What brings you here?
I overheard a patron the other day talking to barista about his desire to visit LA. The barista ultimately dissuaded the customer and told him “who needs to visit LA when you can get it in East Austin.” I think that was said out of spite and disillusionment for the changing nature of Austin but what it means to me is that this place is having its seismic moment of change brought on by a new crowd - a highly determined crowd. The migratory winds are blowing and this city and its institutions are in the cross hairs of its growth spurt; it’s experiencing puberty and while some embrace the change, others can’t stand the stench. Nonetheless, we come pouring in.
I was sitting by the pool today and got into a discussion with two guys who had just moved into my building here in central Austin. Nick, 31, came from Boston, worked for a real estate company and got tired of providing data science to a large corporate real estate investor, so he went off on his own to produce Youtube videos and start a consultancy showcasing macroeconomic movements in the real estate markets. Aaron, 37, spent his best years in Northern California as a hardware engineer but felt left behind by the rising costs of living and the punitive fiscal policy and social freedoms. Aaron upped and moved here to Austin only four months ago. We are all three examples of young professionals who have moved here in the last eighteen months to start the next chapter of our lives. Naturally, we all started to discuss the topic du jour - what brings you here?
Two main threads protruded:
1) We came to Texas for the fiscal freedom to not only pursue our ambitions and live better within our means but we are seeking social freedoms without the forcing hands of political ideals that our former homes self selected.
2) We came to be part of a catalyzing moment in history, a migratory eruption, a chapter in a text book, a woodstock moment if you will, and a chance to reinvent ourselves and experience the change from within the eye of the cyclone. We all take the philosophical stance that “the world happens for us, not to us” and we wanted to make something special happen here in Austin.
People like to point to Joe Rogan, Elon Musk or Tim Ferris as the pop culture pioneers and that’s all well and good to iconocize a movement, but our every day lives are quite different from those icons. We are here to make it, not having “made it” already. That’s what Texas feels like right now. We didn’t rush to Austin for the natural resources. None of us are happily baking in the 100 degree weather. We find solace in the lakes, the plains and the hills but we would happily opt for the California beaches, redwood trees and day trips to Napa in the brisk summer months. We certainly didn’t come here for the scenic drives - it only takes five hours to leave the state in any direction. We came for something bigger, more external.
Our reasoning for moving here was a bit more elaborate than either #1 or #2. I would say both played into our decision but it was like a vat of matzah bowl soup, a little bit of job reasoning, some family involvement, a desire for change, some celery, carrots and salt and you have your finished product (or decision) to move to Austin. I think its interesting though to decipher the epoch of change we’re living in. Like Hemingway, Stein, Joyce and Fitzgerald of the 20s, they came to Paris for the moment in time. They were collectively painting the canvas of a time piece that would be demarcated in history. It meant something to be in Paris during those long winters of the 20s when Paris existed as a metaphor to encapsulate the disillusionment brought by the first World War. It was important for writers and artists to be present and they wanted to create the movement as much as follow it. If the early 2020s has any significance and parallel, it’s a moment in time where people are voting with their feet and migrating to make a statement of the live’s they want to live, the lifestyles they choose for themselves and shed the lives that were imposed on them. If you leapt to Austin or Miami in the last eighteen months, you know what this all represents.