alt Hacker NewsI think the article and the book tend to forget the terrible living conditions in cities back then, and instead psychologize them.
More than half of people in big American cities lived overcrowded -- that is, >2 people in a room, INCLUDING KITCHENS! Many rented just a bed for half a day! They slept, and the other half the other person, who worked in night shift, slept on it.
In big cities, the traffic in the streets, with horse carriages riding on cobble stone, and cars, started at 6:00 and lasted till midnight. Steam locomotives made a lot of noise and smoke. That's cortisol, lower immunity, more other consequences.
And bear in mind, not everyone had electricity, not to speak of central heating. You had lots of chimneys everywhere. Not everyone had sewer, tap water and so on. I guess, a good deal of these people migrated to cities from more quiet places, and since there was no notion of harmful environment.
We tend to be surprised why modernism got so much traction, and even the best architects hated cities (e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright, who wrote something like "a city plan is a fibrosis"), but the reasons were everywhere, real and brutal.
So I'm pretty sure the reason for people being nervous, is quite physical, not "people were scared", as you may conclude from the article (although this is not explicitly stated).
[EDIT] Forgot about the social environment. When you move to a big city as an adult, without the college/university to give you social fabric, you're quite lonely. And in big cities this fabric was getting thinner with urbanization. And you're short on money, can afford only a bed, and count every cent. I think it's a more serious reason to get neurotic than times changing too rapidly.
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> Many rented just a bed for half a day! They slept, and the other half the other person, who worked in night shift, slept on it.
This is not unheard of for south Asian immigrants in European cities, which typically do hard, low paid work (car cleaners, gig economy delivery "partners" etc).
All that for what ? So people can order take away in Berlin from a place that's 10 minutes away from them by bike, because they clubbed too hard last night. And the profit finds its way to America (doordash owns Wolt).
And bear in mind, not everyone had electricity, not to speak of central heating. You had lots of chimneys everywhere.
LMAO is this most houses where I live in New Zealand. Smoke coming out of chimneys for people to keep warm, often burning coal. They have electricity of course but it's too expensive to heat their houses.
We were also completely coked out of our mind. An issue oddly ignored by the article given they literally mentioned Coca Cola and so are presumably aware of its history. It wasn't until 1903 that Coca Cola removed cocaine from its recipe, but its use and abuse was absolutely widespread everywhere. People were using it recreationally, people no less than Thomas Edison remarked that it (in Vin Mariani [1]) "helped him stay awake." Popes were using it, generals were using, factor owners were pumping their laborers with it to maximize productivity, and much more. It wasn't restricted until 1914 and then defacto banned in 1922.
That's already going to increase anxiety dramatically amongst users, let alone the rest of society walking around in extremely crowded cities where a sizable chunk of the population was completely coked out of their minds at any given moment.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vin_Mariani