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.
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.
To be fair, an office job is a bit like crawling into a coffin. And nobody’s gonna canonize you for that.
I spent 2 hours playing connections today and then went home early. Office jobs are amazing.
Contrast that to subsistence farming or manufacturing widgets in China.
Or salt mining. Or low income anal prostitution. Or live organ transplants.
Or low income anal prostitution.
Oh you mean a tech support job?
I enjoy your comment, though really what’s a better job?
Independent general contractor!
Sounds like real work. My hands don’t do real work sadly, if I was out in the wild I would perish on the first day. Vultures circle every time I leave the apartment.
I have a theory that his family was abusive and he learned to distrust strangers and became convinced that he needed to always stand on his own two feet because nobody would ever truly have his back. I’ve been through a similar phase in my life caused by neglect and abuse throughout my childhood and adolescence. Could be totally wrong ofc but it seems to fit for me
Edit: Apparently his sister confirmed this in a memoir she wrote called The Wild Truth. There’s an interesting article on the NPR website about it:
She and her brother Chris grew up with a volatile, viciously abusive father who made their weak-willed yet hyper-competent mother both his victim and his accomplice.
This is a really similar situation to mine. Took many years of therapy to get to where I am, but I’ll probably never really fully heal from it.
Is that theory based on a hunch you had, or is it maybe based on the memoir that his sister wrote where she says so?
It was a hunch, I didn’t know about any memoir, what’s it called?
The Wild Truth
Dang, thanks so much for mentioning that, it’s lowkey crazy to have this theory I’ve kinda kept to myself be confirmed all these years later. I’ll edit my original comment
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
probably *
That can be inserted several different locations in the sentence and create a different meaning.
only one makes sense
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.
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.
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.
My teacher in biology back in school explained that this was due to hormones being released something something close to death something something. In essence, it was not a “choice” to regret jumping, but rather a biological response. So you would regret it wether you wanted to or not, so to say.
Can’t give you a source since I don’t have one.I have never seen Bojack Horseman but maybe I should!
changed my life. and while the depth of the show is what people talk about most, it is light too, with constanta great sense of fun eg the multi-minute wordplay jokes like rhymes n alliteration the show would often do.
It’s gud
It’s relly gud.
I think it would have been the GOAT if they ended it with the view from halfway down
Bojack dying alone after pushing away everyone in his life yet again would’ve been the perfect ending to the depression show
Idk, I really like the way it ended.
I get your point, but instead of a horrifying (but somewhat deserved ending) we got a very “real” ending.
This sounds like the most beautiful deconstruction of Ayn Rand I’ve ever heard.
Mmmm… Checks out
Siri, what is the American Dream?
I remember watching the movie and then immediately thinking, “Why the fuck did I just watch that? And why the fuck did anyone make it? This is not a story that needs to be given attention.”
Idk, I always thought of it as a modern take on Walden . A cautionary tale for those folks who get really hyped up about a life in the bush who forget the crucial fact that Thoreau was on a friend’s property and got more meaningful support from people than the book really lets on.
One of those “Yes, lots of people feel like you do, AP English guy, but don’t think you’ll make it on vibes alone and not die like a dumbass” kind of things. Appreciated it differently at 16 and 20.
I was kinda like this,
adoringfetishizing a life free from material constraints, wearing busted old shoes, etc. Then I worked at a homeless church and that’s when I realized two things: first, I was basically cosplaying as poor; second, every homeless person I talked to basically thought it was stupid to not have things when you otherwise could have them.The clearest was this one time I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat at one of the breakfast tables with guys. They looked at me like “you’re not eating?” And I said that I wasn’t hungry and that I didn’t want to take a plate away from someone who might’ve needed it. They chastised me heavily. “You could have got your plate and then shared it with all of us, then!” I realized that I had the luxury to turn down food. They saw my torn up shoes as a kind of affectation (which they were, but I couldn’t admit it at the time).
It’s turned me off of a fair bit of folk music, tbh. This whole “get rid of your stuff and be free” sentiment. Yes, reject capitalistic materialism. But the discipline is in having enough. The person with nothing can be just as obsessed with wealth as the person who hoards it.
“Imagine no possessions…” John Lennon was living in a mansion when he wrote that.
EXACTLY! They even show it in the music video!
You read Walden once
And now you’re obsessed
With a life where you don’t have to try
To be liked, or to be loved
Man it’saweso-dumb, yeah I know
And I really think you
Earned the right to go and leave
And never talk to human beings
Being that they’re all insane, and
Fucking up this world we’ve made
You should just get up and go
Just quit your job, leave your phone
Or jump into the great unknown
Or stay at home, it’s all in your head
It’s all in my head- Hobo Johnson
I felt like that, too. I guess people glorifying him are missing the point entirely, and it is close to the ‘we finally announce our very own torment nexus implementation’ level of missing a point, imo
The movie glorified him and his death. It isn’t portrayed as needless or reckless. His death in the movie is framed as being a spiritual awakening, him finally leaving the material world behind and achieving enlightenment and that dying that way is something to aspire to. It was a dumb movie with hot people in places with exceptional natural beauty with a sloppy message which itself undercuts for mass appeal.
Didn’t they have to deconstruct the bus he lived in or something because other idiots went there? People who are really into that movie are so weird in my experience
the national guard removed it in a training exercise, it was deemed a danger to public health as some 20+ people needed to be rescued from the site, and 2-4 people died trying to reach it. it was in a difficult area to hike to, that required crossing a river, so a lot of people who wanted to visit it didn’t have the skills to reach it and return safely.
“This dude just killed a whole ass moose and let it all go to waste?”
I think he tried to smoke it, right? But he didn’t do it right and it spoiled.
I remember watching it, liking it, and thinking thats it? Never watching it again
Yeah they should’ve just made the soundtrack.
From my understanding, all the locals where this happened think this dude is a colossal dumbass.
I think his legacy is slowly changing though, and people are less impressed by his antics today than when it happened.
Coinhippiepro
