Life In A Big City
Recently we studied George Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” and it occurred to me that this work is even more relevant now in a modern world where pretty much everyone rushes to move to a big city. Moscow and Saint-Petersburg are one of those, thus I thought it would be useful for many of you to read about what characterizes a life in a big city and why it is not as beneficial as it might seem at first sight.
George Simmel is one of the first generation of German sociologists, whose neo-Kantian approach helped to form the basics of sociological antipositivism. His essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life” was published in 1903 and was originally provided as one of series of lectures on different aspects of big city life by specialists in various fields. In his essay Simmel describes and compares how people take way of living in a city and a town.
According to Simmel there are some specific things that determine a life in a metropolis:
- intensification of nervous life
This comes as a consequence of dynamic shifts of experiences typical for people who live in a city. People who live in small towns have a more measured and steady mode of living, which make their life experiences less abrupt than bright contrasts of life in a metropolis
- orientation on human intellect
People that live in a big city react on changes of environment mainly using their intellect while inhabitants of a small town are mostly oriented on their emotions and senses.
However, that rationalism of people who live in a metropolis protects them from mental overload which comes from continuously changing events in life.
- significance of monetary economy of big cities
Intellectual life is very related to monetary politics of big cities. It makes a person indifferent to everything that’s related to an individual him/herself. In big cities production is oriented not on an exact client, but on a market in general. Thus, relationship between people become purely buisnesslike.
- jaded indifference
Life in a city help developing other personal state of mind - arrogant and jaded indifference which mostly happens for two reasons. Firstly, people become unable to react on new things with the same energy. Their brain simply cannot process/ grasp all the information that a person consciously or unconsciously put in his/her brain. A person whether he or she wants it or not becomes a victim of innovations.
- insularity
That’s how Simmel determines behavior of metropolis inhabitants to each other. If a person from a big city would have to react on continuous contacts as people from small towns, where everyone knows each other, it would have probably led to emotional burn out.
Metropolis mode of life make people seem very insular from the outside, while from the inside besides this insularity there is not only indifference, but an unspoken desire to avoid the contact with a person, some kind of mutual rejection. But things are not that bad, this insularity provides people with a personal freedom and a feeling of independence.
- fighting for individuality
In a big city there also comes an issue where a person may have a problem with approval of his/her own self. To survive in a metropolis in conditions of maximal specialization and find his/her own place in this world, people try to gain individual difference between each other. That same pursuit to come out of a huge crowd, a desire to be remembered is a basis for such phenomenons as that people that live in big cities are more likely to dress and behave more extravagant. In this fast steam of passing contacts and events for many people such behavior is the only way to be remembered.
Now as you all know what determines a city life there comes a question “What to do with this knowledge” and from my perspective the answer is to simply be aware of those things and take them as something normal and inherent to a dweller’s mode of life.
Text by
Daria Smirnova