Into the Wild: My thoughts
Getting back into reading, this book shook me. Most people have brash opinions about it: Chris’s quest was noble and romantic or Chris was a selfish fool. However it went deeper than that for me. It was not a story of the romanticised throwing away your possessions and running off into the wild. That is not the innate call of humans. Rather his was a story of thirst to experience meaning and greatness. Disillusioned by the systems to achieve anything in the social world he left it. He saw it for the shallow, repetitive machine it was and he left. It made me think of why I have the goals that I do. What is life’s purpose. DNFing in a swimming competition made this book hit that much harder as I was in the emotive state: without any recognition or certificates would I still have the drive to swim. This echoed into other aspects like my interests in entrepreneurship, physics, mathematics.
