If you have a garden (I recommend far from the street to avoid pollution), some wild plants will grow in it. It's good to know which ones you can eat and to be able to distinguish them from poisonnous ones. This way, weeding can become a sort of harvest.

Imagine thinking of population and living as efficiency first and not wellbeing.

Ultimately if we want for 8 billion people to survive on this planet, we have to be somewhat efficient. If you spread out all current human population to a typical rural density (100/km^2) you get 80E6 km^2, or about all habitable land mass on earth. This leaves no areas for anything but human settlement. What you are advocating for is an infinite sprawling suburbia with not even a national park in between, which just sounds like a hellscape.

This is not taking into account that this will require everyone to use transportation to get anywhere (rather than a well-planned city where all daily destinations are a 5-10 minute walk), and transportation at those scales won't be efficient either - if we go with cars we get a network constantly jammed, insanely polluting highways, if we go with rail it would either take an insane amount of rail or the "last mile" would actually be 10 km with little to no infrastructure. In any case it would take an insane amount of time when you need to go somewhere uncommon, like a medical professional specializing in your rare disease, or a DnD hangout, or a scientific conference, whatever.

Other essential services will also be very inefficient like electricity (imagine just how much wiring we would need), or water supply and sewage (which requires piping and dedicated sewage treatment facilities), or emergency response (imagine the amount of deaths because we can't staff enough emergency stations to cover all the sprawl).

I'm not just talking about efficiency in the capitalist sense of profit, I'm talking about the basic sense of the amount of resources required to keep humans alive. We simply will not be able to sustain everyone living in a rural-like setting with a modern quality of life (like access to modern medicine, electricity, running water and internet). There is not enough land and resources on this planet to live like that. The fact that you and other people can do that is because they are (indirectly) subsidized by the city folk, mostly so that there is someone to work all those out-of-town agriculture jobs.

Also, the great thing about not living in a city is the fact you can grow your own food reducing the need for incredible amount of supporting land around you.

If you grow your own vegetables, you're using more land for your vegetables than if you bought them from someone else, because economies of scale make agriculture much more efficient. And in any case I grow some tomatoes and celery on my balcony, you can do that in a city too with proper planning.

Cities are sadness and misery factories, and some of the most polluted places humans have ever managed to create.

Have you ever been to a well-planned car-free (or at least less-car-infested) city? It can be a quiet cozy place with lots of communities forming, lots of green spaces, and access to nature within 10-15 minutes by train. The thing you hate about cities is probably not cities, it's cars and car-centric planning with suburban sprawl (which is ironically what you seem to be advocating for).

I've also lived a big chunk of my life in the forest, and I wanna do that again because I like forests. But I won't pretend it's sustainable for all humans to live like that. This must be the last refuge for those who truly love nature and/or want to work agriculture, which is a very low percentage of the overall population.