100%. Lately I'm kind of obsessed with cities "in the middle". I don't really know what the definition is exactly, maybe like "you have a pretty big train station" or something, but yeah something where you get all or most of the benefits of a city without the bonkers downsides of "world cities". I think there's a lot to be said about housing costs for sure--probably the main issue but I think it's downstream of a lot of liberal culture that was very OK with building a wall between the and poor people while their housing values skyrocket--but what TFA calls out is also a pretty succinct way to say what I think a lot of people are nibbling at the edges of: there's a single Airbnb/Instagram aesthetic everyone's pursuing and the mechanisms we have for honing whatever we're doing to more perfectly match that aesthetic are so powerful they're blanding things faster than we can create a backlash.

When I rented my first apartment in NYC I needed to buy a shower curtain, and I was in a very "don't use Amazon" mode, which meant I was about to discover how little choice you really have when it comes to buying one locally. I got one home I thought I liked, but hanging it up I discovered it had totally trite _words_ on it like "Happiness" and "Sunshine" or whatever. It was so cringe and not my personality even a little, and I cursed God for saddling me with a lot of unpleasant options at that point (throw it away immediately and create waste and go through the whole rigamarole or getting a new one blah blah). But for some reason I suddenly had the thought that this was really enriching my life. It was so totally unlike me it weirdly stretched my experience in a really refreshing way. It was a low-key funny story. It does actually put you kind of in a good mood if you're not actively resenting it while showering.

Secondary cities are like that, but for your whole life. It might not be your choice, you might not have access to everything you need to sculpt your life for maximum clout or virality, but it turns out that's an insidious kind of poverty. We're better when things outside our control influence us at least a little.

Some examples of this:

- local restaurants take pretty bonkers chances with their menus and change them seasonally, so it's possible you just won't like anything at a place all winter, but then the spring menu is amazing

- there's a gas station a few blocks away from us which isn't that pleasant on paper (traffic, odors, light pollution, though we don't experience this from where we live) but for some reason it makes me super nostalgic

- we used to do a swim class with our oldest every weekend, but there really isn't one here (in English), but the music class we just found is also very fun even though we really wanted a swim class

I could go on. Maybe I'm aging, maybe it's becoming a parent, but the thought of moving back to an NYC or even a Chicago feels deeply uninspiring and exhausting. I want the weird decor/playlist choices. I want the people who only run their shop 2 days a week. The constraints big cities labor under have become too intense for them to really be surprising; they have to be so efficient they can't be robust.