Into the Wild
So, they recently found the body of a young man in the Seattle area who left his home in Arizona and apparently wanted to drop off the radar like Christopher McCandless from Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild.
In case you haven't heard of Into the Wild, no it's not a Broadway show about Little Red Riding Hood. It's about a college student, Christopher McCandless, who decided the world was just too crowded and decided to take himself out of it. He did this by driving into the desert, ditching all of his money, his car, and most other worldly possessions and then just kind of tramping his way around North America. He wound up in Alaska, where apparently he turned his aesthetic hermit powers up to eleven and finally checked out after dying of malnutrition in the Alaskan outback.
I think his last words were, "Henry David Thoreau is a little bitch."
I used to like what this kid was all about. Hell, I even romanticized what it would be like to do what this guy did. Just disappear and live on the fringe, having adventures. Being a slave to no one. Not having to deal with people or civilization or any of it. Just being out there by myself. But you see, I got to the end of Krakauer's book and realized something. McCandless pretty much committed slow suicide. He was in over his head, knew he was in over his head, and kept at it anyway. Doing really, really stupid things to just expedite his own death. McCandless, I believe, got hooked on the thrill of surviving and ultimately, he OD'ed. He starved to death in an abandoned school bus. Our lesson from this? People need people, dammit. McCandless is only known because he failed so miserably at his attempt to do...whatever the hell it was that he was trying to do.
He got to be famous by example. Much like the captain of the Exon Valdez. We got to see him fail. Gradually diminish into a emaciated skeleton of a man who was finally consumed by the solitude he sought after for so long.
And this kid recently, according to the press, thought that was awesome.
Kind of missing the point, wasn't he? Sorta like just reading the first half of Crime and Punishment and thinking what an awesome idea it is to murder your landlady. Or watching the first hour and ten minutes of Grizzly Man and wanting to move to Alaska to film bears. What can we get from all of this? Alaska is incredibly dangerous. People have problems. That's two echoes from our primordial past if I ever hear them.
So, just a "More You Know" PSA here, when your kid idolizes someone who completely failed at life, you might want to show them some examples of people who are famous for being awesome. Like Ernest Shackleton. Or Theodore Roosevelt.
In case you haven't heard of Into the Wild, no it's not a Broadway show about Little Red Riding Hood. It's about a college student, Christopher McCandless, who decided the world was just too crowded and decided to take himself out of it. He did this by driving into the desert, ditching all of his money, his car, and most other worldly possessions and then just kind of tramping his way around North America. He wound up in Alaska, where apparently he turned his aesthetic hermit powers up to eleven and finally checked out after dying of malnutrition in the Alaskan outback.
I think his last words were, "Henry David Thoreau is a little bitch."
I used to like what this kid was all about. Hell, I even romanticized what it would be like to do what this guy did. Just disappear and live on the fringe, having adventures. Being a slave to no one. Not having to deal with people or civilization or any of it. Just being out there by myself. But you see, I got to the end of Krakauer's book and realized something. McCandless pretty much committed slow suicide. He was in over his head, knew he was in over his head, and kept at it anyway. Doing really, really stupid things to just expedite his own death. McCandless, I believe, got hooked on the thrill of surviving and ultimately, he OD'ed. He starved to death in an abandoned school bus. Our lesson from this? People need people, dammit. McCandless is only known because he failed so miserably at his attempt to do...whatever the hell it was that he was trying to do.
He got to be famous by example. Much like the captain of the Exon Valdez. We got to see him fail. Gradually diminish into a emaciated skeleton of a man who was finally consumed by the solitude he sought after for so long.
And this kid recently, according to the press, thought that was awesome.
Kind of missing the point, wasn't he? Sorta like just reading the first half of Crime and Punishment and thinking what an awesome idea it is to murder your landlady. Or watching the first hour and ten minutes of Grizzly Man and wanting to move to Alaska to film bears. What can we get from all of this? Alaska is incredibly dangerous. People have problems. That's two echoes from our primordial past if I ever hear them.
So, just a "More You Know" PSA here, when your kid idolizes someone who completely failed at life, you might want to show them some examples of people who are famous for being awesome. Like Ernest Shackleton. Or Theodore Roosevelt.