Dropping Out of College from An Album Made By Ye

The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” Genesis 2:18

Everyone dreams of dropping out of the world at least once in a while. For vacations, mental health days, or just after a bad day when life is weighing you down. You dream of dropping everything and living in the mountains, on the beach, or fulfilling a dream of living somewhere else specific. Then you get in the car and drive back home.

Last spring, after reading and watching Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, I got the urge to drop out of the world. Then I added another major and sat through two more semesters and graduated. Despite the movie not really representing the true nature of the story in the book, Into the Wild follows the life of Christopher McCandless after graduating from Emory University, running away and isolating himself from his family, and donating the remaining $24,500 of his college fund to Oxfam. After traveling through the western United States for a while, McCandless eventually ended up living alone in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. During the course of McCandless’s journey to find himself in his travels, a constant theme is the process of finding one’s self in the midst of society. Does it require getting rid of material possessions? Can you be an active member of society and still find yourself? Do you need human companionship and relationships?

In the book, Krakauer writes, 

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.”

…

“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.” 

…

“We like companionship, see, but we can't stand to be around people for very long. So we go get ourselves lost, come back for a while, then get the hell out again.” 

Towards the end of the story, without spoiling the ending, McCandless endures painful loneliness and longs for human companionship, often with scenes of him talking to himself frantically. In the end, McCandless realizes:

“Happiness [is] only real when shared.”

I can’t imagine what it would be like to not have anyone to talk to for months. I often find the need to retreat to my room after a busy week or weekend to recuperate before the next week starts. But, every time I isolate myself to rest and just hang out for a bit, I always eventually get the strong urge to go be social by the end of it. Even when I am alone in my room, I am never actually alone. I have my phone to text people, to constantly refresh social media, to check what else is happening in the world around me. I’m sure I have gone a day without physically speaking to someone, but never being completely isolated. Life with a smartphone is seemingly set up to avoid loneliness at all costs. There is always an urge to be connected to other people through your phone. Or, simply having your phone to dive into to avoid being alone ever. Even though he is a terrible person and I hate myself for mentioning him, when I think of this issue, I can’t stop thinking about an interview Louis C.K. did on "Conan" talking about we push away legitimate feelings—happy or sad—by reaching for our phones where you never feel completely sad or completely happy. Instead, “You just kind of feel satisfied with your products.” On texting and driving, Louis C.K says, “People are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.”

 …

The real motivator for this post comes from me reading the book The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel. The book is about the true story of Christopher Knight, a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, only once sleeping indoors at the very beginning of isolation. In 27 years, Knight never slept indoors, only spoke to one hiker the entire time (“Hi.”), and never went into a town to shop or gain shelter. Instead, Knight built himself a shelter within the dense woods of Maine and broke into the surrounding lake houses thousands of times to steal the necessary supplies to survive. I’m not sure which is more incredible: the fact that he survived Maine winters without sleeping indoors, that he was able to break into places in the same vicinity for 27 years without being caught, or that he never went mentally insane after enduring harsh conditions alone without a single conversation in 27 years. Eventually, Knight was caught breaking into a summer camp building for disabled children a park ranger that was obsessed with catching Knight after over a thousand break-ins.

“It was as if he went camping for a weekend and didn’t come home for a quarter century.”

Knight's pet mushroom

Why would Knight just abandon his life and go live in the woods? Apparently, when he was 20, he left Maine spontaneously and just start driving south before coming to the conclusion that he was going to turn around and simply get lost in the Maine woods. It turns out, he was very close to his childhood home where he had a seemingly normal and healthy upbringing. While everyone else views forced isolation as one of the worst punishments, from toddlers being put in timeout to prisoners enduring solitary confinement. In the book, it is mentioned that after 10 days of solitary confinement, a study shows that about a third of people will eventually develop active psychosis. After 27 years, Knight did not show any signs of mental illness. The book mentions the possibility that Knight has Asperger’s and could be a main reason in why Knight was able to survive psychologically all of those years alone. Knight was simply determined to live life his own way. In the woods, alone. The closest thing to a companion that Knight had was a mushroom that he kept as a pet. In Knight’s solitary living, Finkel writes,  

“He sacrificed college, a career, a wife, children, friends, vacations, cars, sex, movies, phones, and computers. He had never in his life sent an email or even seen the internet.”

Knight dropped out of society in 1986 and reemerged with his arrest in 2013. In a way, when Knight came back into society it was almost like time traveling. He hadn’t even been exposed to modern illnesses. Without human contact, in 27 years, Knight claims that he never suffered from a serious illness or even a common head cold—which meant the second he was put in jail his immune system was initially put into a state of shock.

Knight’s reintegration into society made me think of the Shawshank Redemption when Brooks Hatlan gets out of prison after 50 years, serving time from 1905 to 1955, and can’t believe what the world looks like after being away for so long, ultimately living in fear at the foreign world around him and lamenting,

"The world went and got itself in one big hurry." 

Knight had the same reaction to the world when he rejoined society, reacting to how society moves at “light speed, without rest” and feeling unfree even in his freedom when he got out jail. 

When the author of the book asks Knight if he gained any specific grand insight that was revealed to him after spending 27 years alone in the woods, Knight sat quietly for a while. As the author waited for a mystical revelation, Knight finally came up with his reply: “Get enough sleep.” 

And that's the way I read it.

Knight during his court case

Knight after spending time in jail, looking much more like a hermit