There are some times I get asked about this website, sometimes directly and sometimes implicitly: what is this actually for, why does it exist, what problem does it solve? Those are all good and fair questions. There are a TON of personality tests on the internet. There are also a lot of "where should you live" quizzes and tools. So why create another one?
Honestly the answer starts with going to graduate school in Los Angeles, during one of the most difficult times of my life.
I went to graduate school in Los Angeles with a genuine intention to do better than I had in the past. I had been lonely and disconnected before, especially in high school, and I also recognized that pattern in myself. So at the start of grad school I made a conscious decision to be proactive and put in extra effort. I got to work to get involved. I tried to join student clubs, organizations, student government. I made repeated efforts to meet people and build friendships or connections.
It did not work. I was rejected, consistently and thoroughly. I could not break into ANY group. The connections I tried to build simply would not form, no matter how I pursued them. I became depressed during the first semester and, honestly, stayed that way across much of graduate school. I did graduate, but I left with a question that would not leave me alone.
The people in my life had a ready answer: That's just grad school. I heard it constantly. Ad Nauseam. And after a while, I got sick of it. Not because it was entirely wrong, but because it felt like it was ending a conversation that deserved to be continued. Honestly is graduate school supposed to be miserable? I did not accept that the experience was simply inevitable, and I did not want to.
So I started looking for explanations on my own. I took A LOT of personality tests, quizzes, assessments, and evaluations of various kinds. I was drawn particularly to the Big Five model of personality, which measures five core traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. AKA the OCEAN model. Unlike many personality tests or frameworks, the Big Five is scientifically validated and backed by decades of research in psychology. It felt like a model I could actually trust.
As I did more research, I came across personality data for locations. There were studies and datasets that had measured average Big Five scores across all kinds of locations. It made me think to myself: what if I compared my own personality scores to those locations?
I created an early version of what would eventually become the Regular Method used on this website. I extensively cleaned the data I had gathered as well as sampled, and I also took a comprehensive Big Five personality test with nearly 200 questions for accurate results. From there I began running comparisons. First against US states. Then against countries. Then finally against cities, which had around 840 cities where I had enough reliable data to make meaningful comparisons.
When the city results came back, I was not prepared for what I saw.
I honestly couldn’t believe the results. I was stunned.
Los Angeles was fifth from the bottom. Out of 840 cities. The place where I had spent years feeling disconnected, lonely, and unable to build the connections I was actively trying to build, it ranked 835th for how well it matched who I am based on my personality.
Meanwhile, my hometown ranked in the top 200. A city nearby ranked in the top three.
I want to be careful about what I claim here. I do not think personality compatibility with a location explains everything about why someone thrives or struggles somewhere. Life is much more complicated than any single model can capture. Although for me, in that moment, it felt like the first genuinely satisfying answer I had to a question I had been carrying for years. Not a complete answer. But a real one. Something beyond the usual, "that's just how it is."
So that experience is why wheresmypersonality exists.
I do not think I am solving a problem that everyone knows they have. Most people making decisions about where to live, where to go to school, where to move for work — they are weighing cost of living, job markets, proximity to family, weather, a hundred practical factors. Personality compatibility and happiness with a location is not usually on that list.
But maybe it deserves a place in the conversation. Because where you live shapes who you interact with, what social norms surround you, what the energy of your surrounding feels like. For some people, in some places, there is a kind of alignment that makes life feel easy and natural. And for others, in other places, there is a friction that is hard to exactly name but impossible to ignore.
If you have ever felt out of place somewhere and wondered whether the problem was you, it might not have been. It might have just been the place.
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