>extras usually in the form of various culture and activities
Note that the average local more or less intentionally can't afford the time or money to visit the tourist traps. If you are not rich and want to visit the museums and galleries of Chicago, or attend a Bears game at the stadium, or a music concert, you can't live in Chicago because then you'd be too poor, you have to live elsewhere and visit.
What dense, expensive, low standard of living areas provide, is extremely dense employment. No matter how unique your job is, there's dozens to thousands of positions within walking distance of your current employer. In the more rural areas you'll see a lot more sinecure behavior, retired in place, people who've worked the same place for 20 years, nobody (such as yourself) gets promoted because the company doesn't grow and nobody quits, etc. Long term relationships are comfortable and lower stress on average, yet also less exciting and less adventurous, just like with love life.
There are also minor behavior constraints. If there's 50 companies all doing the same thing in a big city, then stack ranking basically wastes a lot of HR money pointlessly shuffling people every year, but at least its possible, whereas in a rural area especially if its a company town, stack ranking would rapidly destroy the company because the applicant pool is too small to sustain bad behavior. As a gross generalization people tend to spend far less time commuting in rural areas than urban, but the rural commute has more (high speed) miles so it is more expensive, in the city a twice a day rush hour commute might waste more than two hours of precious life per day, but at least its short therefore cheap, whereas in the country it'll be a comparatively lightning fast 30 minutes each way, but at 80 MPH and 50 cents per mile, that'll be an expensive 40 mile daily commute. City people are amazed how much rural people spend on their commute, rural people are amazed how much time city people spend on their commute.