From my understanding, all the locals where this happened think this dude is a colossal dumbass.
I think his legacy is slowly changing though, and people are less impressed by his antics today than when it happened.
He wasn’t a dumbass, he was just suicidal.
He first left his privileged life, then his family and friends, then society. Typical steps of a suicidal person preparing for the end.
If he actually wanted to keep living, he could have left the bus and simply walked back, 3 days before his provisions ran out (it takes 6 hours to get to the trailhead).
But he stayed, even though he didn’t have the skills to live off the land. He accepted death, until it came close, then he regretted his decision and tried to get out but it was too late.To me, this is the simplest and most plausible explanation.
Somewhat related but it’s odd to me how many people I’ve met that feel so strongly negatively about him. Maybe as a herd instinct to warn others?
He wasn’t exceptionally selfish as he had no serious responsibilities.
On June 18, 2020, various government agencies coordinated with an Alaska Army National Guard training mission to remove the bus, deemed a public safety issue after at least 15 people had to be rescued and at least two people died while attempting to cross the Teklanika River to reach the bus.[
This BS is part of the reason, I think. Not only is he a dumbass, but he inspires other dumbasses to be the best dumbass they can.
Natural selection working as intended?
Several Darwin Awards nominees
stupid is as stupid does
Not sure the hate is directed at him, but at people glorifying him
Yeah, I haven’t read his book and have no strong opinions on him one way or another, but when the book came out, I remember him being presented to us as if he were some sort of spiritual or philosophical luminary to emulate, and it’s always rubbed me the wrong way.
Maybe, but having read the book I don’t think that’s what Krakauer was going for. The last chapter is basically a bunch of experts roasting him for making mistakes and getting himself killed.
I think he was stranded because of a flooded river though? From memory there was a reason he couldn’t just walk out.
The reason was him refusing to bring a map, which would have shown a bridge over the river less than a mile away.
And not scouting out his environment either, or even trying a detour along the river, or improvising a raft…Yeah, that’ll do it.
i’m too lazy to look into, but did he actually starve starve to death or was there some medical complication? it takes a long time to starve to death
His emaciated decomposing body was found by hunters. Time of death couldn’t be determined accurately.
The last 4 entries in his diary were just a date and a dash (-).
He had a bag of plant seeds with him that contained a toxin which causes paralysis.
His diary contained entries documenting his dwindling food reserves and unsuccessful hunting attempts.Yeah, I read that hypothetically consuming the plant (which resembled a nontoxic look alike) could have made it so he was too weak to scavenge what he needed to survive. He could have survived otherwise. He was certainly gambling with his life being out there alone, but I read the claims of him being totally unprepared were exaggerated.
The dude who dropped him off at the trailhead was so concerned due to his lacking gear, he first tried to convince him to call it off multiple times, then offered to drive him all the way to Anchorage and buy better gear from his own wallet.
the first theory was possible toxicity, it didn’t pan out, another person noticed he consumed similar forage as prisoners in a concentration camp during WWII who developed paralysis the plant has animo acids that most people can tolerate, but then you are stressed and starved they can cause paralysis, so there is some chance he was paralyzed by the time he knew he needed to hike out. all of it is speculation though, as others have pointed out a lot of people tired to get him to turn around and he may have been trying to end his life.
stuff you learn in boy scouts when your 12. yeah… probably the best lesson I learned in boy scouts is that if you don’t want to die on a camping trip, you have enough supplies for twice the time, enough clothes for twice the time, a map, a compass, a good understanding of where every road out is, and a plan to bail out of your camp site for every hour of the day, and when medical problem 1 happens, you bail, and you bail fast, no one needs to die on a camping trip. I camped through a blizzard, I dug shelters in snow, I did a lot of crazy stuff, but I was never dangerously hungry, thirsty, injured, or in shock, and the tired old guys who only half wanted to do camp outs were the best, because they knew exactly how far was too far every time.
Privileged is a complicated term for his life. On one hand, yes from the outside, and especially as presented in the movie, it seems like he had a typically idyllic upper middle class life. But if you do any digging into it, you find out that his father was an extremely volatile, violent abuser and his mom wasn’t much better. That sort of childhood trauma is a hell of a thing and absolutely impacts someone’s mental state.
… , then he regretted his decision and tried to get out but it was too late.
As good as all people that jumped of the Golden gate bridge and survived, regretted their decision the second they jumped.
I agree with some of Chris’s viewpoints. Materialism is stupid. Buying shit for the sake of acquiring shit is stupid. Not that you should never have anything sentimental, but those kinds of things are tied to people or events.
But yeah, guy kinda lost me when he decided to camp in the Alaskan bush with no survival skills, no experience dressing a carcass, no foraging skills, and very little equipment. As others pointed out, he went there to die, then changed his mind when it was too late. A rational, non-suicidal person would have spent months preparing for this outing.
Basically everyone who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and lived (only ~2% of jumpers) regretted doing it before they hit the water. Chris jumped from the bridge and changed his mind halfway down. Going to Alaska wasn’t some brave choice to be free. You can do that anywhere in the Lower 48. It was a cry for help masked as a revolutionary idea.
Basically everyone who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge and lived (only ~2% of jumpers) regretted doing it before they hit the water.
My teacher in biology back in school explained that this was due to hormones being released something something close to death something something. In essence, it was not a “choice” to regret jumping, but rather a biological response. So you would regret it wether you wanted to or not, so to say.
Can’t give you a source since I don’t have one.I have never seen Bojack Horseman but maybe I should!
It’s gud
I think it would have been the GOAT if they ended it with the view from halfway down
Bojack dying alone after pushing away everyone in his life yet again would’ve been the perfect ending to the depression show
Idk, I really like the way it ended.
I get your point, but instead of a horrifying (but somewhat deserved ending) we got a very “real” ending.
It’s relly gud.
changed my life. and while the depth of the show is what people talk about most, it is light too, with constanta great sense of fun eg the multi-minute wordplay jokes like rhymes n alliteration the show would often do.
A rational, non-suicidal person would have spent months preparing for this outing.
I have a theory that his family was abusive and he learned to distrust strangers and became convinced that he needed to always stand on his own two feet because nobody would ever truly have his back. I’ve been through a similar phase in my life caused by neglect and abuse throughout my childhood and adolescence. Could be totally wrong ofc but it seems to fit for me
Edit: Apparently his sister confirmed this in a memoir she wrote called The Wild Truth. There’s an interesting article on the NPR website about it:
She and her brother Chris grew up with a volatile, viciously abusive father who made their weak-willed yet hyper-competent mother both his victim and his accomplice.
This is a really similar situation to mine. Took many years of therapy to get to where I am, but I’ll probably never really fully heal from it.
Is that theory based on a hunch you had, or is it maybe based on the memoir that his sister wrote where she says so?
It was a hunch, I didn’t know about any memoir, what’s it called?
The Wild Truth
Dang, thanks so much for mentioning that, it’s lowkey crazy to have this theory I’ve kinda kept to myself be confirmed all these years later. I’ll edit my original comment
Does this “stand on your own” thing include not reading survivalist books, bringing maps or assorted tools? Because that’s what I would do if I wanted to live in the wilds. The “he was literally suicidal” theory is a much better explanation for his actions IMO.
He did read survivalist books, there was a book about identifying edible plants he had with him when he died. He even hired a botany/foraging tutor I believe. Ultimately though it’s kinda the same thing, if he was suicidal, it would have been because of the abuse, most likely. Personally, I don’t think it holds much water, suicidal people don’t typically go off and live in the wilderness to starve to death, they usually kill themselves a bit more directly, whereas “mediocre rich white boy vastly overestimates his own wilderness survival abilities and is horribly unprepared for the reality of living off the land” is highly credible
And the final note vibes with that. Why kill yourself slowly if you want to die? And why change your mind at the last minute?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless#Death
Turns out no one knew that some of the plants he was eating were poisonous until after he died
probably *
That can be inserted several different locations in the sentence and create a different meaning.
only one makes sense
Every bad situation leading up to his trip into Alaska, someone bailed him out of the situation. There was no one at the bus in Alaska to bail him out.
How do you manage to starve in a heated school bus literally on a trail, a few hours walk from a tourist lodge in the direction you came from?
By being a fucking moron. He was out of food and weak, and by the time a thought sparked in his brain, the small stream he crossed on his way there was a big river, because of snow melt.
Anyone on a trail would know that, because they’re not fucking morons. Except for dumb entitled Chris who thought nature would just provide and that solo survival would be easy.
Men will do literally anything except get therapy
Lean meats. He was mostly eating rabbits and other small game, this is problematic since they aren’t particularly nutritional by themselves. He did take down a caribou with a .22 which is impressive, but he didn’t know how to cure the meat so most of it rotted away.
He also ate plants he didn’t know, which were poisonous and shut down his digestive tract.
But that was all after he made his fatal mistake, which was staying put when his actual food ran out instead of just walking back.I thought he was already starving by the time he ate the plants out desperation. Regardless his whole situation was of his own making, especially since I’ve met a few guys who basically did the same thing around that time and didn’t starve to death in a random spot in Alaska.
The term for this is protein poisoning or protein toxicity. Less formally, rabbit starvation.
Thanks couldn’t remember the proper term and didn’t want to use the term full starvation since I think that’s a bit too vague and dialect specific.
This sounds like the most beautiful deconstruction of Ayn Rand I’ve ever heard.
Mmmm… Checks out
To be fair, an office job is a bit like crawling into a coffin. And nobody’s gonna canonize you for that.
I spent 2 hours playing connections today and then went home early. Office jobs are amazing.
Contrast that to subsistence farming or manufacturing widgets in China.
Or salt mining. Or low income anal prostitution. Or live organ transplants.
Or low income anal prostitution.
Oh you mean a tech support job?
I enjoy your comment, though really what’s a better job?
Independent general contractor!
Sounds like real work. My hands don’t do real work sadly, if I was out in the wild I would perish on the first day. Vultures circle every time I leave the apartment.
Coinhippiepro
Alaska isn’t as “settled” as lower 48 (continental US), the wilderness is always there for mooks to wander into.
It will kill you, just one moose will ruin your day. And the moose are the least of your worries
you don’t know what fear is until you’ve locked eyes with a bear.
In Alaska he is always used as a cautionary tale to the point where he borders on being mythic like Icarus.
Actually, now that I think about it, Alaska sizable pantheon of guys like this. Dumb people who think they love the wilderness, but do not have any real respect for it.
I think there were discussions of him dying from eating raw potatoes or something like that. I just remember hearing that and thinking this guy must be the type of person who thinks chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
I know I’m being rude, but I’m with anon and always felt like I was missing something when people praised this guy. He didn’t seem like an enlightened soul to me. He seemed like he was going through a severe mental health crisis. And was intensely ignorant and a bit arrogant that he could go into the wild with zero understanding of it and have a life there.
Steve Jobs beta release
Siri, what is the American Dream?
