Drawing Life's Key Lesson from Into The Wild
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

Chris McCandless's journey into the wild serves to give our lives purpose.

A couple friends and I have gotten together on a weekly basis to study literature in the modern construction known as a book club. It’s not the craziest thing to do weekday evenings, but it’s definitely been helping to keep our minds sharp. At least we’re not just reading off a computer screen 24 hours a day.

Our first book was Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild, the story chronicling the postgraduate journey of Chris McCandless, a well-to-do Emory graduate, as he forsook a career lifestyle in favor of a penniless journey tramping around the United States, pitting himself against the elements to measure his worth as a human being in his most primal form. After we finished reading the book, we watched the movie written and directed by Sean Penn starring Emile Hirsch.

Well, my review will be short and sweet. No in-depth analysis. Go enjoy it for yourself. They’re both good. Obviously the book>movie. I’ve never really seen a movie that’s better than the book version, except for maybe Where The Wild Things Are, but that’s even arguable. The bottom line is, go enjoy the book and then the movie, in that order.

The story brought up certain running themes that we returned to over and over again in our discussion. All of us being from Asian American backgrounds, we’ve all been bombarded with the idea of career being the be all and end all of our lives. You graduate college, you jump into a career or you head off to graduate school. The worst thing you could do would be to give away your savings to charity (that would be irresponsible!) or wander around the country in an existential funk (because our lives are already defined for us – careers or bust!). But most of us saw that the sense of adventure that Chris McCandless had and the soul searching that he took part in was healthy to a degree. We can’t just live blindly. We need to live deliberately and purposefully. The authors and philosophers that guided Chris along the way did the best they could to put it into words, but until Chris challenged the elements himself, he wouldn’t be able to continue his life.

So in the end, Chris’s life can be summed up into one realization he scrawled into his makeshift journal in his weakest state: happiness only real when shared. Regardless of how we spend our lives, pursuing our careers or breaking convention and tramping around the U.S., if we don’t experience happiness and share it with others during the process, then we’re not truly living.