Cities, love them, hate them

Before I start describing cities, I have to mention that I am not someone that likes to live in a city. I have got a sort of love-hate relationship with them. Love the things that happen in cities involving art and the possibilities to create cool stuff, like street art.

As an artist you want to create new things, stepping away from the crowd. I have always been doing stuff differently my whole life, although people wouldn’t describe me as a weird eccentric person with a different dress code.

I think I started noticing the different choices I made when I went to university and later discovered that it actually takes a lot of energy to constantly swim against the tide. Sometimes I consciously conform to the direction of other people, which is still difficult to accept.

So what is it with cities? A city is where loads of people come together and I don’t like loads of people that come together. You get this group thinking, social behaviour, that makes people do similar things as others. Yet, there are so many people so you can create subgroups that fit your profile a lot more than in villages. So for people that want to be different and accepted, cities are great, it gives them more freedom than villages. Villages tend to have one culture and behave as one group, which makes a lot of people feel more restricted. I don’t really care that much what people think, I like the fact that I know the people around me and they know me. Cities limit my freedom more than villages because they tend to push you in the rhythm of the people much stronger. In some cases stronger than I would like to handle. One of the examples is traffic. In Britain people use the car for every 100m of travel and I like to cycle. I have moved house to a big city and after one week I find it quite depressing how the filth and danger of the traffic pushes me in taking the car and my bikes to drive somewhere less busy to go out and enjoy cycling. JUST THINKING THIS, I FIND ABSOLUTLY DISGUSTING!

You know what freedom is for most people? That they can do things other people like to do and that people let them do it.

What is freedom for me? That I can do whatever I think I want to do even if nobody else is doing it, probably the reason why most of my decision makes me struggle and fight against mindless sheep.