> In a big city you can really be yourself because there's always others that > are like you and you can meet them in like-minded places. > And you can make real ties there.
This is a massive assumption, but maybe 'yourself' is limited to a standard deviation from the accepted mean.
Well yes of course there's a maximum deviation. If you're too different you won't fit in. Not a bad thing because then there's no real point in being there anyway.
That's why you have to pick the communities you engage in so you fit. You don't have to change yourself but you pick the community to suit.
It's not an assumption though. I live in a city of millions and I'm in some communities of only hundreds of people. Which thrive and even have their own places. That's the nice thing, in a city it's easy to have enough scale even to make niche communities thrive.
Is it really that outrageous of an assumption to think that most people are not too far from the majority?
What's the majority? There's so much difference in people. There's the IT/intellectual worker and there's blue collar workers, there's sport fans and book enthusiasts, there's religious communities and lgbt-friendly ones. All examples of dualities that are common to some degree but don't have so much overlap in interests.
In my experience social settings work a lot better when they're a bit more specific. Like, about something. And there's not really one majority that fits all. In the US even the two major parties are extremely polarised and yet they are about equal in size.