Thanks for the additional perspective, this is good!

Also, in the movie the captain and his family appear to be comfortable with the city life, and they are hopeful that eventually Dersu will adapt and feel at home. So I must say that the "problems of living in a city" are mainly experienced by Dersu, who feels deprived of many of the aspects of his earlier free-roaming life in the vast wilderness of taiga.

But surely things are different for people who grew up in a more urban environment. On their expedition in the wilderness the captain and his men had a lot to learn from Dersu - and I'd guess if any of them would've decided to try to settle down to live in the taiga, they would've faced a lot of issues =) So, indeed - I think it is wise to avoid over-simplified statements like "everyone should move to the countryside for the rural life is better and more cozy than the urban life!". It isn't that simple, and it doesn't work like that. This is a big theme, and I try to write a blog post or two about it, this winter. But for now, just one more thing;

I'd guess one aspect is that we human beings tend to miss things we are familiar with. And sometimes we take a lot of things for granted, only noticing their value when we are away from those things. So, in the context of rural / urban life, a person living in a city might have romantic illusions of how they would enjoy the quiet simple slow-paced life in the countryside - but only when they move there, in the darkness of late November they realize how it feels not to have access to all the things which in the city simply were there with no extra effort. I think this is perfectly normal and human - adapting to new situations takes a lot of energy, and learning new things often comes with a cost.