It is interesting to note that the everyday life of those belonging to a bucolic setting lacks this obsession with precise time. Simmel describes punctuality as the other half of the calculative personality. Time is partite and under capitalism it is money. If this chain of precision and punctuality is broken, the entire metropolitan life will reduce to chaos. If all the watches in Berlin suddenly went wrong in different ways even only as much as an hour, its entire economic and commercial life would be derailed for sometime.

The attitude that finally comes to dominate the mental landscape of the urbanite is known as the blasé attitude. The metropolitan type in all its modifications creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of external world threatens it. So the intellectualist quality provides a protection for the inner life against the domination of the metropolis.

The irony of the urban existence is that the same factors which have led to a structure of the highest impersonality have on the other hand an influence in a highly personal direction. Simmel points out that there is no other psychic phenomenon which is so unconditionally reserved for the city as the blasé attitude. Too many stimuli that stimulate the nerves to their utmost reactivity lead to this attitude.