A Love Letter To Austin

The Library at The University of Texas, among other things, inspired me to write this essay. Particularly something called The Room of Noble Words. It is a wide open space that is lined with bookshelves, and the ceiling is one of those spectacular ones that make your neck ache because you can’t help but stare at its beauty. As you look up, you see some classic quotes in gold. From Aristotle to Jesus to Stephen F. Austin to Marcus Aurelius, they are all thought-provoking aphorisms.

Sitting here, in the heart of the city, made me reflect on life in Austin.

It’s been a little over a year since I came to the capital of the great state of Texas, and I feel more confident than ever that it is one of the better decisions I’ve ever made. I forever will have infinite love for my home in Massachusetts, but this place feels exactly right at this point in my life.

The hardest part, however, is being far from my family. Thankfully we talk every day and visit each other very frequently. This is the greatest challenge about moving somewhere new, and I respect anyone who does not find it is right for them to be so far away from their parents and siblings and extended family.

So, what made me still make the hard decision to take such a big leap?

Well, as far as I can tell, the old saying that people make emotional decisions and justify them with logic is one thousand percent accurate. I can give you all these ad hoc justifications and reasons for why I moved here, which are true, but at the end of the day, the decision to move here was fundamentally not rational.

I still thought long and hard about the decision, but in my heart, it was made in an instant one day when I was at my favorite coffee shop in my hometown. It just hit me, as a sort of epiphany, as the sun was shining through a window, that this would be the perfect place for me to live and thrive and grow as a person. And in that moment, my mind was made up. I felt this overwhelming clear intuition that it would be the place I would have the most success, and most importantly, the most fun. This was System 1 thinking.

More than anything, what drove this intuition was the desire to keep becoming the person I’ve been becoming. After a lot of partying in high school and college, I was consciously trying to move away from that type of lifestyle.

I’ll never forget one night out in Boston that has stuck with me. It was five months or so after graduation, and I was with my old college roommates. We went to a bar in Southie and recognized half the people there. Despite being friendly with many of them, this was somehow disturbing to me. The realization that this was essentially college, part two, smacked me on the head with unbelviable force. I could have been at my favorite UMass bar. It was hardly different.

As fun as that can be, I didn’t want my life to revolve around bars, drinking, and partying, as it did during much of university. I still now love myself a cocktail here and there, but I was deeply, deeply sick of that as a habit—as a way of life.

So, what was the easiest way to avoid that going forward? Go somewhere new, meet new people, and reinvent yourself.

Besides, I’ve always had a craving for adventure and a proclivity to travel far and wide, one that is also far from rational. It’s the existential itch to, in Thoreau’s words, “suck all the marrow out of life,” through seeing as much of the world as I can. On top of that, having already lived by myself during study abroad in Spain, and once doing a long road trip to South Carolina with my friends, the idea of moving somewhere new—and driving there—didn’t seem so daunting.

Now, all that said, what are those logical reasons for living in Austin, apart from a coffee shop epiphany. Practically speaking, Texas is significantly less expensive than Massachusetts, especially Boston. And of course, significantly less cold. It may sound silly, but I started to develop a legitimate hatred for the freezing New England weather. Scraping ice off your car at 5 AM and while your nose is running like a fire house is only cool in Ben Affleck movies about some gritty Boston hero. In real life it just sucks. The damn cold gives me sinus infections and nasty sicknesses every year. It’s like some sort of sinister clockwork. Meanwhile, I haven’t had a single one since being here for over a year. I feel healthier here. I drink up the sun and feel like I’m glowing with ever new levels of strength.¹

Additionally, one of the more encouraging aspects of living here is how many people you meet who are online creators. In Massachusetts, it sometimes felt unbearably lonely, feeling like “that guy” who makes online content. While so many people close to me at home express genuine support, I can never help but suspect that others sneer at it behind my back, but maybe I’m just being paranoid and vain by thinking that. In any case, it is what it is. But it is so different here, where it is as if everyone you meet has a thoughtful blog, a nutrition podcast, a fitness Instagram page, a niche YouTube channel, or whatever. It’s a great relief to not feel like such a weirdo for making content. Perhaps a lot of this is all in my head, because, of course, people do in fact do online stuff in Massachusetts. But it just feels not as common, at least amongst people I know or am aware of. It seems that the default in Massachusetts is to make fun of someone creating online. Which is fine, people are always going to criticize people, and sometimes it is deserved. That’s fine and that’s life. My point is that it’s more likely you’ll hear people say things like, “they’re trying to blow up,” in a mocking tone, and comments of that nature. That is, people are more likely to make fun of you not for what you write in your blogs, or say in your videos, but for even doing it in the first place. As opposed to in Austin, the default are comments are things like, “Oh cool I’ll check it out,” with a smile because they probably do something similar.

Moving on, there is also the cultural aspect to Austin that I love. I think I over-corrected a little bit too much at one point, but after living in Amherst, Massachusetts for four years—where there is probably the highest concentration of Soviet Union sympathizers on the planet—I was so insanely disgusted with the whole woke enterprise and that I wanted to literally get as far away as possible. Sure, Austin, is a “blue city,” but compared to the blue I’ve seen in my life living in Worcester and Amherst, this is nothing.

This preference, however, does not mean I threw on a MAGA hat and stormed the Texas Capitol. Quite the contrary, for, as an independent and centrist, I don’t hesitate to criticize the right. Whether it is delusional MAGA cult fanboys, unnecessary cruelty towards immigrants, insane Christian fundamentalism, or perhaps most dangerous of all, seeming to think we don’t need institutions, there is as much ugly on the far right as their is on the far left. All that said, my proximity to the radical left in college radicalized me against them to an absurd extent, and it seemed obvious to me at the time that people who are more my temperament were slightly center of right, which is still the case, and this is another reason why Austin is a good fit.

What’s more, the company I work for has an office in downtown Austin, which is conveniently close to where I live. And there is no shortage of tech sales people here to network with and learn from. Some people call it “silicon hills” reason. You have giants like Oracle, Google, and Tesla who have a significant presence here, and a seemingly endless supply of wild startups. So it is interesting to be around that as well.

I’m also convinced Austin is the most fit city in the world. I have no data to back this up. But walking around the trails and parks, it is inspiring how many sculpted people are running and walking and biking around, often at impressive paces. And the gym I joined? My goodness. The way people throw weight around in there is electric, and always pushes me to go harder.

It is as if everyone you meet is growth-oriented, fit, and working on a creative project or running their own business. It’s as if everyone is on some kind of spiritual journey. There is this special combination of intellectual curiosity, fitness obsession, and professional ambition to the whole place.

And more than anything, what I love the most about Austin is not the University of Texas football games, or the Comedy Mothership, or Barton Springs, or barbecue, or rooftop bars, or delicious breakfast tacos, or badass gyms, or pickup basketball, or Lady Bird Lake, or beautiful coffee shops, it is actually a woman by the name of Jade. To write about her, though, would take a whole another essay.

¡Viva Austin!

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1. Fate indeed does love irony. As I publish this, I’m sick in this way for the first time in Austin.