I agree with some of Chris's viewpoints. Materialism is stupid. Buying shit for the sake of acquiring shit is stupid. Not that you should never have anything sentimental, but those kinds of things are tied to people or events.

But yeah, guy kinda lost me when he decided to camp in the Alaskan bush with no survival skills, no experience dressing a carcass, no foraging skills, and very little equipment. As others pointed out, he went there to die, then changed his mind when it was too late. A rational, non-suicidal person would have spent months preparing for this outing.

Basically everyone who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and lived (only ~2% of jumpers) regretted doing it before they hit the water. Chris jumped from the bridge and changed his mind halfway down. Going to Alaska wasn't some brave choice to be free. You can do that anywhere in the Lower 48. It was a cry for help masked as a revolutionary idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless#Death

Turns out no one knew that some of the plants he was eating were poisonous until after he died

Every bad situation leading up to his trip into Alaska, someone bailed him out of the situation. There was no one at the bus in Alaska to bail him out.

Alaska isn't as "settled" as lower 48 (continental US), the wilderness is always there for mooks to wander into.

It will kill you, just one moose will ruin your day. And the moose are the least of your worries

you don't know what fear is until you've locked eyes with a bear.

To be fair, an office job is a bit like crawling into a coffin. And nobody's gonna canonize you for that.

In Alaska he is always used as a cautionary tale to the point where he borders on being mythic like Icarus.

Actually, now that I think about it, Alaska sizable pantheon of guys like this. Dumb people who think they love the wilderness, but do not have any real respect for it.

I think there were discussions of him dying from eating raw potatoes or something like that. I just remember hearing that and thinking this guy must be the type of person who thinks chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

I know I'm being rude, but I'm with anon and always felt like I was missing something when people praised this guy. He didn't seem like an enlightened soul to me. He seemed like he was going through a severe mental health crisis. And was intensely ignorant and a bit arrogant that he could go into the wild with zero understanding of it and have a life there.

This sounds like the most beautiful deconstruction of Ayn Rand I've ever heard.