Well back then all of your friends and relatives were probably living in the same village. Now they might be spread-out over hundreds of kilometers or even much

Well back then all of your friends and relatives were probably living in the same village. Now they might be spread-out over hundreds of kilometers or even much more. Seems like fundamentally different situations to me. > If you lived in a viking settlement or out in the wilderness of the Wild West or some secret monastery at the top of a mountain range in Tibet that's pretty damn isolated. Or a lighthouse. Or an island. 'etc. That was a statistically insignificant proportion of the population even back then (assuming by 'viking settlement' you mean in Greenland or something like that)