Chris McCandless was a young man who had been a part of a wealthy family and previously lived a comfortable lifestyle, until he decided that he was better off without it. After graduating from Emory University, McCandless cut off all communication with his family and created a new identity for himself as a form of dissociation from society. Transcendentalism influenced Chris McCandless' life and beliefs in Into the Wild as it strongly evoked the sense of abandoning his privileged lifestyle and a simple life of nonconformity.
Chris McCandless felt the need to abandon his social life after he retrieved influential beliefs from the ideologies of people like Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the excerpt ‘Walden’, Thoreau states how most
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Perhaps the purpose of Thoreau’s excerpt is to prevent us from overlooking the possibility of living a simple lifestyle without extra accommodations. Most of the things people pay for are more or less likely to not be necessarily needed, and it's highly probable that people end up miserable as they are left to pay off their education’s expenses, which could be the reason why McCandless felt influenced to abandon his privileged lifestyle. Although McCandless had the wealth to cover these costs, it wasn’t enough to make him feel as if he was actually living a meaningful life, let alone a simple one. In addition, the author Jon Krakauer of the book ‘Into The Wild’ states how McCandless had previously spent four years preparing to leave behind "the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence" (Ch. 3). Krakauer describes the surroundings of McCandless’ life as something asphyxiating with very little value, and it happened to be overwhelmingly bothersome to him. Krakauer follows his words by stating that Chris "intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he