People are genetically hard-wired to connect with other people. This urge is so strong that if you and me are the only ones on a desert island, we're automatically best friends.
As the population goes up, so do the choices. The fewer the people, the less picky anyone can afford to be. If you live in a village of 30, and one of you is obnoxious, well, you just have to put up with it. But if the population gets to 300, you're less inclined to tolerate this. If the population goes up to 30,000, you're less likely to tolerate even minor defects you perceive in others.
This inevitably leads to a troublesome conundrum, the effects of which we see all around us in modern mass society. We seek to be with other people, but since there are so many options, we get pickier. In a city of 500,000, you just eliminate people who are too young or too old, or maybe people from different backgrounds or of a different economic stratum. Or because of political differences, even racial differences.
At a certain point you become thwarted: with so many options you develop the expectation that you can find someone without critically objectionable characteristics. So you're more likely to reject people for trivial reasons, e.g. this guy doesn't even like the Beatles!
Thus we end up with the weird paradox of people having difficulty finding people to be with even as they're surrounded by thousands of them. Because remember, even if you find someone you can accept, there's no guarantee they're going to accept YOU.
Lonely in an ocean of people. It doesn't make sense, but it seems to happen.
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