Explaining the 'Nowhere-Maxxing' cultural trendfrom @orenmeetsworld

Transcript

You ever get the sinking feeling nothing is cool anymore? You wake up in a boutique hotel or kinda boutique. Curio collection, unbound, autograph, Kimpton. It was a long night, natty wine, a few espresso martinis, pimento, short rib. As you wander out of the hotel for that matcha latte, you don't even know where you are. Dallas, Minneapolis, Austin, Tampa. You get to the coffee spot and the coworker you're traveling with says, Stamped Good is pretty tier. And you think, is it? There's a concept spreading online called no maxing. When every city is a copy of a copy of the best version of another city, maybe it's time to go where it's cheap. Akron, Toledo, Kansas Tier, Birmingham. You can get a big good house, content studio, maybe a goat. See, the tier two cities are robbing you of the millennial dream. Here's the financial case. The people doing the moving thought they were winning. Austin best shot up 40% between 2020 and 2023 because it felt like a cool place to live with good jobs and instead became the overpriced work life balance pro capital of the world. Nashville, meanwhile, is a medium one bedroom at 1,800 rank no state income tax, so it sounds like a deal until you realize it looks and feels like a much smaller version of whatever tier one city you just left, except with no no, worse transit, and a fucking bachelorette pedal tavern on every corner. No one can be started on Portland. The arbitrage that made secondary cities attractive has been largely consumed by the people that moved there. Zukin has an argument that authenticity itself has been commodified. It's no longer a property of people or community, but of things. Beer, cheese, neighborhoods, bikes, experiences you can consume. And once authenticity became a product, a coffee shop looks like every other coffee shop. The Norman looking bro there with his athleisure girlfriend is the same bro from El Segundo or Minneapolis. What made Williamsburg in 2003 or Silver Lake in 2009 or East Nashville in 2015 was the people who made it work to afford it then who good also rank genuinely good tier, whereas the Gymshark bros are questionable. The demographic math is blunt. Millennial homeownership sat at 47% in 2024, a generation consistently priced out of tier markets it culturally shaped by chasing its own hotspots. They moved to Austin and made it expensive. They'll move somewhere else and do it again. A macho bar will follow and if you are in the 53%, I would encourage you to opt out. Toledo it is. So is it a good financial decision moving to a tier two city? If you came in the 2023 and after and rented, it might have been one of the worst of your life. Hope the run club made up for it. At the end of the trip, you land back in JFK. Take the train into the tier, walk out into what is supposed to be the greatest urban experience on Earth. What you see is a matcha bar or a La Labo, then a blank street. Everyone's in line. On the street, the guys are wearing shorts and gats and graphic tees. Wait. Are we in San Francisco?