Wide context
Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)
/^t/In a village everybody knows everybody and every piece of gossip spreads very quickly. People are like a large family. It is similar in a small town. People know one another, they have friends or acquitances here and there, and they feel at home wherever they go because it is their town. There is nothing like loneliness in a crowd, so characteristic for people who live in big towns or cities and are lost among others, overwhelmed by concrete buildings, traffic jams, and the speed of life. If you go to the street in a city you will see hundreds of strangers rushing in every direction. You will feel like a tiny, unimportant part of an immense machine. Nobody knows you, nobody cares of you. You are just another human being living your ordinary life and being worthy of any interest. You are nobody. It is such a depressing feeling. So you had better move to a small town. There you can find your lost self without giving up the privileges and technical improvements of the civilization. Life is not so intense here. It is much more peaceful. You will not have an impression that you do not matter anything. You do not have to be the man of success. People will respect you anyway. Of course if there is a question of making a professional career there are no as many possibilities of making it as in a city, but it is much easier to distinguish yourself in a small community than in a place where you are just one of many and you have to struggle to get the chance of showing that you are better than others. In a town it is not so difficult to get the job you want, although the choice of jobs is smaller and in order to find something really special and one of a kind you often must travel to a different town, which of course takes some time and effort, but also gives satisfaction of having a good job and a convenient place to live.