Where Is The Place To Be?

Hemingway Went To Paris

I was reading this piece in the Financial Times and wondered, where is the place to be right now? Hemingway and his fellow writers, artists, and intellectuals went to Paris in 1920.

It was after WWI. Hemingway had served in WW1 as an ambulance driver in Italy and was severely wounded. The United States had enacted Prohibition, and the moralizers in the Temperance movement were in full throat, and control.

They were the “Lost Generation” and many of them churned out some incredible fiction and art that lasts to this day. Personally, I love reading Hemingway. I like F. Scott Fitzgerald, and George Orwell as well. There were so many good writers in that era and in that place.

The FT writes, "Paris in the twenties seems now to be the foundation of our modern cultural world. Abstract art, surrealism, existentialism, American jazz, all were bubbling furiously through the cafés of the Left Bank.” It was a primordial soup of creativity.

Other epochs in human history had similar instances happen. The Medici’s and their financing of the Rennaisance in Italy is one example. The great independent Scotch thinkers of JS Mill, Adam Smith, John Locke, and David Hume came up with the thesis that built the organization of the United States. If you were at the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, you could have been exposed to some of the greatest economic minds in generations. More recently, if you were in Silicon Valley during the right times you might have met the Fairchild Republic mafia or the PayPal mafia. They made seminal investments that created the entrepreneur community there and led to huge strides in human standards of living.

If you are in the right place at the right time and network with the right people you can catch lightning in a bottle.

Where is that place today? What is the underlying incentive and movement that is driving it? Leave your thoughts in the comments and if you can provide some supporting evidence that would be interesting.