I feel like you're trying hard to reframe the situation so as not to admit the obvious fact here -- that your tastes are, by big city standards, somewhat dull.
It's fine if you like living in a place with one museum, an aquarium and a golf club. But don't frame it like there's some mystery about why people choose to pay multiple times your costs to live in big cities: that's where the culture is. Your Atlanta suburb is not an alternative to SF, it's a place where you can live because you simply don't care for the things that draw many others to SF. There's no need to compare the two.
