The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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Sean Penn’s ‘Into the Wild’ is a brilliant movie adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s bestselling book about the real-life (mis)adventures of Christopher McCandless.

I had been dying to watch ‘Into the Wild’ ever since I read about it in the April 2008 issue of David Report. So, I was delighted when GK brought over the DVD for our Saturday Night Movie Marathon session. It is such sweet serendipity that reaffirms my faith that the universe reaches out to give you whatever you ask for.

The movie itself is mind-blowing, especially in the context of my own experiment, and I went through an entire spectrum of emotions over its two and a half hour run.

Emile Hirsch is superb as Christopher, the idealistic, but troubled, twenty-something protagonist who, inspired by Tolstoy and Thoreau, decides to abandon his career and his family, give away his $24000 savings to charity and hitchhike to Alaska to live in the wilderness.

Christopher deals in extremes and evokes extreme reactions. It’s easier, therefore, to idolize him as enlightened or reject him as naive than to identify with him.

However, my first thought when I saw him was how similar we were — “Wow! That’s me!” — in our angst over our broken childhoods, our ennui with owning things, and our idealistic search for an alternative approach to happiness. I immediately got why someone like him (”us”) would want to leave a life of ease and search for something more.

Christopher spends the next two years on the road as an ‘aesthetic traveler’, chasing the next adrenalin rush (kayaking down the Grand Canyon into Mexico) and befriending an interesting assortment of hippies and loners, while sustaining himself by doing a variety of odd jobs (cooking fries in McDonald’s).

It is here that my sense of identification turned to awe — “Wow! That’s cool!” — at his physical and social ease, at the range of his experiences, at the extremes to which he goes in search of ‘ultimate freedom’. Like there’s no limit to owning things, there’s no limit to renouncing things, and, compared to the extremes to which he takes his renunciation, my own experiment felt woefully inadequate.

Once in Alaska, Christopher settles down into an abandoned school bus and spends his days exploring the territory, shooting small game, reading Thoreau, and recording his experiences in a journal. However, as days turn into months, loneliness sets in and he begins to tire of solitude, and long for human relationships. As he sets out to return, he realizes that he is trapped, as his path is blocked by a seasonal river. Weakened in body and spirit, Christopher dies; a few days later, his body is found by a hunting party.

For the most part, ‘Into the Wild’ is a story about the relentless pursuit of joy. In the end, it’s also a story about the futility of that pursuit, because, after we have traveled the whole world searching for joy, we realize that we have, in fact, left it behind. The catch is that unless we set out to search for it in the first place, we’ll never know that we already have it.

So, maybe, the key is to start with the premise that we already have whatever we need, and look inwards, and not outwards, as we search for joy.

That sounds a little like my own experiment.

Anyways, I have been listening to Eddie Vedder’s ‘Hard Sun’ non-stop for the last two days. Have a look and find out why –