“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure” is what Chris McCandless believes is happiness in the movie “Into the Wild”. The movie centers around a young man by the name of Chris McCandless who abandons his family and wealth to search for his ultimate happiness in the wild. He believes that living in the wild will make him discover his true happiness. In Sara Ahmed’s essay Why Happiness, Why now, she explores the how the pursuit of happiness affects people’s life choices and decisions. Sara Ahmed claims that everybody wants to strive for happiness in some way or some form and that the search for happiness may lead to the “good life”. The movie “Into the Wild” shows how the two cultural share an understanding of society’s influence on happiness and how the good life can be achieved through dependence on others.

First, society inputs many ideas and models that can instruct people how to be happy. Sara Ahmed talks about how the media often promotes novels and films to the public in a way that gives the people a standard on what happiness should or should not look like. In the movie, Chris McCandless disregards society’s influence and abandons all his possessions. In one scene of the movie, Chris McCandless is in the desert burning his money and his ID cards. This act of burning his possession symbolizes his rebellious nature of defying society and symbolizing the start of his new life. McCandless says in the movie “If you want something in life, reach out and grab it”, this quote reinforces the idea that if one wants to be happy, one must take action in order to get it.

Secondly, the good life can be achieved through a realization of a person that he or she is truly happy. However this “good life” is different for every person because no two people have the same backgrounds and construct. McCandless did not achieve this good life because he was not in a state of true happiness. His happiness in the wild was a short and temporary because he realized that he could not be truly happy unless he shared it with another person. Throughout McCandless journey across the country, he met various people in his trip who helped him achieve his goal. In this case, society is benefiting McCandless because the people in the society assist McCandless. This further reinforces the idea that people need to depend on each other in order to be happy. One can not simply be happy alone. This realization came to McCandless when he realizes that his happiness can be fulfilled by sharing it with another person.

Furthermore, happiness can often be associated with objects that bring happiness to them. It is not wrong to say that money can make a person happy, but the question is how long will it make a person happy. The long-term happiness is the hardest to achieve and needs to input the most work into achieving. Sara Ahmed’s essay states that a country’s wealth does not necessarily indicate a happier country. This can be related to McCandless because he doesn’t view objects as his true happiness. As seen in the movie, he burns all his materialistic possessions and abandoned his car and views all items not crafted by nature as materialistic. However, one scene in the movie contradicts with McCandless idea or abandoning materialistic possessions because he relies on an abandoned bus for shelter in the wilderness. McCandless loves the bus because it represents his sanctuary and a place where various travelers have marked signs in the bus.

Lastly, Ahmed talks about how there is a system in measuring the happiness level of people. The happiness of some people is based off of the unhappiness of others. In the movie, McCandless encounters several people are who unhappy with their lives and McCandless shares some aspect of his experience to others to help them and feeds off of their unpleasant situations and turns them into pleasant ones. For example, in one scene there is an old man named Franz who befriends McCandless. Franz had a drinking problem and lives a life of destitution. When he met McCandless, he instantly likes him and even went as far to ask him to be his son. However when Franz learns of McCandless death, he returns to drinking and denounces God.  This tells us that happiness is not always going to be with us forever and that it will always be ahead of us unless we can catch it first.

Although McCandless died in the wild, his idea of happiness is not wrong. His attempt in trying to find happiness is his own unique form. Sara Ahmed’s essay reinforces the idea that there is no one true path leading to true happiness and that finding happiness can often lead to madness and make a person even more unhappy. The good life reinforced by Ahmed states that it is the ultimate indicator of happiness and when some one is experiencing pure happiness, they are living in the good life.