As a rural person, I’ve come to realize that we usually have no real concept of just how overwhelmingly large the population is that lives in huge cities.

It’s easy to perceive New York as just “a lot bigger than any town I’ve lived in” rather than “large enough that my entire town could visit on the same day and literally no one would notice”.

Another one that helps me put it in perspective - “If every resident of New York took a day trip to casually slap one member of my town one time, everyone in my town would probably die of our injuries.” It helps me when meditating on “Why should they wield so much political power?” They already do. This shared voting system just let’s us argue in a much chiller way.

A lot of history makes more sense through the context of realizing both how different city and town life is, while also accepting that an almost inconceivable number of people live in cities.