What Dying Places Teach Us: A.M. Hickman on Rural America, Self-Employment, and Why He Stays

If you like this episode, you’ll also enjoy Buc-ee’s Hates Your Hometown w/ Javier Velazquez

A.M. Hickman is the writer behind Hickman’s Hinterlands, a Substack with tens of thousands of subscribers where he publishes long-form essays—some running 13,000 words with 90-minute voice-overs—about the places mainstream America ignores. In this conversation, Joe and A.M. explore what it actually costs to live in the hinterlands (his house cost $33,000), how the birth of his daughter rewrote the calculus on staying put, and what a book about anarchist revolution taught him about knowing when to leave.

Main Ideas:

* The hinterlands aren’t just rural—they’re any place that’s out of sight, out of step with the dominant culture, and invisible to the people making decisions. You’ll find them in the Bronx just as easily as central Kansas. What they share is a burning ember of something the mainstream lost, kept alive by people who simply refused to adapt.

* Living where nobody else wants to live is a legitimate financial strategy. A.M.’s house cost $33,000 with no mortgage, and his monthly expenses are so low that digital nomads in Panama City spend more than he does. The catch is the social cost—no school, a parish that will close within fifteen years, no other kids for his daughter to grow up with.

* Having a child reframes every question about where to live. When it was just A.M. and his wife, the calculus was simple: cheap, wild, interesting. Now, with a daughter, the honest answer is that staying in a dying village may no longer be defensible—and he walks through exactly what it would take to leave with a clear conscience.

* A.M. spent years as a political anarchist and student of revolution, and the theory he walked away from gave him one lasting insight: you can’t push a stopped train. The “arrows effect,” drawn from George Katsiaficas, holds that effective change has to jump on a current that’s already moving. A.M. applies this framework to community revitalization, to his own decision about upstate New York, and to the harder question of when persistence becomes delusion.

There’s a genuine return to tradition happening, but it’s splitting in two. One group is going deeper—reading more, asking harder questions, returning to the Church. The other is going further in the opposite direction: gambling debt, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, no questions asked. The bifurcation is real, and her argues it has more to do with how mechanized culture rewards indifference than with individual moral failure.

Resources:

* Hickman’s Hinterlands

* “Stumbling Toward the Cosmopolitan Christ” by A.M. Hickman

* “How to Live on $432 a Month in America” by A.M. Hickman