The Culture in Austin
A wholesome, soulful city full of excellent people
I’ve never really felt at home in a city until I found Austin.
Austin is an electric city charged with young energy. Although almost everyone who lives here isn’t from here, most people I meet are welcoming, healthy, honest, open-minded, spiritual, self-aware, smart, and authentically ambitious. People here are curious. People here are intensely present. People here are alive.
If you eavesdropped on some conversations, you’d probably hear words like breathwork, surrender, Bitcoin, seed oils, trust, raw milk, God, boundaries, ChatGPT, and aligned. If you went to a coffee shop, you might see a guy reading The Creative Act. If you peeked over his shoulder, you might see him using black and white mode on his phone. People here are inspiring. They care about growing. They happily reject the degenerate lifestyle. They think long term and seek out sustainable things.
While what I’m writing obviously doesn’t describe every human that lives in Austin, I have seen and heard and testify that there is a subgroup of people here that are dedicated to the pursuit of truth and excellence—not comfort. When I drove down in January, I had a theory that my type of people were here. But boy oh boy I was shocked to find out how many people here actually value what I value. And it’s overwhelmingly rare: what kind of person values intellectual curiosity? What kind of person actually stretches and meditates? What kind of person thinks that TV is a distraction?
In college, it was rare for me to find friends because it seemed like everyone wanted to smoke weed and sit on the couch all night. But I always thought that there was something more to life. I used to think that people like me didn’t exist—until I came to Austin. This city gives me the same hope that George Orwell expressed in 1984: “Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad.”
Get More Ripped
While there are plenty of pockets of people with something for everyone, one message Austin sends is that you should get more ripped. If you spent some time here, you’d notice right away that everybody is always running everywhere all the time. It’s sunny and sweaty for most of the year, so if people aren’t running, they’re walking, biking, and rucking. The default hangout tends to be a walk, since there’s a trail right next door to downtown.
If you zoomed in even closer on people, you’d notice that many of them wear Oura Rings, Garmins, Whoop Straps, and barefoot shoes. But the real reason you can tell people value their health here is not actually by the technology they wear but what they look like. There’s a saying that goes something like, “People who are actually healthy don’t need to say that they’re healthy because you can just tell. People who say they are healthy are lying to themselves.” I have never seen such savages walk around planet Earth in my life. I’ve seen guys who look like a walking statue of David, with bulging bicep veins, chiseled jaws, and traps like the Hulk. I’ve seen girls outrun guys. I’ve seen people who could be pros at jump rope, handstands, and juggling a soccer ball.
A friend of mine once said that Austin is the type of place where you will get fit by accident. By living in a warm, energetic place like Austin, I now just naturally do things I never would’ve done had I stayed in Colorado. I often joke to myself, “I’m not a runner but I go on runs.” I sit down to sweat in the sauna. I do yoga. I don’t feel weird about wearing blue-light blockers when it’s dark outside. I do my best to avoid tap water and plastic bottles. I don’t drink caffeine anymore. Almost everything I eat is grown or slaughtered.
Lest you think that I’m an abstemious monk who has no fun, I still like to baby myself with the occasional slice of berry chantilly cake from Whole Foods or some of those “yogurt” pretzels. While a lot of this might sound extreme to a past version of myself, all I would say to him is: “Dude, I feel so much better when I actually take my health seriously. A lot of people say that they value their health, but they don’t really. Sadly, our world is broken, and what most people are doing isn’t working. It feels awesome to have natural energy like this and to be around others who think and feel the same.”
The most surprising example of this is my dentist. I’ve never met a health professional who’s mentioned Joe Rogan and mouth-breathing. I’ve never had a dentist take a picture of my airways and tell me that I have low tongue posture. I never would’ve thought that after a routine teeth cleaning, I’d be taking an allergy test that an ENT developed out of frustration with misaligned incentives. This man is actually excellent, just like the people who live here.
As I’ve seen in studying the history of technology, every new invention is an extension of our bodies in some way. A car is an extension of the foot. A podcast is an extension of the ear. A book is an extension of the eye. But over time, there’s an invisible numbing of the senses that takes place, and being here in Austin has made me realize that the body needs more nurturing. Sure, it takes “more time,” but what if that’s how we’re supposed to be spending our time?
As Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine, once wrote:
“What was once niche is now mainstream in health discussions: clean eating, resistance training, sprints, avoiding blue light at night, sunrise viewing, phthalate avoidance, meditation, breathwork, cold, heat, creatine, microbiome, peptides, clean water etc. Health is a practice.”
Align Your Ambition
Last week, I went on a run and saw a graffiti cartoon below a bridge. It was a drawing of a man. But instead of having a human head, a boxy computer took the place of his face. On the computer screen, there was a message: “REMEMBER: YOU ARE REPLACEABLE!”
Every day in Austin, I see Teslas, Cybertrucks, and self-driving Waymo taxis. Judging by the futurist feel and all the conversational reminders about using AI, Austin acknowledges and accepts automation. But crucially, this city pushes back and also says: “You are not replaceable. You need to surrender to your unique gifts and figure out what ignites the fire in your soul.” Austin whispers and screams authenticity, alignment, abundance, and awareness.
People in Austin are ambitious, but not in the traditional sense of the word. They don’t engage in status wars and aren’t envious Cains who wish to make as much money as possible. Instead, there’s a more chill type of ambition where everybody is allies and wants to support each other. It’s a place where people don’t care as much about what you do but rather who you are. If you’re excited, they’re excited. One question I hear people ask all the time is, “What are you looking forward to this week?”
In Austin, spirituality and ambition are one and the same. People have come to the collective conclusion that money is usually a means to something else and that we have to find the things that we’re meant to be doing. People try to embody the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita:
“You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction … Those who are motivated only by desire for the fruits of action are miserable, for they are constantly anxious about the results of what they do.”
As a college dropout, it’s been refreshing and amazing to be here. I’ve never met so many young and crazy-curious kids who didn’t go to college. To even meet just one other physical person on a different path is so comforting. I’ve also never gotten so much encouragement from other adults about how great of a decision I made in leaving college. Many friends and mentors have told me that I’m ahead—not behind—in how I’m thinking about things. I can’t tell you how good it feels to hear that. And while I’m still solving the money puzzle as my parents pay my rent right now, all I can say is that I have this feeling that I know I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. As the musician Zach Bryan once said, “I don’t know where I am, but I know exactly where I am.”
I used to be confident and comfortable in the identity of “pre-med college student.” But when I told people that I was a writer, I felt insecure about it because I don’t make any money from it—even though I felt an intense calling to take it seriously and create my own curriculum of timeless books.
Living in Austin changed that. I feel safe. I feel secure in pursuing low-status projects. The more time I spend here, the more I see that labels are limitations and that the most meaningful things can’t be measured. In fact, the word “prestige” comes from the Latin praestigium, which means delusion or illusion. I get the sense that people in Austin feel the same way that Henry David Thoreau did at Walden Pond: “The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?” If each person really is unique, then what if status is just a mass delusion, a Procrustean bed of the soul?
Go Deeper
“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” — Ray Bradbury
One of my favorite spots in town is called Lizard Yoga. In the lobby, there’s a sign that says, “heavily meditated.” People in Austin are like that. They’re tapped in. They have this intense presence. They’re curious, not judgmental. Just by the look in their eyes, you can tell that they care about nothing other than listening to you. You don’t have to fight to get a word in. Silence in conversation isn’t awkward—it’s peaceful.
Very few surface level conversations happen here. It’s almost effortless to go deep by default with people and talk about things I’m learning or struggling with. People like talking about ideas. Ideas!? I never thought that I’d find so many smart people like those I followed on Twitter and Substack. It’s one of the best parts of my week to ask my friends what they’re reading. As a friend said when he first visited Austin, “Wow, I actually get value from every conversation that I have!”
People here also wonder what’s going on inside of you. Men’s clubs and sharing circles are a regular, acceptable thing. Austin is a city of unlearning, and people have done the inner work to heal and decondition themselves from past generations of emotional sickness. For many men, like me, it’s our first chance to share suppressed stuff with other safe guys. Austin has helped open my heart and made me feel more comfortable with sharing my own feelings. If I’m having a bad day, for example, I no longer tell people that “I’m good.” It’s scary to be vulnerable, but with vulnerability comes freedom and intimacy, things that seem to be lost in our world.
Although Austin is traditionally seen as a blue city in a red state, people rarely talk about politics. And if they do, like in an election year, people detach from reductionist labels like “Republican” and “Democrat” to objectively and consciously evaluate each topic by its own merit. I get the sense that people here don’t really pay attention to the news, because they know that it’s mostly irrelevant garbage that was designed to deceive. In the words of Balaji Srinivasan: “What is important often is not new, and what is new is often not important.”
People here are also cautious with their social media use. Earlier this year, I met a guy in the sauna who said he stopped watching YouTube on his phone and computer to eradicate his passive consumption habit. I reluctantly tried it out, but I knew he had a point. Now, I just read a book with dinner and feel like less of a slave, which probably has to do with how books don’t have distracting ads in them.
A similar thing happened at a group dinner this past week: me and three of my friends pushed our other friend at the table to delete TikTok on the spot. After deleting it in 2020, I know that I’ll never download TikTok ever again. Same with Snapchat and Instagram. Although I post on Twitter and Substack, I do it all from my MacBook. I don’t have email or social media on my phone, and I feel pretty confident that that will never change.
An outside observer might think that these fellow Austinites I describe are stupidly strict people who don’t enjoy themselves. But the funny thing is that people are very happy in this city because they know what they want and what they like doing and they will ruthlessly protect against all of the addictions that most of the world deems necessities. Sure, maybe studies say that TikTok is harmful, but even if it wasn’t, there’s an opportunity cost that sucks the complete joy out of living a deep life of the soul.
Look Up
“Do you know one sign that you’ve woken up? It’s when you are asking yourself, ‘Am I crazy, or are all of them crazy?’” — Anthony De Mello
I’ve heard a lot of people say this: “I didn’t believe in God before I came to Austin.” I am one of those people. At the beginning of the year, I was an atheist, but now I have no doubt that there is something higher out there.
If I told a past version of myself that I would be mentioning “God” in my writing, he would cringe and judge and think that I was crazy. But living here this past year has convinced me that there are some magical and mystical things that happen in the world. Plus, the more I history I read, the more I wake up to the fact that not looking up is an anomaly in human culture. A friend of mine once said that he’s never met a happy atheist, and I think he might be onto something.
While there are churches here, many people seem to be spiritual but not religious, having different definitions of God. I’m in that group. Even though I’m studying The Bible right now, I still have a lot of trouble believing that that God is the one True God. Regardless of how people define it, one word you’ll hear people say a lot here is “synchronicity” to describe all those coincidences-that-aren’t-actually-coincidences.
Before I came to Austin, a friend told me that he sees intuition as the voice of God. While I sort of scoffed at that idea earlier this year, I now agree with what he’s saying. I used to think that intuition came from me and my own gut, but I’m not so sure about that anymore. As I learned from reading the Odyssey, I know there are things outside of my control and that the failure to surrender my pride to something higher might mean death or decay.
We Need Community
An essay about Austin couldn’t be complete without talking about community, which is the strongest asset of this city. I never realized how starved of community I was until I came here. When I was living at home with my parents last year, I found it hard to find other people who cared about what I cared about. There was never much stuff going on, and I didn’t even know that I was totally numb from a lack of actual social interaction. After getting a cavity filled at the dentist, you only know that your lips are numb because everything else isn’t. But when everything is numb, it’s impossible to know that you are numb. Austin was a wake up call to this.
When it comes to community, I’ve missed out on it since playing high level hockey. I didn’t grow up going to church, so the only place where I had deep, brotherly bonds was in the stinky locker room. In Austin, you will get physical and emotional bonds. You will get intimacy with other people and especially yourself. You will get a taste of everything else I already mentioned in this essay, because there are endless numbers of curious people who want to talk about things like attachment styles, Aldous Huxley, and entrepreneurship. In a world where the church and the office are disappearing, Austin has helped restore me socially. But not just with any people, but with the type of people who I want to program me.
For example, when I first came here, I went to this thing called the Board Walks. Every Saturday at 8 am, a woman named Elle attracts a massive group of people for a 5-mile walk around the trails. The only thing you have to do is bring a question you want to explore. Then, as the whole group walks together, you branch out to meet someone new and talk to them about your topic, connecting with them on a deeper level right away. Isn’t this the way things should be?
Something similar to this is a men’s sunrise run club that I go to every Tuesday morning at 7 am. I always look forward to running two miles down and two miles back with a group of great guys at a conversational, Zone 2 pace. After that, we do a group meditation in the park for 15 minutes. Once the timer dongs, the leader of the group might ask us to say one word that describes how we’re feeling or what’s a challenge that we’re grateful for.
The picture I’m painting of Austin couldn’t be complete without mentioning Squatch Fitness. On paper, Squatch is a gym. But when you go there, you realize that it’s basically a social club for student athletes of life. It has a raw, garage-doors-up aesthetic, so I get to be outside when I work out. I don’t have to wear shoes or a shirt. When I walk through the entrance, I see four banners with the Stoic virtues hanging from the ceiling. When I walk past the leg press machine, I see the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson on the wall: “Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
What’s even more amazing about Squatch is not just that there’s a cold plunge and a sauna on site, but that the people there are a different breed. Many of them don’t wear AirPods and are very open to just talking to me. Many of them are also just inspiring mutants who do muscle-ups. Sometimes, I’ll get to the gym around 5:30 pm, on cue with a few of my friends. Sometimes, we’ll hop into each other’s arm farm workouts and have chit chats between sets. Squatch, like Austin, is full of the type of people where you forget that time exists. This is the sort of culture that I’ve always been looking for but had no clue I was looking for.
Wholesome New Norms
“No matter how determined you are, it's hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It's not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.” — Paul Graham
Growing up, I always thought that people were either mentally or physically fit. I thought that you were either a handsome athlete who couldn’t do a derivative or a pimply nerd who didn’t know how to do a bicep curl. But I was different; or, at least, that’s how I saw myself. I always felt out of place in college because I couldn’t find too many people who wanted to grapple with Seneca after supper and then pump iron in the morning. I never really met people who practiced meditation or stretched their hip flexors. I also never really took to drinking because it was boring, expensive, and I thought that “happy hour” was a total myth—as if people needed to add a substance to be happy or that life wasn’t happy when it wasn’t happy hour.
Although I found a few friends over the years, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t lonely growing up, never really having a stable friend group. Just a few close friends who didn’t know each other. For the first 20 years of my life, I was convinced that there weren’t too many people like me that existed. I rejected the fake fun of drinking, but never really thought that most people liked to have fun the way I did. But then Austin found me.
Two weeks ago, Squatch hosted their monthly community workout. After a few minutes of conversation with five other people I just met, we all learned something about each other: we don’t drink alcohol. As one attractive girl said, most of her friends don’t really drink. Same. It’s rare to find this. And while I never had a degenerate phase, some of my friends had their time in college but are willing to accept the tradeoffs of forgoing the scumbag lifestyle.
New norms like this have transformed me. Earlier this year before I met my people, I went clubbing at a place that locals call Dirty 6th. Although I knew I wouldn’t have much fun, I went because I feared missing out. Surprise surprise: it sucked, and my white Stan Smiths got sticky. Why do I keep going out if I don’t like it at all?
Now though, I feel fantastic about missing out on that stuff because I’ve curated a different culture where it’s normal for me and my friends to grab dinner and go to bed early. In other words, I feel less friction in becoming the highest version of myself.
If I had to summarize my entire experience of living in Austin with one word, it would be wholesome. It’s like that perfect feeling of fullness after eating steak and eggs. While I’ve heard that this city has changed in the past two decades, it still sends the same message that Matthew McConaughey described in his memoir Greenlights: “I liked Austin because it always let me be myself. It’s really the secret to why Austin is so cool; all you have to be in Austin is you, and Austin appreciates it when you are.”
Thanks
Thank you to all of the inspiring people that I’ve met here this year. All of you helped me write this essay.
In particular, I want to thank the following people for their generosity and guidance:
, Michelle Florez, Yash Chitneni, Brayden Alley, , Danny Miranda, David Perell, , AJ Mares, Cameron Hogan, , Derrick Butler, Max Schult, JT Ponder, Sergio Apollo, Jack Moses, and Annemarie Allen.Of course, the greatest thanks go to my parents. Thank you Mom and Dad for helping support something that I could hardly even explain with words.
Couldn’t have said it any better!
Great overview of Austin Baxter! Really enjoyed this essay.
Now I have a better understanding of why you love it there and want to stay.
Having lived in dry climates my entire life - I loved our visit to Austin this past Labor Day Weekend AND as crazy as this sounds, I loved the humidity!!!