My Toxic Trait? Having Excellent Taste in Cities I've Never Visited

How we became experts on cities we've never visited and why everyone's cultural radar is starting to look suspiciously similar. 

There is something mildly concerning about opening Google Maps at the start of a trip and realising I have more places saved in Tokyo, New York or Lisbon than in my own neighbourhood.

The hand roll bar? Saved.

The cool vinyl bar? Saved.

The café with supposedly “the best cinnamon rolls in town”? Obviously saved.

I know the cool spots, the best neighbourhoods, the stores I want to visit. I've even seen the hotel lobby and already know what I'm ordering at that restaurant.

And you know what the weirdest part is?

I've never been to Copenhaguen, yet somehow, Copenhaguen has been living in my phone for months. Maybe even years.

I may be a bit of a control freak, but c'mon… don't tell me you don't have a TikTok or Instagram folder full of places you've saved for cities you haven't even booked flights to yet.

It got me thinking, and eventually talking about it with some friends: when did travelling somewhere new stop necessarily meaning discovering it for the first time?

We used to go somewhere to see what was there.

Now?

We see what's there.

We save what's there.

We want what's there.

And then, eventually, we book the flight.

Somewhere along the way, the whole sequence seems to have flipped.

Travel → Discovery

has become

Discovery → Obsession → Google Maps List → Travel.

And if we already know what we're going to find when we get there, what exactly are we travelling to discover?

Your FYP has no passport

Culture has always travelled.

Parisian fashion made it to New York long before TikTok. Italian food managed to leave Italy. The Beatles somehow conquered America without a single GRWM.

So no, the internet did not invent cultural diffusion.

But it did remove a lot of the waiting.

There used to be friction between something becoming cool somewhere and people elsewhere finding out about it. Someone had to travel. A buyer had to find the brand. A magazine had to cover it. A store had to stock it. Your coolest friend had to return from Tokyo and make everyone feel culturally inadequate.

Now a brand can be geographically local and culturally global almost overnight.

A 25-year-old in Madrid can watch a Copenhagen morning routine before breakfast, discover a Seoul café at lunch, add a Brooklyn restaurant to a TikTok collection titled “NYC!!!” despite having no trip booked, and order a sweatshirt from a Spanish brand she first saw on someone in London.

Before 6 p.m.

Our physical lives are still local.

Our reference points increasingly aren't.

And that changes more than our screen time.

Plot twist: the customers got there before the store did

Consider fashion.

For decades, international expansion followed a fairly logical sequence.

A brand entered a country. It found distribution. People encountered it. Awareness grew. Desire followed.

Basically:

store first, obsession later.

Except increasingly, the obsession is already waiting at customs.

When Spanish streetwear brand Nude Project arrived in Miami, thousands of people showed up to its pop-up. Some reportedly waited for hours.

Which sounds less like an introduction and more like a reunion.

These weren't consumers walking past an unfamiliar shop and thinking, Cool, what's this?

They already knew.

They had followed the founders. Seen the clothes. Understood the references. Probably knew which hoodie they wanted.

The physical store wasn't creating the audience.

It was finally meeting it.

Scuffers offers an even cleaner version of this. The Madrid-born brand has used online demand to help decide where it makes sense to open stores internationally.

Read that again.

The internet tells the brand where its cultural neighbourhood already exists.

Then the rent contract follows.

Awareness → desire → distribution.

The geography of retail starts catching up with the geography of attention.

And suddenly being “a Spanish brand” doesn't necessarily mean your cultural relevance stops at the Pyrenees.

Your cultural soulmate might live in Seoul

This is where things get slightly weird.

Because if the same creators, brands, aesthetics and places can circulate everywhere, physical location becomes only one of the things shaping taste.

Imagine two 25 year olds.

One lives in Madrid. The other lives in Copenhagen.

They follow the same fashion accounts. They have the same Salomon trainers saved. They've both developed an inexplicable interest in chrome furniture. They know the same emerging brands. They both want to visit Seoul. Their Pinterest boards could probably be merged without anyone noticing.

Meanwhile, the person living three streets away from one of them might have absolutely none of those references.

Geographically close.

Culturally? Not particularly.

TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest and the rest of our algorithmic entourage have created something that looks a lot like taste neighbourhoods.

You don't have to live near the people influencing your taste anymore.

You just have to scroll near them.

And once millions of us start scrolling through overlapping cultural neighbourhoods, something else happens.

Why is there matcha everywhere?

This is where our beautiful little story about cultural democratisation develops a slight PR problem.

Because theoretically, having access to the entire world should make everything more diverse.

And in many ways, it has.

You can discover a Korean designer from your sofa in Madrid. Learn about Mexican architecture from someone in London. Find a tiny Copenhagen label because a girl in New York wore it once. Listen to music you would have had almost no chance of encountering twenty years ago.

Our cultural menu has never been bigger.

So why do we keep ordering the same thing?

Spend enough time in Copenhagen, London, Madrid, New York, Melbourne or Seoul and certain things begin to feel suspiciously familiar.

Specialty coffee.

Matcha.

Natural wine.

Running clubs.

The café that could be in Copenhagen.

Except it's in Madrid.

Or Seoul.

Or Brooklyn.

At some point you start wondering whether you travelled 2,000 kilometres or whether someone just changed the location tag.

And this isn't entirely imagined.

Researchers studying independent coffee shops have found remarkably similar visual codes appearing across geographically distant locations. Research into Seoul's Instagrammable café culture has even described a resulting sense of “placelessness”: local spaces increasingly designed around aesthetics that already circulate globally.

Which creates a delicious little contradiction.

The internet gave us access to the whole world, and then we all saved the same café.

Being in the know is getting crowded

And perhaps this is where things get most interesting.

Because taste isn't only about liking things.

It's also about what liking those things says about us.

There has always been social currency in knowing.

Knowing the restaurant.

Knowing the designer.

Knowing which neighbourhood is about to become cool.

Knowing that little place in Tokyo.

Knowing the brand before everyone else started wearing it.

Cultural knowledge worked partly because information wasn't equally available.

But now?

Everyone has Google Maps.

Everyone has TikTok.

Everyone has a friend who sends them Reels at 1 a.m.

Everyone can theoretically find the Copenhagen bakery.

So if access to what's cool becomes easier, perhaps knowing what's cool becomes less valuable.

And taste has to find another way to show off.

Maybe the flex is no longer knowing.

Maybe it's knowing first.

Or knowing something that hasn't been turned into a “10 places you NEED to visit in Copenhagen” carousel yet.

Suddenly, the restaurant with 700 followers becomes more appealing than the one with 170,000.

The beach doesn't get geotagged.

You gatekeep the vintage store.

Someone tells you about a bar and immediately adds, “but please don't put it on TikTok.”

Which is objectively hilarious.

We built the greatest discovery machine humanity has ever had.

And now we are desperate to discover things it hasn't found yet.

Maybe “I found it first” is the new “I was there”

None of this means local culture is disappearing.

Copenhagen is still Copenhagen. Seoul is still Seoul. Madrid is not suddenly Brooklyn because someone opened a natural-wine bar and bought a chrome stool.

Places have histories, languages, habits and communities that cannot be flattened into an Instagram carousel.

And seeing somewhere online isn't experiencing it.

No amount of TikTok research can tell you what a neighbourhood smells like at 8 a.m., which street you'll accidentally love, whether that famous croissant is actually worth 45 minutes of your life or which restaurant you'll find because the place you saved was fully booked.

Maybe that's precisely why physical experience still matters.

But something about discovery has undeniably changed.

We increasingly arrive carrying a version of the destination with us.

A version assembled through TikToks, Instagram posts, Google reviews, creators, friends, brands and hundreds of tiny digital encounters we probably don't even remember having.

The city is new.

The references aren't.

And perhaps that's the strange thing about having the entire world available through a screen.

We can know more places, brands, restaurants and cultural references than any generation before us.

But when everyone has access to what's cool, being in the know isn't quite the flex it used to be.

So maybe the next status symbol isn't knowing where everyone is going.

Maybe it's still being able to find somewhere they aren't.

And preferably not posting it.