Welcome to the city. These are just some of reasons why people prefer it to the beautiful but often dreary countryside. The city is popular throughout the world and has been a favored destination throughout the history of human society. In recent centuries, this preference for urban living has become even more pronounced and in the last two decades, earth has witnessed probably the greatest migration of humans in its history, that of third world peasents to urban areas. People just seem to find it more convenient and more enriching to live in the city, even with all of its defects that include stress, pollution, crowding and loads of pornography. I wish they didn't like it so much. God knows, I'm not happy to have all of these proles bearing down on me.
In this world in which resources are forever prophesied to become more scarce, urban living just seems more efficient. The goal is for the majority of the human race to live in thousands of high-rises on the outskirts of around five-hundred global megacities, and use trains and buses to commute to skyscrapers in the middle of the city, where they will face a computer and (1) program, design or write things that will appear on other computers in other skyscrapers or (2) mastermind the movements of funds that appear on other screens in other skyscrapers or (3) educate the others to properly do the afformentioned tasks. There are others who work as support for this grand undertaking, but these are pretty much the end goals for all of the migrants to the city.
Anyway, I'm back in this city where I have the unusual fortune - nearly unique in all of these rising megacities - to live in a one story courtyard in the center without even having to take a bus to a skyscraper. The trip to three other megacties was a great break but it also reminded that the rest of China, outside of a few blocks in the middles of the two top megacities, is more or less one vast pit. My main advice to the millions and millions of concrete-box dwellers in these places is to act more nouveau-riche. In Hangzhou, after every kind of situation that forced me to leave the confines of the apartment, I found myself wishing that the vulgarian businessmen could at least behave more nouveau-riche. Their behavior suggests they are more proud of their peasent roots than their new money. Nouveau-riche at least implies some degree of pretention and an attempt to pretend that one has some class and culture. Among the various crude money-makers of Zhejiang provinvce, the nouveau-riche are actually a rare breed. The term "bourgeois" could only be used as praise.
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