There are some huge cities in this world.

Worldatlas.com lists the largest metropolitan areas on the planet. Tokyo comes out on top with a population of 32.4 million, followed by Seoul (20.5 million), Mexico City (20.4 million), New York City (19.7 million) and Mumbai, India (19.2 million).

The most densely populated incorporated city in the United States is Guttenberg, N.J., a suburb of New York City, that boasts 56,012 people per square mile. That is more than the population of Enid crammed into just a square mile. Whew. Can you imagine? Hey, buddy, get your elbow out of my ear? What, that’s not your elbow? Ewww.

The most densely populated city in the world is Manila, in the Philippines, with 1.6 million folks crammed into an area of 14.88 square miles, or some 111,576 people per square mile. That’s a bit too close for comfort.

Enid, in contrast, covers 74.1 square miles and has a population density of 648.2 people per square mile. Sometimes that seems crowded enough.

The state with the smallest population density is Alaska, with just 1.2 people per square mile. That may be going a bit too far the other way, unless you happen to be a hermit.

I have friends who live in large cities, and they love it. They talk about the variety of entertainment available to them, they enthuse about the vast range of shopping venues they enjoy, they gush about the cultural opportunities, they drool over the plethora of delectable restaurants they can frequent.

I hate them.

Then I stop to think of the other side of big city life. Traffic, for instance. And a higher cost of living. Not to mention just having so many more people around them day in and day out. I love mankind, but sometimes people drive me crazy.

Speaking of which, living in a large urban area can, in fact, be bad for your mental health.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a study conducted in Germany and published recently in the journal Nature.

They studied 32 volunteers and found that certain areas of the urban dweller’s brain react more vigorously to stress than those who live in smaller towns. That, researchers say, may help explain how living in the city can boost the risks of schizophrenia and other mental disorders.

The amygdala is the area of the brain that reacts to threats in one’s environment. Researchers found volunteers from cities bigger than 100,000 population showed more activation of the amygdala and the circuitry that regulates it than volunteers from towns of more than 10,000, whose amygdalas were more active than those from rural areas.

The test involved the volunteers solving math problems while connected to a brain scanner. The test subjects were led to believe the problems would be easy, but in fact they were hard enough that the volunteers got more wrong than right.

Then the volunteers were criticized by a researcher for their poor performance. The researcher said the test subject’s math skills were surprisingly bad and disappointing, and questioning whether or not the volunteer had the skills necessary to take part in the study.

Perhaps the urban dwellers’ amygdalas (amygdali?) were stimulated not because they live in big cities, but because the researchers were acting like jerks.

I like living where I do. I suspect many people feel the same way, whether they reside in a Manhattan high-rise or in a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness.

You can be happy wherever you live. You can be joyous in the middle of a crowded New York neighborhood, or you can be miserable on a beach in Hawaii.

It is, as Jimmy Buffet said, a matter more of your attitude than your latitude.

I like having a 10-minute commute (and that’s if I hit all the red lights). I like not having to drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic at 75 miles per hour (or faster).

I like living in an area where people are generally nice to one another, where neighbors genuinely seem to care about one another. And it doesn’t hurt that Oklahoma ranked third in CNBC’s recent index of states with the lowest cost of living.

I like living in a place where people greet each other on the street, whether they know each other or not, and where drivers wave at one another using all their fingers, not just their middle ones.

I wish we had more restaurants, more shopping, more direct access to concerts and such, but I can live without them.

I love going to big cities. There is a palpable level of excitement in a big city, the noise, the hustle and bustle, the jostling crowd and some unforgettable smells. But the nice thing is, I don’t have to live there.

A former co-worker of mine, who has long since passed on, said her philosophy was to “bloom where I am planted.” That certainly seems to beat the alternative, which is to wilt, no matter where you are.

Big city, small village, crowded high-rise or remote encampment, in the end it doesn’t matter where you live, just how.



Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle. E-mail him at jmullin@enidnews.com.