Every Place Is Famous for Something

Or: Why Nothing Is Boring, Only Unsorted

There is a quiet assumption baked into how we talk about geography: that most places are unremarkable. Flyover country. Nowhere towns. Empty stretches of road. Locations whose defining feature is the absence of defining features.

This assumption is wrong.

Not morally wrong—structurally wrong.

Stuff happens everywhere. All the time. The only difference between a “famous” place and an “unknown” one is not whether things happened, but whether what happened has been ranked, selected, and repeated.

Every place has a claim to fame. Most of them just haven’t computed it yet.

Nothing Is Empty. It’s Just Unindexed.

Consider any square mile of Earth. It has:

Geological history measured in millions of years
Weather patterns that never exactly repeat
Human passage, even if brief or undocumented
Decisions made, avoided, or deferred
Conversations held, arguments ended, kisses shared
Accidents, near-misses, quiet moments of resolve

The idea that “nothing ever happens here” is less an observation than a failure of sorting.

We confuse lack of annotation with lack of events.

A desert looks empty until you understand hydrology. A rural town looks dull until you learn what almost happened there. A nameless intersection becomes notable the moment you hear the one story people still tell about it.

Nothing is empty. Everything is merely unindexed.

Interesting Is a Ranking Function, Not a Property

The word interesting feels subjective, even frivolous. But in practice, we treat it as an algorithm.

Events compete—implicitly or explicitly—across a set of criteria:

Uniqueness: Did this happen anywhere else?
Consequence: Did something change afterward?
Symbolism: Does it stand for something larger?
Narrative quality: Is it easy to tell, remember, repeat?
Verifiability: Can it be pointed to, dated, marked?

Every location has an ongoing, invisible leaderboard of events. Most of the time, no one bothers to run the comparison. But when they do, something rises to the top.

That thing becomes the story.

The most interesting thing to happen here.

Claims to Fame Are Emergent, Not Planned

Very few famous places set out to be famous.

Gettysburg didn’t aspire to define American memory. Kitty Hawk didn’t intend to launch aviation. A random stretch of highway didn’t plan to host the most photographed gas station in the state.

Claims to fame emerge retroactively. Something happens. Then, much later, someone notices it was the most interesting thing that ever happened there.

History isn’t written forward. It’s ranked backward.

This is why fame feels arbitrary in hindsight. The event that wins wasn’t necessarily the loudest at the time. It was the one that survived comparison.

Promotion Is Itself an Event

Once an event is selected as a place’s defining story, something strange happens: the act of promotion becomes a new event layered on top of the original one.

A plaque is installed. A festival is created. A sign goes up:
Home of the World’s Largest…
Site of the First…
Where History Was Made.

Tourists arrive. Money flows. Identity hardens.

At that point, even if the original event was modest, the decision to elevate it becomes historically consequential. The town that decides “this is who we are” has changed itself.

Meaning compounds.

Why Small Places Defend Their Stories

When a place has only one widely recognized high-ranking event, that story becomes brittle.

Challenge it and you challenge the place’s identity. Introduce a more interesting story and you reorder the hierarchy. Reveal a forgotten past and the narrative fractures.

This is why some towns bristle when their claim to fame is questioned. It’s not defensiveness—it’s structural fragility. When there’s only one story at the top, everything rests on it.

Places with multiple ranked narratives are more resilient. Places with only one cling tightly.

The Radical Implication: Claims to Fame Are Recomputable

If interestingness is a ranking, then it isn’t fixed.

It can be recomputed.

Most interesting geological event
Most interesting human story
Most interesting thing that almost happened
Most interesting event to a specific community
Most interesting thing this decade, not ever

Every place has multiple leaderboards waiting to be run.

A town doesn’t have one story. It has a dataset.

This Is Not Tourism. It’s Meaning-Making.

This idea is often mistaken for marketing: find a hook, brand the town, attract visitors. That misses the deeper point.

What’s really happening is this:

Humans cannot tolerate infinite undifferentiated experience. We sort. We rank. We tell stories about the winners.

A claim to fame is simply the story that beat all the others.

And because things happen everywhere, every place is meaningful—whether or not anyone has bothered to notice yet.

Nothing Is Boring. It’s Just Waiting.

The world is not divided into interesting places and uninteresting ones. It’s divided into places whose stories have been surfaced and places whose stories are still submerged.

Every road has a best story.
Every town has a top-ranked moment.
Every nowhere is one comparison away from being somewhere.

All it takes is the decision to ask:
What was the most interesting thing that ever happened here?

And then to listen carefully to the answer.

The Inner Monologue