How "siloed" are you?

[rousseau]

Don't mean politically. It recently occurred to me that I've started to gravitate toward certain people when it comes to various services in a way I never used to.

Example 1: A couple of months ago I needed an emergency root canal, but all I got from my dentist was a specialist appointment out of town that was days away. Frantically calling around while contemplating cutting my head off, I was rescued by a gruff, no-nonsense dentist in his sixties with nothing in the way of the considerate bedside manner you expect these days. Suddenly what always made me so uncomfortable at my previous dentist's, a much younger guy, came into clear focus, namely the insincere and obsequious show of attentiveness, the seeming hypersensitivity to current niceties. My new dentist is a plain-speaking farm owner (and an interesting mix of the politically liberal and libertarian).

Example 2: After years of getting my hair cut by conversationally inept drones at those discount places, I accidentally walked into a men's barbershop run by a lone guy in his late sixties, and now I'm hooked. The talk, the jokes and the camaraderie are free-flowing. Why had I never thought about trying one of these places before?

I never used to discriminate much, but as I get older I'm starting to consciously seek out people I feel more comfortable around when it comes to certain areas like the examples above. In some ways I can see the potential danger of cutting myself off from demographic diversity, but then again, it's not like I agree with everything that the dentist and the barber say, or have limitless commonalities with them.

Do people in big cities really come into contact with a wide variety of people all the time? Isn't there some "siloing" happening there too?