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Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

Would be interesting to see this study. I personally feel more lonely in nature, especially in forests. I need the energy of big cities to feel a warm glow. I suspect I’m not the only one and there’s a large percentage of the population who are similar to me.

When I used to live in small towns, I would have a strong need to periodically visit a big city to restore my emotions. I love the feeling of being in a crowd even if I never talk to anyone. I love the bustle and noise and potential for new encounters.

Nature feels isolating to me. I wonder if I’m wired this way because I grew up in a big city. We’re wired to look for places where we can feel we’re “at home”, and that’s usually a function of childhood experiences.

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I agree that it might be due to where we grow up ... I grew up in a forest on an island with few people living within walking distance. But I've been living in a small city for about 14 years, and more and more I long to go back to living somewhere were there aren't all these people around. Or more importantly, to somewhere so much more _quiet_.

I think I am same as you. I recently noticed that listening to birds singing make me feel incredibly melancholic. I was very lonely for a few years. I was listening to the singing a lot when I was at my place, and now I have associated birds singing and loneliness. It is unfortunate that something so calming and beautiful now makes me feel sad. It has become the sound of loneliness to me.

Being alone in the city, "alone in the crowd", feels just as lonely if not more so for me than walking alone in the forest. The latter I expect to be alone, but in the former, I'm surrounded by people but with no connection. It's a strange feeling.

There’s a new lot coined word “sonder” that describes being alone in the city and observing others and wondering about their inner lives. As a writer this fills me with warmth rather than loneliness.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/sonder#:~:text=(file)-,Verb...)

There's a difference between "being alone" and "loneliness". Being alone in the city or the forest can be great. Being lonely, less so.

I grew up in a small rural area and experience this in the opposite direction. Sometimes I just need to get away from people, there's too many of them and crowds can be nerve wracking, not to mention noisy.

There is nowhere on earth I am happier than at a family member's camp, deep in the woods away from everyone all by myself. Ultimately I think your last point is absolutely correct. I doubt I'd feel this way if this wasn't a lived experience while growing up.

Yes. I used to live in a smaller city and my friends were from even smaller places (small towns, farms). They have a relationship with open space and with crowds that I don’t have. This is particularly pronounced here in the US where there’s vast expanses and people love their backyards. I never had backyard growing up and never missed it.

When I told them about my dream home being a 500 sq ft apartment in the middle of a bustling metropolis, they said the first thought they had was “claustrophobia”.

But for me, small spaces in dense areas give me joy — living in the midst of an exciting morass of people where people collide in Brownian motion and new ideas form feel like happiness. This notion is much more common in denser places like Europe and Asia.

Disagree, I enjoy hanging out in nature, and when it’s not possible I usually look at images on nature subreddits like r/earthporn. Always manages to calm me.

Sure. But consider that not everyone is like you. There has been a normalization of nature lovers in our time (mostly correlated with upbringing and environment, but in some cases possibly partly correlated with affluence ironically — most of my nature loving friends like spending money at REI and posting nature photos — if that was my hobby I would too — yet I notice that there’s a kind of mimesis going on where it’s now cool to love nature) and it’s an interesting reversal because in my day the opposite was true in my milieu (in a big city, so self selected population).

I come from survivalist stock where my parents escaped smaller more rural places to make it in the city hence the opposite orientation. When my family moved from the downtown core to a more sparsely populated new development closer to nature (forest preserve next door) for my dad’s job, my grandmother and rest of the family felt it was “too quiet”. They missed the connections they had with the fishmongers and shopkeepers and the thriving commercial activity and convenience of being able to buy stuff.

I suspect there is a bias that we see online because those who comment on sites like this and Reddit tend to be introverts and there’s an intrinsic bias toward solitary activities like being in nature. I find the numbers to be more even in the non tech forum population.

These two aren't mutually exclusive tbh, both being in rural areas and cities has its pluses and minuses. Living in some area that's on the edge of a city that lets you have both seems like a good compromise to that. Nature a short walk one way, practicality and connectivity a short walk the other way.

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