Reply #35: Any big city brings with it a kind of jaded politeness/privacy

[Recursion]

That's true for San Francisco and San Diego (I've lived in both). It's too crowded to be in everybody else's business; we'd all go crazy.

I've also lived as a child in the mid 70s in what in retrospect could only be called a commune (though I don't recall that word being used at the time) and it was just as dysfunctional, controlling, conformist, and pressuring as my cousins' more stereotypical small town in Texas.