I recently finished reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. I’ll see the movie when it comes out on DVD. [It's not currently playing in a theater near me -- even if it were, I rarely go to the theaters any more....]
The book is primarily the story of Chris McCandless, a young man that, after graduating from college, shunned his family and most of society to travel alone mostly in western North America ending up in Alaska. Krakauer adds a chapter on one of his own early adventures making a solo climb in Alaska and information on a few other [in]famous figures that lived on the fringes of society.
At one point McCandless writes,
…nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.
I can identify with some of the yearning that McCandless felt for a more genuine, more deliberate existence and the desire for solitude. But I take it in smaller doses. I don’t want to be a hunter/gatherer — I’ve never been hunting and I’d probably starve before I killed and cleaned everything I eat. Still, I think we have gotten too far removed from the sources of our food and, as a result, we fail to appreciate our food or the hard work of the people that provide it. Also, I need a lot of time alone. Fortuitously, I can get a lot of that without escaping to the bush.
But the allure is there….
Let's do Something Cheap and Superficial 
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