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Who doesn’t like getting validation of their lifestyle decisions? It’s even better than getting parking validation at hotels and restaurants.

So reaction here is justifiably positive to the news that our claim to paradise here in the Naples-Marco Island area, has been blessed by AARP as the 10th best place in America to live and retire.

We walk a little taller now. We step a little livelier. We hum a little tune, knowing that being born here or emigrating here from some humdrum place was the right thing to do. Why?

Because AARP’s magazine, the world’s largest circulation magazine, says so, that’s why.

After a long weekend of other-directed self-esteem, however, I started to hear murmurs and whispers from locals who found flaws in our boasting and basting in the AARP spotlight.

“How come we’re only No. 10?” a store clerk asks. “How did we come in behind nine other places?” grumbles a grocer. The most asked question I’ve heard:

“What? Fargo, North Dakota, was fifth? Are you joking? Fargo? That ice-covered wilderness they made a movie about? The one where William Macy as bungling criminal Jerry Lundegaard and Frances McDormand as pregnant Police Chief Marge Gunderson donned earflap-equipped lumberjack hats and ran around in sub-zero weather? That Fargo beat us? That’s crazy talk.”

Ya think? For many of us sub-tropical, palm tree-hugging, sunscreen-slathering, happy hour-hunting, sunset-worshipping Southwest Floridians, living in Fargo or several other places in AARP’s top 10 would be a classic case of going to Hell after it freezes over.

I phoned the Editor in Chief of AARP publications at his Washington, D.C., office to ask that question: “How in the name of gators, golf and grouper sandwiches did you rate Fargo ahead of us?”

He laughed long and loud. He’s Hugh Delehanty, a veteran journalist who has lived in the frozen north and its grueling winters.

“But we considered a lot more than climate,” he explains. “The study’s emphasis was on health and medical issues. Fargo is very good in its affordability of health care, teaching hospitals, exercise and healthy activities by the people there.”

Delehanty noted that Naples-Marco is “not that high” on affordability of health care, whereas Fargo was “very high” on that category.

“One other downside for Naples-Marco was the high cost of housing there. It’s a really great place to live but it’s expensive.”

The AARP executive also noted that our area was second in life expectancy of its residents, behind Ames, Iowa, a frosty college town near Des Moines.

“If we were only looking at paradise towns, Naples-Marco would have been much higher on the list, but being in the top 10 is pretty good, right?”

Well, gee, if you put it that way, OK. Still, Delehanty feels Fargo is a worthy place that gets a bad rap, especially from that movie.

He noted that a lot of people there ride bikes or walk to work, a healthy lifestyle choice. I made a mental note that some Fargovians probably bike or walk because it’s so cold outside their cars won’t start.

We parted friends when I conceded that we know Fargo isn’t really full of people like the movie villains who stuffed their victims into wood chippers.

Yah, you betcha.

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E-mail Don Farmer at don@donfarmer.com