In my experience, it’s harder to make meaningful friendships in the cities I’ve lived in. I met more people, but it always seemed within five minutes or so the question “what do you do for a living?” would be asked, and the answer was “make-or-break” whether the conversation went any farther. For the record, I work in IT and have absolutely no interest talking about it outside of work (unless digital privacy is the main focus). I think a lot of city people are only interested in being friends with their own “class” or out of convenience (e.g., parents making friends because kids go to the same school, etc)

Small towns you can’t easily dispose of people you don’t see eye-to-eye with, and I really appreciate it because you don’t get stuck in echo chambers as easily, and you learn to see things from perspectives you don’t agree with. In my experience, small town people are more ok with their view points being challenged without being totally offended, even if there’s no chance in their minds being changed. You just have to do it respectfully.

My home town is super small (less than 1,000). I moved back to an area close to it with about 7,500 people and found that’s the sweet spot for me. It’s a tourist town, but my friends here are way more reliable and less fickle than the ones I had in the city. Can always plan a trip to the city if there’s some big event that looks fun.

I have actually come to prefer using AI instead of a search engine at work for most things sysadmin related (using DuckDuckGo’s AI chat feature), but I 100% have found that Copilot performs far worse than competing products. Having it that engrained in the computer is a very negative feature, despite the battery improvements.