𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗

Sometimes I wake up and I still can't believe my profoundly good fortune. Wasn't that long ago that I was a bachelor with no prospects, broke, miserable, quite certain I'd die a recluse. Twitter changed that. You people changed that. So please accept my heartfelt gratitude: Without the support and encouragement you've all given me, God knows where I'd be today. This site led me to my wife, it led me to make great friends, and it allowed us to be hosted here and there in our travels with wonderful folks all across this country. It's also unexpectedly led me to a writing career. Those of you who've read my long-form work, subscribed to my newsletter, and become paid subscribers to Hickman's Hinterlands have made one insane long-shot of a dream into a reality for us. Because of you, I'm writing about America for a living -- we're living a life that everyone told us wasn't possible. Do you know what that means for us, as we get within mere days of our baby's birth? It's a blessing of absolutely surreal proportions. Now, we've got room to keep dreaming and to keep writing -- because of you. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart. And if you haven't gone and subscribed to Hickman's Hinterlands yet, I hope you do. If you can go "paid," I hope you will. You've got my word that I aim to repay your faith in us and in my work a hundredfold however I can. God bless you all.

In the Unorganized Borough of Alaska, this is technically possible IF you can subsist on less than $16,100 per year there. No state income tax, no sales tax, no property tax, and on $16k a single filer under 65 effectively pays no federal income tax. Could this actually be done? It could. You'd have to eat a lot of fish and a lot of bear meat, reserving your cash for staple foods, bullets, gasoline, and so on. Heat with wood, fully off-grid. It'd likely be real lonesome, and you might get neurotic about stuff like injuries, weather, tools breaking, etc, but it could be done. Not for the faint of heart, but tax-free. America's a fantastic country. Total choose-your-own-adventure game of a country.

Won't ever forget how at my lowest point in boot camp, I thought: "at the end of this, I'll get a free meal at Applebee's on November 11th for the rest of my life." That got me through. Big salute to those eating for free at Applebee's tonight. I raise my Dollarita to you.

The most fascinating aspect of this critique is that it now appears to run much deeper than being a critique of simple "leftism". Much of the "right" is now crippled by this exact stuff. Blackpillers, certain white nationalists, Heimbach-type Eastern Orthodox converts, conspiracy types, and so on all exhibit this revulsion toward the West, toward optimism, toward civilization -- and insist on staking their wagon to some obscure fantasy, esoteric knowledge, or "underdog" institution, or hiding out in the woods waiting for the "SHTF" that never comes. These fringe characters are generally skeptical of practically every facet of Western Christendom and the civilization it has produced -- from schools to cities to libraries, universities, Cathedrals, and so on. And on the topic of the future of our civilization, or of their individual advancement within it, they always have a dark message, a litany of curses and forecasts of doom and impossibility. What follows is an apocalyptic, "retreatist" mentality and an obsessive interest in collapse and withdrawal. They essentially develop a fetish for powerlessness that is not especially different from that of leftists themselves. Interestingly, the more vehemently "anti-leftist" a particular node of the culture -- the more absolutely crippled it now tends to be by these "feelings of inferiority" and an explicit rejection or hatred of all things "strong, good, and successful," with an overt hatred of Western Christendom featuring most prominently.

Had a zealous dispensationalist Protestant fellow over to the house last night. Fascinating discussion. What surprised me most was how he simply did not care about the 1500-year era spanning from the Apostles to Luther. He just... didn't care, wouldn't think about it, seemed even vaguely annoyed that I kept bringing it up. But seriously, if your religious belief didn't exist until Zwingli, and you're effectively saying that Christians for 1500 years were all wrong, shouldn't you have some kind of a defense of this frankly strange idea of what the Church is? I'm consistently shocked that people find these kinds of ideas satisfying at all.

I truly wonder: do parents have a right to refuse all internet-based school activity, such as school Chromebooks, homework, remote school, etc. If you tell schools: "We do not have internet, we won't get internet, and we're opposed to internet" -- what would they do? It seems far-fetched to imagine that they can any way compel you to have a household internet connection. In fact, any attempt to coerce you into such a thing seems like it actually might be illegal? Especially if you claim opposition to the internet on religious grounds.

My wife and I agree we're just not gonna have internet in our household, period. We're not inviting that hellacious insanity into our household. Want to use the internet? Walk to the library. Reserve your 30-minute time slot on a content-controlled computer in a public space.

Frictionless access to limitless volumes of decontextualized information causes neuroticism, by the way. When in order to obtain information, you have to expend real effort -- in the form of physically traveling somewhere far, reading a thick book, searching the stacks at the library, making face-to-face connections with real people who might have the information you so badly want, etc -- there is a balance; the slowness of these informational pathways allows for balanced absorption. With the internet, it's like guzzling fruit juice instead of finding, preparing, and slowly eating, relishing, and digesting the hard-won fruit. Feels real good, makes you giddy, it's all rapid-fire, and eventually instead of living real life you just sit in a chair analyzing bytes of data about real life, comparing things, gathering data, paralyzed, numb. Why do you think everybody and their brother has "anxiety" now? I can guarantee that 80% of today's neurotics would become low-neuroticism within a year of being 100% offline, no smartphone, etc.

This is quite funny to think about. If you said "I'll never ride in an automobile; it is too dangerous," you'd be considered to be a lunatic. If you said "I'll never live in a high-crime neighborhood because it is too dangerous," it would be considered a normal position. But which of these is objectively more dangerous? Are you more likely to die in a car crash, or to die by murder in America's worst, most violent neighborhood? Seems to me that if you mitigate risks well on both accounts, driving is still markedly more dangerous overall. This is simply because even in America's worst areas, genuinely random violence is incredibly rare, and where it might exist, it doesn't generally manifest as murder.

I'm not sure if there's a way to harden young men up without a genuine risk of injury or death. At a certain point, you've got to take the training wheels off and face up to real life. Those who never get this chance do unfortunately tend to wind up being "soft."

I think it'd be a fantastic idea for 18-year-old men fresh out of school to take a "gap year" in one of America's worst ghettos. Live at the Motel 6, work at Church's Chicken, live with no car, head on a swivel. It'd harden them up, make them understand what civilization is. Like a latter-day analogue of sending your sons to frontier ranches in Africa or to be the Viceroy's Porter in India or whatever. And I say this as one who spent an inordinate amount of time in America's worst hoods at about that age. I was always living homeless, too. Those experiences taught me a tremendous amount about the Hobbesian state of man when the rule of law has worn thin. They also taught me to have intense confidence in myself even in chaotic environments. After some time doing that, too, it really hits me hard just how much crime has actually decreased in America. The idea of a version of NYC that had double the population and 3x the crime rate of Kensington Philadelphia is a frightening idea; it makes me respect those who endured that and still managed to build this country and make it great. Formative stuff, I highly recommend it for all young men.

The Reserves are a *fantastic* option for young men looking to get ahead. I particularly recommend the Coast Guard Reserve. You do one weekend a month + 2 weeks a summer every year, minimum. Plus boot camp and "A" School. Winds up being $332 post-tax each month and $1,890 for each summertime 2-week drill. And between boot camp and "A" school, you'll start out with a check totalling roughly $22,000 if your "A" school is 14 weeks. More if you choose a job that has a longer school (some are 25 weeks). Then, once you're in, you can opt for TriCare health insurance at a cost of $57 if you're single. If you wind up with a family, it's $286/mo (which eats up most of your monthly drill pay but that is CHEAP and very good family insurance). In the USCG, you have a lot of great options for volunteering for active duty, such as the "Summerstock" program, where they send you to the Great Lakes to help with the summer search-and-rescue season for a few months. What it really is is driving boats around on beautiful lakes most of the time, checking people for life vests, helping distressed mariners, sometimes even saving somebody's life. It's a great gig. And once you've got a grand total of 36 months of Active Duty service, you get the full Post 9/11 GI Bill. Finally, if you do stay for 20 years, you'll qualify for a retirement starting at 60 years old. At the lowest (an E-6 who only ever drilled and didn't ever go active) it's about $500/mo for life. If you went active as much as possible and make higher ranks, it can get up over $1500/mo for life. Seriously, if you have no criminal record, hand/neck/face tattoos, or health issues, it's a FANTASTIC deal for a very interesting side job with the best benefits of any side job.

This is of course the boldest and best plan for a broke 18-year-old fresh out of High School. Head to CA, get crafty with the homeless lifestyle, get a gym membership and a camp stove, and proceed to work like crazy for a year at the highest wage you can find. Stack BIG cash. It's so absurdly easy to be homeless in SoCal that it's practically a giveaway. The key is that you never sleep where other homeless people are sleeping. Use a bike or public transit to get as far out of the typical homeless person range as possible, then find an unseen nook in some vegetation and build a heavily camouflaged shanty from dirt-cheap materials, knowing it'll eventually be discovered and destroyed one day while you're at work. I've done exactly this quite a few times and it's always worked, I was never caught, nobody knew I was there. Yes eventually my camp was destroyed but so what, I built another one elsewhere or just left the area entirely. This can also work in other fair-winter-climate areas where there are many employers urgently hiring. E.g. Phoenix, Austin, Louisiana, Florida; though SoCal is easier for a lot of reasons.

$10,000 buys you a 355 sqft shack in Marksville LA. Annual taxes are just $50 per year. Tenth-acre lot. Downtown's walking distance. I suspect I could easily live here on $250/mo for ALL expenses as long as I had no car. With any income, you'd save a huge pile of cash VERY fast. Honestly, if you were willing to adjust to the climate such that you needed no A/C, and if you were willing to do a lot of hunting and fishing to supplement your food supply -- you could probably live right in this place for more like $175/mo for everything. Ride a bike to work, run a fan at night, etc. Now imagine working full-time at the local Wal-Mart, which is actively hiring at $14/hr and is a 15min bike ride from the shack. That's $2240/mo minus $175/mo in living expenses or about $1800 straight to savings every month. Within 2 years, you could save about $45,000 cash. That also gives you time to get your credit score into the 700's or higher. And if you worked a second job the cash piles faster. $45k is a 10% down payment on a $450,000 house, and the national average for a down payment is about 10%. And 75-85% of US zip codes have a median housing price under $450k. This means that for most people, there might be a "housing crisis," but for those who would spend 2 years living in a shack in Marksville and working at Wal-Mart -- there is no housing crisis. A man with $45k liquid cash and a 700+ credit score could realistically go anywhere he liked. And it only "costs" two real lean years in Marksville (during which you'd exercise a lot, eat cheaply, learn to hunt and fish, and probably make some friends at the local Parish). Might even find yourself a nice Louisiana woman while you're there. The blackpillers don't want you know all this! Contrary to their message of doom, we're living in one of the finest eras in human history if you've got even one ounce of get-up-and-go.

Realized something this week: Ragweed largely doesn't exist in Atlantic Canada. And in Gaspésie, I read that they've successfully eradicated it. This could mean that buying a cabin somewhere up thataway for use during pollen season would be a smart move. Like "snowbirding" but instead of avoiding winter you're avoiding pollen. And who wouldn't mind spending June through September in, say, Chéticamp or Port-Aux-Basques or Harrington Harbour? The niche to whom such a thing would appeal is likely tiny, but I am squarely in it. High-leisure geographically-independent extreme allergy sufferers take note!

One of the great benefits of living in an "undesirable" place is that I NEVER deal with anything like this... ever. To the contrary, it's eerily empty here much of the time. At times I've driven as much as an hour without seeing another car, even on weekdays. I've gone days interacting with nobody but the occasional gas station cashier, never seeing anybody walking on the street, barely any cars save for the odd logging truck or plow and nobody else. The extent to which you're alone in so much of this region is intense. It does get desolate and lonesome. Sometimes it's just too spooky and you do get unnerved by it. But I doubt I'd enjoy the alternative!

You can eat pizza every single day and never get tired of it if it's actually good pizza. I remember years ago there was a Vice article about a guy who only ate one large slice of cheese pizza every day, for every meal. His doc tested him without knowing. Said "keep doing what you're doing, you're in perfect health." When he told his doc he'd been eating ONLY 3 large slices of cheese pizza every day for the last 15 years, the doctor freaked out, couldn't believe it, etc. And how do I eat? When I'm in the city, I eat pizza easily 4-5 days a week, sometimes more than once in a day. No problem, it's normal. But if you tell certain people this kind of thing they act shocked that you're not morbidly obese.