How much does it cost to live, eat, work, and play in the spaces that bring you the most joy? In evaluating your options, it may be best to compare your personal joy return. Instead of living in a large vintage home you re-modeled, it may be better to love closer-in—nearer to art, architecture, and artistic people. Smaller space, yes, but you can have fun fixing it up within space limits that residents of Paris, NYC, or Tokyo have had to face forever.

Who are the friends you’d most prefer being with? Should you invest more time with them? What about food, fitness, spiritual, hobby or other interests you’d like your life to be more filled with? Health care, nutrition, or alternative medicine? What about traffic, gossip, dogma, ugly landscapes, politics, isolation, and other things you want to get away from? All of these things can be weighted compared, sliced and diced to analyze the best ways of getting more enjoyment.

Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City: How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life gets into the geography of where you soak up the most creative energy. And in that decision process, you can add on weightings and ratings for how you most like to spend time, whether for work, play, learning, or creating.

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