Nara Smith makes Takis from scratch for her husband while wearing a couture gown.

She also makes homemade chewing gum, breakfast cereal, and cough drops with the serene energy of someone who has never panic-eaten shredded cheese over the sink while answering Slack messages.

Every time one of her videos goes viral, the comment section fills with variations of the same reaction: “Who the F has time for this?”

Well.

That’s precisely the point.

Nara Smith’s content isn’t really about cooking. It’s about signaling distance from necessity.

She’s communicating that she has enough time, money, support, and freedom to do deeply impractical things by hand while looking like she’s about to attend Paris Fashion Week immediately after reducing bone broth for six hours.

Economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote about this in ​The Theory of the Leisure Class​ back in 1899. One of his core arguments was that wealthy people signal status through what he called “conspicuous leisure” and “conspicuous waste.”​ ​

In other words, the ability to waste time becomes a status symbol.

Because time itself becomes a luxury good.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu later expanded this idea in ​Distinction​, arguing that elites signal status through taste, cultural behaviors, and distance from practical necessity.

The richest signals are often the least economically rational.

That’s why luxury brands make handbags you can barely fit a phone into.

That’s why ultra-wealthy people romanticize slow living while the rest of humanity reheats coffee for the fourth time and answers emails with one eye twitching.

That’s why “I only work three hours a day” became such a powerful flex in online business culture.

And HAVE YOU SEEN THEIR POOL?

Of course you have. The pool is part of the argument.

So is the villa. So is the midweek horseback riding. So is the “I took three months off, and my business kept running” post written from Tuscany with suspiciously good lighting.

It’s all the same signal wearing different outfits: “I am free from urgency.”

The working class cannot casually disengage from productivity because survival still depends on labor exchanged for money.

But the wealthy can publicly distance themselves from optimization itself. That’s the flex.

And I think this exact psychology is starting to reshape the internet, especially the creator/solopreneur economy.

For years, the internet rewarded scale above all else: more reach, more impressions, more followers, more content, more frequency, more growth hacks from people whose primary qualification was owning a ring light and a dangerous amount of confidence.

The dominant strategy of the social media era was abundance.

Flood the feed → maximize output → stay visible → become unavoidable.

And that strategy worked for a while. It still works if you are ​a real expert​.

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Fun fact: Stefanie is a fellow Council member (a founding member, in fact) and the winner of our newsletter bootcamp. Within a month, she grew her email list the most out of all participants, so she won my ​biggest advertising package​. You’ll be hearing about her more in the future — and I love that for you because it’s rare to find someone in this space who cuts through website design BS.

Back when solopreneurs could rely on social media alone, often without even bothering to build a website, attention was relatively cheap, and platforms still distributed content generously, so scale itself created leverage.

But abundance changes markets — it always did. This econ 101.

Once everyone can produce infinite content, value shifts somewhere else, which brings me to the thing I increasingly believe:

The internet is entering its luxury era

And luxury internet businesses look very different from mass-market internet businesses.

Luxury spaces optimize for:

  • trust
  • intimacy
  • discernment
  • curation
  • emotional safety
  • access
  • human judgment
  • reputation
  • community
  • coherence

Not maximum reach.

This is why I think low-volume/high-trust models are going to rise over the next few years.

Because trust itself is becoming scarce, and scarcity creates value.

The bottleneck has moved: production stopped being scarce, so discernment and human judgment became scarce.

This is one reason small trusted ecosystems suddenly feel so valuable.

  • A great newsletter feels luxurious now.
  • A thoughtful private community feels luxurious now.
  • A recommendation from someone whose taste you trust feels luxurious now.
  • A room full of smart people who aren’t trying to aggressively funnel you into “the next tier” feels downright revolutionary.

Wealthy people historically don’t spend most of their time in public spaces. They have always moved toward exclusivity, curation, filtration, and controlled environments.

Think private clubs, boutique hotels, invitation-only events, members-only spaces, concierge services, luxury lounges, and so on.

Part of luxury has always been access to environments with lower noise levels, stronger social filtering, better contextual trust, and fewer random variables

The same psychology increasingly applies online.

Public platforms feel more and more like digital food courts. They’re loud, crowded, overstimulating, and algorithmically engineered to maximize emotional volatility because outrage keeps shareholders warm at night.

On the other hand, high-trust ecosystems feel different.

People speak differently in smaller, trusted environments because reputation matters more there, so context, nuance, and relationships all survive more.

This is one reason newsletters continue outperforming social media financially for so many experts and solopreneurs.

Communities follow the same logic — a trusted community reduces uncertainty. And uncertainty reduction is one of the most valuable psychological services on the modern internet.

People always seek stronger affiliation and trusted groups during uncertain periods because social belonging reduces cognitive and emotional strain. That matters economically, especially now.

Because audiences are exhausted.

They’ve been:

  • overmarketed
  • overtargeted
  • overautomated
  • overpromised
  • overfunnelled

At some point, your nervous system develops a primal survival response to the phrase: “Hey friend, quick question…”

So people increasingly move toward spaces that feel slower, smaller, more intentional, and more human.

In a world drowning in information, trusted filtration becomes a premium service.

That’s one reason I believe the future belongs disproportionately to:

  • niche communities
  • premium newsletters
  • relationship-based businesses
  • intimate workshops
  • boutique consulting ecosystems
  • curated memberships
  • highly trusted operators

The strongest internet businesses increasingly resemble private clubs more than media companies (with an important caveat)

To build low-volume, high-trust spaces, you paradoxically still need a fairly large audience or network. That’s why I think that ​the 1,000 true fans theory doesn’t work anymore​, at least not for non-artistic creators.

The “private clubs” of entrepreneurs are built with 0.001% of the founder’s audience.

And that’s part of what makes spaces like The Council increasingly important to me.

I don’t want it to become another giant “networking community” where everyone aggressively hands each other metaphorical business cards while pretending to “add value.”

I want it to feel like a high-trust room, a place where smart solopreneurs can think clearly together. Because I think high-trust rooms are becoming luxury products on the modern internet.

And judging by where the internet is heading, demand for them is probably just getting started.

So the obvious question becomes:

How do you build one of these low-volume, high-trust rooms yourself?

Most people immediately jump to platform decisions: should I start a Circle community? Or a Slack one? Do I paywall my newsletter?

That’s the wrong starting point because the container is the least important factor.

A better starting point is your standards because they create trust. The biggest mistake people make when building communities or relationship-based businesses is trying to maximize size too early.

Luxury ecosystems don’t behave like public squares. They behave like carefully curated dinner parties.

This is why you don’t invite everyone. You invite people who improve the room because curation is part of the product.

That room can take many forms.

  • A paid newsletter with thoughtful replies and discussions.
  • A tiny Slack or Circle community for a specific type of founder.
  • A curated dinner series in your city.
  • A monthly strategy salon over Zoom.
  • A research membership.
  • A small-group workshop cohort.
  • An invite-only peer group.
  • A private audio feed for clients.

Even a highly curated email list can function as a luxury room if the trust level is high enough.

The format matters less than the social architecture behind it. But, perhaps the biggest factor here is proximity to real judgment, unfiltered through parasocial chaos and noise.

Because time is the ultimate luxury and, to create or maintain wealth, you can no longer afford to spend time in crowded, noisy spaces.

What would that look like for you? What kind of room that feels exclusive could you build for your audience? Reply and let me know!

The Council Bulletin

Speaking of intentionally small rooms, ever since I launched ​The Council​, I’ve had exactly ONE person tell me it’s too small and that they were looking for bigger networking opportunities.

Most people who asked about the size reacted with: “oh, great, I’m so over communities with 1,000+ members.”

In our last Decision Clinic, our tiny group helped members make decisions on lead magnets, cohort programs, and funnels. And I witnessed two members arrange a private coffee chat to discover if they could work together.

All because they had the space to get to know one another.

Does this sound like the kind of private, exclusive room you could use? Get a sneak peek into ​The Council​ and join us.