I also do plenty of activities I'm not really interested in for the sake of socializing. But always just adopting to whatever is most popular at a given time would be soulcrushing to me.
Go to South Korea or Japan and you'll find rural villages that are more densely packed than cities of 100,000+ in USA and Canada. This density allows for shops and convenience stores to be easily accessible and walkable in every neighbourhood, which nudges towards social interaction. Rather than sprawling everywhere, neighbourhoods are built with the same density as elsewhere (with small apartments, large apartment towers, and/or multifamily housing).
On the other end, megacities like Seoul and Tokyo are really just cities of many neighbourhoods with similar density to the rural towns, with a few areas that are more densely built and populated than others (typically centered around geographical or transportation features). Most neighbourhoods in Seoul or Tokyo feel the exact same as any neighbourhoods in "second tier" cities. (In fact, many "suburbs" of Seoul are more densely packed than Seoul itself due to legacy building heights!) But the smaller towns just don't have subway access to megacity-only amenities.
I suspect that a lot of folks who enjoy North American big city living would do just as well in a smaller East Asian town (aside from cultural and language difficulties).
I don't know about Korea, but in Japan, most of society grew up around castle towns, and with the exception of post-war suburban development, those towns are still the same towns they have today, so population is distributed roughly the same way as in medieval times.
There's also a literature reference to I think Little House on the Prairie where the father sees another family coming into the valley and decides they need to pack up and leave.
There is a long history of US travel out west to get land and space regardless, or maybe because, of how far away from others you can get.
In the big city I do have less interactions with neighbors, but on the other hand, whatever my interest is and however fringe, I will find likeminded people.
I reckon it depends a lot on how far away your interests are from the norm as well as which and what part of the city you are living. The neighborhood I'm in, people do spent quite a lot of time in the corner cafes, restaurants and park and are open to make new friends, instead of just leaving the apartment to go to work.
Naturally everyone does both but in the RPG of life some rogues tend to hang out in the rogues guild in town while others want to be out in a dungeon alongside wizards and warriors.
Panty-sniffing busybodies with nothing to do but mind other peoples' business are a major reason I've lived in cities since I had the option.
Again I funnily enough have the exact opposite experience. In my experience if you live near 1000 people there are a higher risk of there being "gossipy busybodies" than if you live near 100 people or 10. In my opinion the difference is not the amount of people that talk rumors, as it is likely always around the same percentage, but that they drown out in a big city. So I guess the question is, if that is true: Do you care about the rumor or about hearing the rumor?
All it takes to ruin it is one bad neighbor. I went from party and traffic noise, people trying to threaten me to back off when I complained of noise and drugs being sold to waving to people in the neighborhood, walking our dogs together, helping out when a car is broken down, etc. It is like night and day.
Big Cities also amplify loneliness and make it more crushing when you just keep getting lost in the crowd.
Concrete jungles with more traffic than trees are also a depressing drain upon the soul.
My ideal sweet spot is Small Towns near a Big City that you can dip into once every weekend or so.
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.
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.
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.