This doesn’t make sense to me.

How can you respect his decisions and choices while openly acknowledging that he was a naive fool who didn’t prepare at all? Do you think he would have respected himself if he survived? He seems to have been aware he made a MASSIVE error in his last days.

I don’t understand how you can applaud someone for being adventurous when the only adventure he took was “How fast can I become a well-known example of rampaging moron?”

Some only see failure. I see success in the intent of what he was trying to do.

I can personally think of a bunch of idiotic things I did when I was younger that I got away with that could have caused my death. Just because I got lucky and lived doesn’t mean I am better than Chris McCandless. He was a young guy with some personal trauma. He made some poor choices but he was trying to figure things out. To me that is admirable.

I saw success in the intent of what he was trying to do

… What? By no metric did that man succeed unless you’re trying to simply say “He succeeded in trying” but that’s even more nonsensical because the thing he was trying was idiotic. Should I see the success in people who try to rob banks too? Or people tilting at windmills? Just like Don Quixote, Chris put himself and others in harms way for his own delusions and just like Don Quixote, both died knowing how monumentally badly they fucked up.

You keep saying you admire him and that is genuinely concerning to me because he didn’t do other than kill himself. He never prepared for living in the wild. He just assumed he would be able to. He went into the forest with nothing except purr unbridled arrogance and stupidity, assuming both would protect him. That isn’t admirable.

He made some poor choices

No. Every choice was the WORST choice possible, not a poor one. Nothing about what he did is deserving of respect or admiration.

I cannot fathom this at all and I think you’re actually arguing something incredibly dangerous.

Well, we are not going to agree on this and that’s okay. I did post this in the right community though.

I look at something like this:

Evel Knievel’s Jump at Caesar’s Palace

and I think, “that’s dumb as shit and there’s no way I would risk doing that”

And he crashed, broke a bunch of bones, and spent 29 days in a coma in the hospital.

But he’s also a legend for having done that. Understand? He did not succeed yet he was successful.

That is not even remotely comparable.

• Chris did not prepare in any way whatsoever. Evel was a stunt man who literally did this for a living and the entire jump was specifically designed ahead of time prior to the event.

• Chris had no help. Evel was surrounded by people and had paramedics and firefighters on standby.

• Chris did it for absolutely no reason other than because he wanted to. Evel was paid.

• Chris endangered himself, a slew of fools who tried to find his RV, search and rescue teams to had to rescue those fools, and the people who eventually had to destroy the RV to protect those public folks that Chris endangered. Evel endangered himself and people who were trained/equipped/prepped to deal with this specific outcome and who had instant response times.

• Chris vanished and inflicted mental trauma on everyone by just walking away into the woods to randomly die from unearned confidence, leaving them with no answers until his corpse was discovered. Evel televised his stunt.

• Chris died. Evel didn’t.

Well, we are not going to agree on this and that’s okay.

I am not going to debate you. People in the world have different opinions than you.

The community is called Unpopular Opinions. I posted one.

Sorry, but I am not going to reply to you anymore.