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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

I lived in the area for more than 20 years, have annually visited family living there for my entire life even after I left, and consider myself quite qualified to comment on the area, the people who live there, and their culture, thanks.

I've traveled a lot through the area. I was throughout Ohio earlier this year, spent two weeks in Illinois last year, etc.

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If I'm allowed to be anecdotal too I've also spent a decent amount of time in the area, including a visit to Bloomington, Indiana to visit their Informatics school, which was full of very interesting, open people that were absolutely wonderful and invited us into their world for a weekend.

The last night there I had dinner at one of the professors' houses in a very nice neighborhood that was absolutely lovely, and in general I thought it was a solid middle class place to live. If it was plopped in the middle of Silicon Valley it would be considered one of the more bucolic and put together cities in the area. And unlike Greenland, the weather is quite good for much of the year and there are trees.

My personal experience does not match the image of tired, doomed NPCs living in a wasteland that it's painted as in this blog post and in these comments.

University towns are exceptions that the rural and suburban parts of these states largely hate. They are the tiny pleasant exception to the whole that is not representative.

Ann Arbor is a nice town. Bloomington sounds like a nice town. The vast majority of Indiana and Michigan are sparsely populated and full of people who distrust anyone not like them and are not interested in broadening their experiences.

"Got tired and decided this is good enough" is literally true - small town midwest America is full of the kind of people who don't want to travel or experience new things because they're content in their house with their hobby and their 6 friends and trying to do something like understand how to ride a bus is terrifying.

This is not a stereotype. I know tons of these people. I got out of the midwest to get away from them.

Having spent a decade in Portland and a few years in the Bay Area, all I can say here is that I've met these people in droves in both places, and the rural-urban political divide is just as strong in the coastal states as it is in the Midwest. I don't think content people living simpler lives are a thing that is unique to any state or region in the country.

If your experience is different, it may simply be the product of cost pressures. It's easier to have a simple life that consists of smoking weed and playing video games with your friends if you don't have to figure out how to afford an expensive house. And something tells me people in Indiana, even their dullards, could figure out how to ride a bus if they really needed to.

Sounds lke you grew up in the wrong small town, you could say the same about a bad neighborhood in any major city. I get around in the midwest for motorsports events, and there is a critical mass of people who love to meet travellers and love to travel themselves. Maybe it's condescension they distrust?

University towns are a dump of businesses of questionable morals extracting as much as they can from a transient population. They're basically military base towns. And both of those are basically tourism or retirement towns which are almost as bad (source: grew up in one). The difference its that tourism towns and retirement towns get their population voluntarily, without a bunch of brainwashing.

I'll side with the "Indiana ain't bad" crowd on this.

I would assume most of those 20 years were your childhood? How many years have you lived in the Midwest as an adult?

Not the person you responded to, but: I lived in north-central Indiana until around age 35. Family still lives there. And the description: Pretty accurate.

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