As a Canadian who’s driven through a couple times it really is a weird place. There are some parallels pretty much all over North America but upstate NY really hit me as uncomfortable. It’s hard to tell what anyone does and you can really see the poverty. The poverty and the overabundance of US flags.
I've driven through upstate NY just once going from Boston to Buffalo and took a detour to Ithaca. Extremely beautiful drive during that detour I will say.
I made a similar drive once and I kept looking up at those ridges and wondering how hard it would be to climb to the top of them. I pulled over at one point and gave one a try, and I can say: it's insanely fucking hard. Like, I think I would have died if I hadn't turned around and gone back down to my car.
I wonder if horror movies will eventually drop the old run down gas station for teens to stop at on their way to die and replace them with dollar stores.
New York City is located in the southeastern corner of the state, so "upstate NY" means basically everything north/west of the NYC metro area. It's a word that is pretty much exclusively used for New York.
To further clarify expr's explanation, most people are familiar with new york only by way of new york city. Shockingly (/s), new york city, a city confined by small island and shoreline with a population of 8 million+, is an entirely different beast than the entire state with a slightly larger population. So people generally differentiate upstate new york with the moniker to explicitly refer to how it is different; mainly being rather rural outside of the 'minor' metropolitan areas like albany. The 'up' part is because most folks think of north as 'up' due to maps being oriented that way.