In the first post on his travel blog, Adventures of Justin, he wrote: “I am running from a life that isn’t authentic…I’m running away from monotony and towards novelty; towards wonder, awe, and the things that make me feel vibrantly alive.” Outside Online
I am always deeply impressed and disturbed by men like Justin Alexander who embark on quests for “authenticity”, and always disappointed in their inability to relate the “authentic” to me in comprehensible English.
They try, and they are often quite eloquent, but not about what matters most. This is partly because what matters to them is something that is very hard to describe or explain. But, like Christopher McCandless, they often scrap and scrape and flourish phrases and ideas and images before you without connecting all the dots. McCandless ended up dying, stupidly, alone, in an abandoned bus in Alaska, just a short trek from help because he didn’t really know the terrain or the challenges of living in the wild. He thought he was on to some incredibly valuable insight into the purpose of life but didn’t even take good hiking boots with him (a truck-driver who gave him a ride gave him his boots, out of pity).
He starved to death.
Countless others have died on mountains or in obscure, remote regions. Justin Alexander is another. No one knows what happened to him.
There’s not point pitying these men: they took responsibility for themselves and made choices that mattered to them and probably accepted that they might pay a price for it. In a way, I do admire them, because they are largely right about the predictability and mediocrity of life in the modern suburbs.
The one thing these people don’t seem to really consider is that, just as they might have some secret insight that sets them apart from mainstream society, mainstream society might have some secret insight that keeps them from wandering into the bush or the wild mountains and starving to death.
And yet some of them might have lives that are rich and rewarding and meaningful.