My eyes are vibrating. It is 10:48 PM, and I have exactly 18 tabs open, each one a neon-lit promise of a better life. I am staring at a photograph of a woman with remarkably white teeth holding a craft beer in Boise, Idaho. She looks happy. She looks like she has never spent four hours trying to record the sound of a rusty hinge for a post-apocalyptic short film. I, on the other hand, am Avery N.S., and my current reality involves a studio in a basement that smells like damp wool and a phone that I just realized was on mute for the last 58 minutes, causing me to miss exactly 18 calls from a producer who is likely currently having a vascular event.

But the tabs. The tabs are the problem. They are the ‘Top 10 Cities for Creatives,’ ‘The 28 Most Affordable Metros for Young Families,’ and ‘Where to Move if You Want to Actually Own a Yard.’ They are the glossy, digital manifestation of a collective anxiety that we are doing it wrong. We treat our lives like we are optimizing a supply chain, searching for the highest ROI on our very existence, and yet the median home price listed in the corner of the Boise article-a cool $548,448-is giving me a physical sensation in my chest that feels like a small bird trying to kick its way out of my ribs.

I spend my days as a Foley artist, creating soundscapes that feel realer than reality. I know how to make a head of lettuce sound like a breaking bone. And I am telling you, these ‘Best Places’ lists are the sonic equivalent of a synthesized clap-thin, hollow, and utterly disconnected from the resonance of actual life. I find myself obsessing over the metrics. The lists tell me about ‘walkability scores’ of 78 and ‘average commute times’ of 28 minutes. But they don’t tell me if the wind howls through the power lines in a way that will ruin my outdoor recordings.

The Spreadsheet Tyranny

I remember moving to a city that was ranked #8 on one of these lists about 8 years ago. It was supposed to be a ‘hub of innovation.’ I spent $1,628 a month for a studio apartment where the walls were so thin I could hear my neighbor brushing his teeth. He had a very aggressive technique. The ‘vibrant downtown’ was actually four blocks of overpriced taco joints and a park where the grass felt like plastic. I was miserable, but I felt like it was my fault. After all, the data said this was the best place to be. If I wasn’t happy, I must be malfunctioning. I was looking for a soul in a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet didn’t have a column for ‘feeling like you belong here.’

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This is the tyranny of the listicle. It outsources our intuition to a mysterious algorithm that values property tax growth over communal depth.

This is the tyranny of the listicle. It outsources our intuition to a mysterious algorithm that values property tax growth over communal depth. We are being sold a version of happiness that is measurable, but happiness is notoriously bad at being measured. I think about my missed 18 calls. I think about the fact that I spent 48 minutes today trying to find the right gravel to simulate a character walking through a cemetery. These are specific, weird, un-optimizable needs. My life is not a ‘Top 10’ list. It is a messy, sprawling, 128-track audio file that needs careful mixing.

Recruited to Fill Coffers

And yet, the pull is magnetic. When the world feels chaotic-when you miss nearly 20 calls because you forgot to toggle a tiny switch on your phone-the idea that there is a ‘correct’ place to live is incredibly seductive. We want to believe that if we just find the right coordinates, the friction of being alive will vanish. We want to believe that Boise, or Austin, or some obscure town in the Carolinas with a population of 32,588, holds the secret to our better selves.

But these lists are built on a foundation of city-sponsored data and demographic targeting. A city doesn’t want to be ‘Best’ for everyone; it wants to be ‘Best’ for the people who will pay the most in property taxes while using the fewest social services. It is a competition for the most profitable taxpayer. When you read a listicle, you aren’t the customer; you are the lead being fed into a municipal sales funnel. We are being recruited to fill the tax coffers of cities that have rebranded themselves as lifestyle brands.

This realization usually hits me around 1:28 AM… I started looking at the real numbers-not the ‘best of’ fluff, but the actual, hard data that these narratives try to obscure. The truth is that we need tools that don’t tell us where to go, but rather show us what is actually there. We need to move past the glossy photos of people laughing over IPAs and look at the cold, hard mechanics of a zip code. It was during one of these late-night rabbit holes that I realized the narrative-driven approach is fundamentally broken. We need something more clinical… This is why I eventually stopped looking at magazine rankings and started looking at Liforico, because at least there, the data isn’t trying to sell me a sunset; it’s just giving me the sun’s coordinates and the cost of the shades.

The Grief of Chasing Ghosts

As a Foley artist, my life is defined by the specific. I don’t need a city with a high ‘culture’ score; I need a city with a high ‘abundance of weird antique shops’ score. I don’t need ‘access to major airports’; I need ‘access to a basement that doesn’t flood when it rains more than 8 inches.’ The ‘Best Places’ lists are useless to me because they don’t know who I am. They only know what a person with my income bracket is supposed to want.

There is a specific kind of grief in realizing you’ve been chasing a ghost. You move to the #1 city, you pay the $2,800 rent, you drink the $8 coffee, and you still feel like you’re watching someone else’s life through a window.

I think back to my phone, lying silent on the desk while 18 people tried to reach me. It was an accident, a missed connection. But in that hour of silence, I wasn’t optimizing anything. I wasn’t looking at lists. I was just sitting in the dark, listening to the house settle. There is a sound houses make when the temperature drops-a series of 8 or 18 little pops in the timber. It is a honest sound. It doesn’t tell you it’s the best house in the world. It just tells you it’s standing.

Reclaiming Mediocrity

We need to reclaim the right to live in ‘mediocre’ places. We need to stop feeling like we’ve failed if we don’t live in a city that made the top 100. There is a profound freedom in living somewhere that isn’t trying to be anything other than a place where people exist. A place where the median home price isn’t a headline, and the ‘nightlife’ is just a quiet bar where the bartender knows your name but doesn’t feel the need to talk to you.

I will probably call that producer back. I will apologize and explain that my phone was on mute for 58 minutes. I will go back to recording the sound of footsteps on dry leaves using a bag of cornflakes. And I will close those 18 tabs. Boise is probably lovely. I am sure the people there are very nice, and the beer is exceptionally cold. But I don’t want to live in a listicle. I want to live in a place that sounds right. I want to find the data, look at it without the filter of a marketing department, and make a choice that is mine, not an algorithm’s.

We are obsessed with the ‘best’ because we are terrified of the ‘average.’ But average is where the space is. Average is where you can afford to fail. Average is where you can miss 18 calls and realize that the world didn’t actually end.

The tyranny of the ‘Best Places to Live’ list is that it convinces us that our environment is the primary determinant of our soul. It isn’t. Our soul is the foley artist of our own lives, taking whatever raw material we have and making it sound like something meaningful. I’d rather live in the 388th best city and have a life that is actually mine than live in the #1 city and spend my time wondering if I’m enjoying it as much as the woman in the photograph.

I think I’ll go for a walk now. Not a ‘vibrant’ walk. Just a walk. I’ll listen to the way my shoes hit the pavement-it’s a 4/8 time signature if I pick up the pace. It’s not a ‘Top 10’ sound, but it’s the one I’m making right now. And for today, that is enough.