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So you understand your proposals don't work and you're just suggesting young men eat cake?
The lottery doesn't work for various obvious reasons either.
My point is that you can’t really define what was actually unique about the ‘Wild West’ that makes it impossible to replicate today.
If it’s about gambling on a tiny chance of getting rich, you can do that.
If it’s about working hard to provide a comfortable life for your family, you can do that.
If it’s about living somewhere rural and remote, living off the land, homeschooling your kids, you can still do that in many parts of the US (and for relatively little money if you’re not picky).
If you want to live some kind of outlaw criminal fantasy, then again, you can do it - and just like it did for most outlaws in the Wild West, it’ll probably end badly.
So what, specifically, is it that’s been lost? You don’t seem able to actually describe the option that young men today don’t have that they once did.
What has been lost is the true belief in God that compelled people to have hope that such a drastic move could lead to a better life. Remember that the majority of the settlers were Christians who were so devout they were willing to cross an ocean and take incredible risks, leaving behind everything they've ever known to go to a new land. There's a reason those people were selected.
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You know, though, that the substitutions you are suggesting meets some technical definition while missing the essence. Playing the lottery isn't the same as prospecting for gold, even if both are "gambling on a tiny chance of getting rich". Working as a corporate drone isn't the same as working as a cattle driver or even running a store.
I’m not trying to be facetious.
My point is that the difference between then and now is mainly a product of huge increases in total societal prosperity. 2/3 of your examples (working on a cattle ranch and running a store) are totally possible today, it’s just most people don’t want to do them because they’re hard work and poorly paid compared to a lot of other stuff you could do.
Most men didn’t seek their fortune in the West as some kind of grand adventure, they did it because they were desperate and poor, because life in the urban tenements of the East Coast was intolerable, because they held out hope for a small fraction of the quality of life that the average American has today.
You’re romanticizing what in many ways was the historical equivalent of Nigerien migrants crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy dinghies in the hope that they become soccer champions. A sad phenomenon that modern young Western men need not take part in because they have already won the birth lottery.
Not American but I think missing element is colonisation. Going, taking ‘virgin’ territory and making it yours, founding a society congenial to you on top of it.
Winning the lottery doesn’t get you enough money to buy a significant amount of land AFAIK and has much worse odds than even prospecting. Going off a building a log cabin requires significant starting capital and won’t get you out from the now-well-developed legal system. If you want to escape modern society the only places you can try it now are MUCH more inclement than the old west and/or ruled by warlords.
(There is also romanticism, but I do think the frontier made a valuable pressure valve for the reasons stated. )
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You can work on a cattle ranch today, but it's just being a corporate drone with horses. If you run a store (aside from some specialties), you're either going to be a corporate drone, or you'll be going out of business for lack of customers, or you'll go out of business because the corporations can do it cheaper and better.
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