Friendships in a big city

A friend of mine is a doctor living in a tiny town in Germany. The kind of place where you walk into a coffee shop and they already know your order. You need help fixing something and three people show up. Nobody sends an invoice.

He visited recently and was very enthusiastic about this. I was sitting there nodding, thinking about how in Amsterdam I can go weeks without speaking to my neighbours.

He made a fair point though. Small places force you to make it work with the people around you. You cannot ghost someone and then swipe to find a replacement. The pool is small. You adapt, you invest, and over time something real grows.

In a big city, the pool is infinite. At the first sign of inconvenience you are out. Why fix something when you can just find someone new? It is like having a streaming service with too many options. You spend more time browsing than actually watching anything. Except with people.

I grew up in a small town in the south of Italy. Friendships there were loud and unscheduled. Someone would just show up at your door. Now I live in Amsterdam and I book a coffee three weeks in advance. Officially we are both adults. Unofficially I have become a calendar entry.

And here is the thing that gets me. It is not even a cultural thing. I know people from places where spontaneity and warmth are supposed to be baked in. They move here and within a year they are scheduling everything and cancelling due to light rain. The city rewrites you slowly and you do not even notice.

So yes, I think my doctor friend is right. Smaller places have a stronger pull toward community. But I wonder how much of that is genuine warmth and how much is just limited options. When you cannot opt out, you figure it out.

Big cities give you freedom and flexibility and access and anonymity. And then quietly, without anyone planning it, they also give you a very specific kind of loneliness. One where you are surrounded by people who are happy to help if you ask, but nobody is wondering what you are doing this weekend. Everyone is fine. Everyone is busy. Everyone is an island that occasionally docks for coffee.

I have made peace with this, more or less. Friendships in a big city are different, not worse. They just require more intention. Which is exhausting for someone who grew up expecting things to just happen.

But then I think about everything going on right now. AI eating jobs. The economy getting wobbly. Capitalism doing its usual thing but maybe with less confidence than before. And somewhere in all that mess, I catch myself thinking: what if all this disruption actually forces people to need each other again?

Maybe just people thinking about the weekend in plural again. Not what am I doing, but what are we doing. Plans that form because someone brought it up, not because three people found a matching slot in their calendars three weeks out.

I have no idea if that is where things are headed. But of all the possible outcomes from the current chaos, that is the one I am quietly rooting for.