If you can afford a house in the city, great. Otherwise, living in an apartment, you're constantly at the whimsy of your neighbors. They can easily be people who like to blast loud music for hours or who otherwise make a lot of noise. In practice, these people often cannot be reasoned with and the only solution is to move. I've been living in apartments my whole life and, while there were multimonth or even multiyear periods of quiet, on the whole it's purely a lottery (as neighbors change, or their kids grow and turn into obnoxious teenagers etc.). Now I'm planning on escaping it all by building a house in a village outside the city.