Storyline:

In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose hunter…

Passage:

As to when I shall visit civilization again; it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and the star sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty.

Even from your scant description, I know I could not bear the routine and humdrum of the life that you are force to lead. I don’t think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.

From the above descriptions I think you can gather what the book was about. (If you want to see the story it was made into a major Hollywood motion picture and you can find the DVD, of the same title, on Netflix.) The kid was a searcher. He loved Jack London, Henry David Throeau and Leo Tolstoy. He wanted to get away from the (civilized) world in order to find meaning in it.

The author is an experienced mountaineer named Jon Krakauer whose most famous book, Into Thin Air, was about a 1996 Mt Everest disaster that resulted in the deaths of many climbers. He is very familiar with getting away from civilization and looking for a higher meaning. The difference between the author and the main character is that the author does not believe that he is omnipotent. He has a boundary for how much risk he is willing to accept. If the risk in a certain situation is more than that limit, he will not go forth. The main character did not consider risk, not at all. It didn’t pertain to him.

The book was a very interesting read. It held my attention the whole way through. I think to some degree we all live lives of quiet desperation. We all want a little bit more. And a lot of the time we have it too easy, we are spoiled and soft. This kid was none of those things. He saw things differently. He did things differently. I don’t agree with everything or even most of what the kid did, but it is interesting to see his point of view. I think had he not been in his early twenties, he would have came out of the woods alive. He was a little too naïve to understand the situation he was putting himself in.

I read this book over the weekend and I thought, “what does this have to do with personal finance?” And then it hit me, this kid had flawed thinking with regards to many things in the world, but he had it right with regards to the definition of ‘needs.’ The kid lived out of a backpack for 3 or 4 yrs. No phone, no TV, no car, nothing. He was a living proof to the world that our needs are hardly anything and can fit into a couple of bags.

If you ever want a very different perspective on the world, give this book a try. Sorry if I ruined the ending for you, although I think you’d have figured it out right away if you decided to read it (as the storyline above is printed on the cover of the book). The book will give you a sense of what is necessary in your life and how much it is possible to live without.

Check out the trailer for the film:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVOUJf_ONzc

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