I would go crazy from all that noise! I was outside the other morning and the loudest noise was the buzzing of honeybees (I have four hives). When a leaf falls from a tree, I can hear it. In the daytime, if more than one car drives by in an hour, then it must be rush hour. Like Oliver Wendel Douglas said, "keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside."
Nobody gets to be a cowboy forever.
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If I won the lottery I would live in the country as well. With a gazillion acres surrounded by an 18 foot wall with armed guards trained to shoot on site in no particular order: All Suits. And Anyone with a stereo system that offends my sensitive aural passages.
Seriously. Noise makes me instantaneously nuts. My neighbor with the freaking leaf blower...using it in the bloody street makes me downright homicidal. I NEED peace and quiet.
This movie should be required viewing for EVERYONE who lives in the city. And the USELESS police, who would rather spend their time busting kids in a park smoking grass should *beep* recognize.
You get used to the ambient levels just fine, that's no problem, and yes you can hear leaves falling in the city---snow too. It's the aberrations that are annoying, and that depends on the city. I live about a mile from "main st." so I'm not in the thick of it, but it's pretty quiet where I live. Not two blocks away is a thriving cultural district with fairly heavy traffic. Never hear it until I'm right up on it. Part of it is city planning. We have lots of trees, so many of them you can hardly see more than a block. Our city looks like small town America in every direction you go, mile after mile of little old houses and ancient trees. Where I live, you see twenty bikes for every car, and that's no exaggeration.
So it's not all bad, you just have to find the right spot to live if you have sensitivities. I do, and I drove myself mad living in all the wrong places. The country isn't the answer for me. I want to be able to get up in the morning and have ten different tea and coffeehouses to choose from (not because I need them all, though the variety is nice, but because that means there will be one or two that are simply outstanding) and several ten thousand different people in my immediate neighbourhood to buffer anonymity and keep things fresh. Whenever I go out to the country where my folks live, I feel sorry for them with the lack of culture and quality. The local diner serves greasy uninspired dishes, the idea of a coffeehouse is utterly foreign (that it could be for more than just coffee; a pub for sober people), and stale old friendships. I'm not saying that's all there is to it, but for someone like me that treasures good cuisine, lots of new people to meet with no obligation to stay met, and you know---just in general living in an area that has attracted the best of a few hundred or more square miles in order to pitch in and make a living doing what they love---that's just not for me. For some people that kind of stuff isn't important and those friendships aren't actually stale.
And yeah, they can keep Manhattan, too, I've got no interest in city on that scale, either, even if it does offer the things I love at a level even higher than what I get.