I don’t know about that being such an absolute. Personally, I feel pretty connected with people just being around them even if we aren’t interacting directly with one another.

It’s also fairly easy when living in a big city to know your neighborhood well enough that if you don’t want to be alone you can expect to run into one or two of a certain few people at different locations.

Like I know of I got to x,y,z coffee shop I can run into acquaintances of set X, Y, Z. If I want to grab a night cap at bar a,b,c I am run in to set A, B, C. And if I just want to be alone I can just wave and say hi.

You just succinctly described why I decided to dip out of a big city into exurbia when the pandemic started. I figured that if I'm going to be lonely, I may as well do it in nature.

Turns out that being alone in nature (as I realized in college) actually doesn't make me feel lonely. This is going to sound kinda weird, but I actually feel a sense of togetherness and belonging being near trees, dense foliage, animals. I wonder why this is? I'm sure there are millions of years of evolutionary evidence to answer my question, but it remains fascinating to me.

I've noticed this as well. Just the thought of being alone in a quiet forest with the sounds of the leaves rustling and the birds chirping, and the smell of the conifers puts me in a relaxed state of mind. I've noticed also that my mind almost reflexively anthropomorphizes the organisms around me, and I have a nebulous hypothesis as to why this is.

Consider this: those who become blind later in life often experience visual hallucinations (Charles Bonnet syndrome). It seems like there is something like a vision module in the brain which, when under-stimulated, starts producing its own content.

Maybe we have a social module as well, which, when under-stimulated by social interaction, starts hallucinating that non-human objects and organisms have human sentiments, and we feel a sense of affiliation as we might toward a human. The happy difference is that there is never a risk of negative social feedback from trees, rocks, or chipmunks, in the same way that there is a low risk of negative social feedback from very young children or kindly old ladies, toward whom I at least also tend to feel a reflexive sense of affiliation.

Thus, the feeling of togetherness we experience in nature is a result of our hallucinating social agents that never give us negative social feedback.

Moreover, exercise and the outdoors make you feel energetic and refreshed for other reasons, and when you feel good, the threshold stimulus for affiliative feeling is certainly lower.

This sounds great to me, but could you give an example of the sort of town you mean? I am only really experienced with NYC, which due to geographic and traffic constraints, just seems difficult to dip into more than once a month.

I'm not aware of any in NA, but I have a few places staked out in Europe and Asia to potentially retire in. What I was talking about depends on efficient nationwide mass transit, which I assume is generally better in smaller countries.

If you live in or around Princeton NJ you can live in a nice college town that's about 1.5 hours from NYC by train or 50 minutes to Philadelphia by car.