conditions that are not fully controllable increase mental flexibility and tolerance for disappointment, both of which are known as two factors of tolerance for ambiguity. As a result, social skills grow in the fight against the obstacles and unpredictability of urban life.
Superb online skills
A small device is also a big problem
Today, the internet and smartphones represent not only the digitization of our daily lives, but also the uninterrupted accessibility and stress. Since the advent of smartphones, the boundaries between work and private life in westerners have sometimes become less clear, which may have turned this small device into a really big problem.
But it does help us become more familiar with the world. We were able to get driving time and travel time from Google Maps, the practical subway and bus apps, and we could buy tickets from there; we could access the taxi app; we could quickly buy an admission ticket with the help of a large number of screen and stage digital guides; we no longer needed to find a parking lot, but used our mobile phones to find the nearest shared car and use it to unlock...
Cities are complex and fast-paced, our hourly information consumption is huge, people who have achieved success in cities are all on the Internet, and cities have become smart cities. As a result, scientists are now also taking into account the "digital differentiation" between urban and rural areas.
Today, whoever can use a smartphone quickly and independently in multitasking can live better in the city than those who need to stop passers-by or walk into a nearby store to ask for directions, although the former is clearly more advantageous in terms of interpersonal communication. Those who can plan their way home to work via post offices, libraries and laundromats with up to a minute of online search can also benefit from the city's dense service sector and shopping possibilities. Not to mention those who are good at being active in virtual spaces, who use social networks and dating mini-programs to project their parallel virtual living spaces into the city, and in this way occupy the virtual network.
However, superb online skills only mean being able to use the Internet and smartphones smarter in everyday life, not that once the intensity of external stimuli is reduced, such as because of a conversation interruption or the need to check how many train stops, the phone is reflexively grabbed. This can disrupt people's attention to their surroundings, which can lead to distance between our hearts and the environment around us. The result is defamiliarization, not possession.