Village life may be curing my social anxiety

I'm 27 and for almost half of my life I've been living in various big cities. I've been observing a rising level of social anxiety in me and I was attributing it to just simply getting older and less socially active due to decreasing number of regular contacts.

I also had that presumption that everyone has their own active goals and so I would do my best to compress each social interaction as much as humanly possible to avoid taking too much time from that person.

Now I finally returned to village life and the so much slower everyday pace is just getting into my head. You're just rambling around, greeting people passing you by, some will want to interact with you, after some time you initialize the interactions yourself. You're just taking things slow, enjoying being a part of this community.

And it translates to the usual conversations too. I feel like I'm becoming so much more talkative. Smalltalk is no longer a chore, but rather a nice and refreshing activity.