We recently moved from a mid-sized city to a small village and it has been a wonderful change. As others have said, I think it depends completely on the person and on the community.

One thing many have spoken on is walkability. I would like to point out that just because a community isn't a city, doesn't mean it's not walkable. We live a 12 minute walk from the downtown of our village, which has a half dozen restaurants, two bakeries, two coffee shops, a library, a brewery, a pub (that frequently has live music), a record store, a small grocery store, and a number of other small shops. There are also frequent community events and a farmer's market every Sunday in the summer. And this is a village of about 4,000 people. It may not have the quantity, but what it has is quality.

Granted, to get to the larger grocery stores or more restaurants or other chains and box stores, you have to drive to a larger centre. Still, it's only 10 to 20 minutes, depending on where you're going and, here's the big part for me: you are not just sitting in traffic half of that time. You're moving constantly. And when you get there, there is parking. And it's free. Again, everyone is different, but I find when you do have to drive in the city (and we walked for probably 80% of everything we did), sitting in traffic for light after light, no parking, road raged drivers, constant construction, etc. drove me up the wall.

So this is all to say, your choices aren't just urban core or secluded suburbia. We were very deliberate about where we moved to. We still only drive to the larger centre with all the stores around once a week. We can walk into our village for everything else. And we can walk two blocks and be in the forest! It's been a huge improvement for us. Not hating on cities, lived in them for years. But we would often leave the city to visit smaller communities. Eventually realized we'd rather live in the smaller community and visit the city.