I’m writing this comment from a small village close to the Carpathians, where my brother lives and where my family on my father’s side has lived for generations (half of the land on which the village’s church was built was “donated” by my family), I for my self live in a city with a population of 2 million people. As such, I just wanted to comment on the “everybody knows everybody else in a small town/village” and the implicit assumption that that would only cause “positive” feelings. It doesn’t.

Back to my brother: he has been through a nasty divorce (divorces also happen in small towns/villages) and as such half of the village (the one who “listened” to his ex-parents-in-law) now think that he (my brother) is the scum of the earth. That isn’t good at all for my brother’s psyche. Also, my brother happens to be better at what he does (driving a lorry all over Europe for a living and in his free time raising a couple of cows and making some pretty good palinka-like drink) compared to some other villagers, and because of that those villagers sort of envy him, so much so that some of them have directly approached my brother’s new life companion and have told her about how in fact my brother is a not that big of a deal because he hasn’t accomplished this and that and that other thing. And I could go on and on with examples like these, all of which haven’t directly affected me while living in the big city: “My neighbor thinks bad of me? F.ck him, I don’t care what he thinks!”. The quiet and calmness is pretty nice in the village though, of that there’s no doubt.