We may be located far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.
Scientific American proposes a solution to the Fermi Paradox by using the European exploration of the South Pacific as an analog.
When the frequency of occurrence of settleable worlds in a galaxy is intermediate between high and very low, fascinating things can happen. Specifically, ordinary statistical fluctuations in the number and location of suitable worlds in patches of galactic space can create clusters of systems that are continually visited or resettled by wave after wave of interstellar explorers. Think of it as an archipelago, a group or chain of islands. The flip side to the existence of these clusters is that they are typically surrounded by large unsettled regions of space, places just too far and too sparsely distributed to bother setting out for.