Yeah, I can. Most of us can. 'Sheep' is such an over-used term that covers so much. Getting a full time job for a company doesn't make your a 'sheep', you can still leave a happy and meaningful life. People say (though I have no personal experience) that having children is the most meaningful thing you can do in your life. If you do, maybe nothing else matters?
The point is, it's ironic to me that you're deriding all the "BS in modern society". To me, the biggest load of BS in modern society is this first world preoccupation with "meaning", "purpose" and all that other junk.
The vast majority of people out there don't even have the time to stop and think about these things. None of us can judge what McCandless did with his life because none of us are him and know how he felt as he was dying. But if I was him, I would have regrets.
Like Chris McCandless's one that resulted in death? Seriously, you can't hold him up as an idol of a 'better life' when his life was cut short very, very prematurely. I'm not qualified to judge whether depression and dietary diseases are better than death, but I think it's at least worth debating.
And few people pursue material gains for the purpose of simply having them. Like I said, for a great many people in the world, being a parent is hugely meaningful. It leads them to pursue material gains in order to provide for their children and watch them grow in comfort. That does not make them 'sheep'.
If they are then everyone is a sheep. You are an "anti-'sheep'" sheep.
I would highly debate it's few. There's a reason AdBusters struck such a nerve.
You can still respect the attempt, consider the ideals, and identify specific mistakes (which most of his intellectually stunted detractors fail to do).
What is so wrong with that?
>>The short list of what this leads to: depression, hopelessness, addiction, dietary diseases
Do you think poor people don't fall ill? Or that when they fall ill they don't need pay hospital bills?
>> There are more meaningful pursuits.
Like? Care to give examples?
People consume more when they are filling a void and it consumes them exacerbating their problems.
Fitting in with society is good in some ways and bad in others.
Here are some concrete examples of situations when it's bad to be a sheep:
- in my home country (Northern Ireland) people tend to vote for one of the two sectarian parties. In the 2010 election only 7% of people votes for non-sectarian parties. The problem is that the sectarian parties are supporting violence, intolerance and ignorance (some directly, others indrectly). Most people (over 90% in this case) are sheep, so they simply vote whichever tribe they were brought up in, even though it is tearing apart their society.
- Recently I was chatting to the directors of a local club who had perpetrated a scam (or "loophole" as they called it) to avoid paying a few thousand dollars in sales tax. I'm pretty sure the scheme is illegal, and the treasurer just resigned because of it. The previous president also thinks it is illegal. Anyway, when I was chatting to these guys they were saying how well democracy works because 67 people voted for this scheme and only 3 voted against.
For more example have a look at the second Iraq war, healthcare in the USA (and partisanship in US politics in general), the housing boom, not to mention silicon valley with its "me too" VCs investing in a raftload of crappy startups that aren't doing anything original.
Chris unfortunately died before he had a chance to really live his life - he was still trying to figure things out and discover his purpose in life. However if he had lived I think it is quite likely he would have made some great achievements.
"Adventure is just bad planning." - Roald Amundsen
For that, I think I'd look to Norman Maclean's _Young Men and Fire_ where he talks about smoke jumpers:
"It is very important to a lot of people to make unmistakably clear to themselves and to the universe that they love the universe but are not intimidated by it and will not be shaken by it, no matter what it has in store. Moreover, they demand something from themselves early in life that can be taken ever after as a demonstration of this abiding feeling...
"For many former Smokejumpers, then, smokejumping is not closely tied up with their [eventual] way of life, but is more something that is necessary for them to pass through and not around and, once it is unmistakably done, does not have to be done again. The 'it' is within, and is the need to settle some things with the universe and ourselves before taking on the 'business of the world,' which isn't all that special or hard but takes time. This 'it' is the something special within that demands we do something special, and 'it' could be within a lot of us."
If people here are reading this and haven't already realized some parallels between not just McCandless and smokejumpers but also entrepreneurs I'd be surprised.
Now, you can draw distinctions between McCandless and smokejumpers, too: the later train and drill and prepare, probably as well as Amundsen could be satisfied with. And their work has a practical end. But their work is still an adventure because they also operate in an area of high risk, and as a result they sometimes pay a high cost.
And they don't do this job for entirely practical reasons. They do it because they have a need for an internal narrative that settles certain things and establishes a kind of identity, they do it because they need something off the beaten track for middle class success.
McCandless was clearly looking for that. I think it's fair to ask if he'd been a little less romantic about it and a little more thoughtful whether he might have had both his survival adventure and his survival.
Then again, unless you're Batman or some other protagonist whose superpower is acute anticipation by authorial fiat, it's mitigated by the limits of the best laid plans.
When best laid plans fail they are forgiven because there were at least plans.
As far as I know, Roald Amundsen was not affiliated with any military. Ironically he died while trying to rescue other, less competent, explorers.
I do recognize a degree of courage in a young man going into the wild to heal the angst and alienation plaguing his soul. Yet I bristle at the suggestion such is automatically heroic or independent thinking, and (implicitly or explicitly) the less wounded amongst us can be dismissed as "sheep", as some admirers have done in this discussion.
I am sorry, but I see no evidence that McCandless ever had a single original thought in his head. He never completed the "hero's journey" in either the literary or practical sense -- he failed to achieve enlightenment and return with his boon, to help himself and/or others. He failed. He may have had some courage to admire, but he ultimately failed when it came to the big important stuff.
McCandless was an adolescent in a man's body -- he was not proven capable of handling adult responsibilities. That is not necessarily a negative in itself -- we are where we are in life, and being honest about it and doing something about it is a fine thing. But I am not going to be patient with people lecturing genuine adults about how this adolescent has deep insights into life. Sorry, but that is just wishful thinking by people who mistake ignorance and low intellectual standards for originality.
Who is "deriding them for not being independent thinkers?" Maybe others who go on quests are independent in their own way, none of the comments here are trying to say one way or the other. What the comment DOES imply though, is that there are a lot of people who don't try anything like that at all, no matter the level of preparation.
The nobel part is that he actually left everything behind while most of us are drowning into urban life.
He wasnt a hero in traditional sense of 'saving, helping' other people. He is a hero who had what it takes to leave society behind while we cannot let go of smallest of things.
Please, at least agree with me that what he did was daring. So damn daring that makes him a hero to me.
What struck me most powerfully was that he did actually discover the meaning of life (or at least one aspect of it) when he says "happiness only real when shared". So it appears that he did actually figure out how to have a meaningful life, but unfortunately never actually got to put it into practice. That is the saddest part of the whole story for me.
You make it look like its a sin to live in a city.
The conclusion is that he died from a specific set of circumstances that few people knew were deadly. I think that directly counters the notion that he "he had no respect for the challenge" because I believe people arrive at that conclusion backwards: he died doing it, so he must have been foolhardy.
The flock itself has value; you don't have live with someone else, but as jusben1369 points out, if he'd so much as broken his leg falling down the steps of the bus he'd have ended up just as dead. Regular contact with a neighbor would have saved him, but he had no reserves and no margin for error.
People from my home state think California is an awful place. I moved here for work and couldn't imagine living anywhere else--imagine if I'd of took their word.
Hmm, yes.