No way. I like having a comfortable bed in an air conditioned house with a nice indoor toilet. Not to mention my computer, TV and cell phone. I honestly can’t understand the desire of living uncomfortably, for those so quick to say yes remember the most important thing you’d be giving up: the dope.
I urge the OP to read the book, which is much better than the movie.
I read the book but didn’t see the movie.
Come on, no one remembers the scene where
They eat bad food and get horrible food poisoning? Man, they would’ve killed for some indoor plumbing then, I’m sure.
Plus, a life with no DVDs, no books, no running water, no make up, no pretty clothes/shoes, no mp3 players, oh and no Chinese food…it seems like hell on earth.
I think it works a lot better in fiction than in reality. “One monkey butler at first, but he’ll train others.”
For an interesting read of how one man did just that – set up a solo lifestyle on the very remote atoll of Suvarow. Tom Neale’s book “An Isalnd to Oneself” is excellent reading.
And I think I may have heard about Neale a couple years ago from a thread right here on the SDMB!
Notably, that scene (along with some other terrifying stuff from the book) isn’t in the movie.
My Number One reason for not pursuing the fantasy: bugs. Many of these idyllic tropical locations have lots of terrifyingly huge bugs.
I have a friend who actually did live on a faraway tropical island for a while. She tells stories about the “centipede hammer” she and her husband kept handy for killing the giant centipedes that would sometimes wander into their home.
Building on what mack was on about, and what I feel the heart of the film was really about, it’s not really a question of how much you’d want to be in that sort of paradise with or without access to modern conveniences. The moral of the story rests on the idea no paradise can remain so, because it cannot be kept a secret. What would you do to keep your private paradise a secret? What would you do if others showed up? You might welcome the first visitors with open arms, but what if they never stopped coming? Sal went to extreme measures to make an example of Richard for giving away the secret to paradise, and that’s when they all realized how fragile it was.
The real question isn’t so much whether you could fathom life without your “toys”, but whether you’d be willing to stay part of a commune (that you have no knowledge of when you first enter it) for the rest of your life. The story suggests that you probably wouldn’t be allowed to leave and take the secret with you. That’s a big gamble considering you’re in a closed community with no laws and a very loose social structure. As the film also reveals, it quickly becomes obvious that there are absolutely no secrets and everyone knows what everyone else is doing at all times. I also think it’s a universal human truth that when a large group of people accepts you into their clique without even getting to know you, there’s inevitably going to be trouble ahead. That is how cultists ingratiate and indoctrinate people into closed methods of thinking. If, like Daffy or the mortally-wounded Swede, you become more of a nuisance than a benefit to the group, you wouldn’t be able to simply sever yourself from them and go on doing your own thing. You’d be ostracized, threatened, harmed, perhaps even killed. The story also has a lot in common with Lord of the Flies. Isolated communes always seem to fall apart in the end (much like actual Communism did) because they just aren’t self-sustaining for a variety of reasons.
For the “Would you do it?” part, I would. I would actually love to, but I know that it is pretty much impossible. My wife and son would be okay with it, but my wife is very close to her large family. Not knowing about coming back to see them would make it far more difficult for her to do something like this (I assume).
As far as a seaworthy boat - I would hope they had something. If not, I would be less likely to stay. This goes in with the idea of being prepared. There are times when you have to go out from where you are, such as a tsunami or something - I don’t know, and I wouldn’t want to be totally stranded.
The amount of men and women doesn’t make a difference. It would be more important that there were families surviving, as I would not go without my son, and therefore his ability to survive there is important.
I’d take enough material things to get by. You need some things while travelling, and that would mean basic survival tools. I would have to take a guitar and a lifetime supply of strings as well, but I would actually need very little else.
Brendon Small
honestly, I would have a hard time imagining a type of leadership structure I’d feel comfortable with. I imagine every office I’ve ever been a part of, or every randomly-selected public group, and I generally don’t want to spend three days with them, let alone the rest of my life!
I mentioned earlier that I did it for a year in a way and in almost complete isolation for 4 months in Vermont. I did have access to a general store a few miles away but that was it and I certainly didn’t have neighbors, a phone, or anyone to contact.
I have been reading the Mother Earth News since I was a kid and they are dead serious about this topic. They profile whole families that build their own cabins by hand. Some use some hydro generators and some solar panels. A few just go without electricity all together. A quote from one older man who built his own cabin in Wisconsin was that “I just couldn’t take having all the electricity around. It makes me nervous.”
I have cousins that did it in Colorado. They lived high in the Rockies and fished and nurtured the land. The nearest school was 40 miles away on treacherous roads especially in the winter. The kids were partially home schooled but also got lessons from a teacher via CB radio (this was in the 1980’s). They once drove from Colorado to Louisiana to meet the family and the kids mainly hung out with us. They knew about the concept of a TV but they didn’t know about formats like cartoons. They couldn’t figure out the difference between plain TV and the VCR tapes that we kept putting in to show them. They couldn’t understand how a “movie” was different from plain TV other than the fact that one was longer. It is an interesting philosophical question.
My dream job growing up was to be an Alaskan bush pilot. Now, I have read plenty about that and it still sounds great except it is still too freakin’ cold. It isn’t nice to know that you could die if your plane breaks down. However, I discovered that you can be a Bush pilot in New England. Large parts of Maine and Northern New Hampshire are mostly uninhabited so that could be viable.
I would happily live that way if I could. However, that would require me to be single and my family is more important than this dream. That is the main reason I don’t do it.
Um…no. I’d probably kill all those hippies with a machete. I mean what is it about civilization people are actually trying to get away from?
That’s the joke. They all act like it’s a little paradise, but when the boat makes it’s trip to the mainland, everyone has a laundry list of supplies and creature comforts they need.
Yeah, just ask that jerk from Into the Wild. Oh right…you can’t because he starved to death in some shit-box van in Alaska.
I’m going to have to read this. I love going-it-solo tales. I Loved Alone in the Wilderness, and recently saw Call of the Wild, a documentary about Guy Grieve, who chucked it all for a year and built a cabin in Alaska. Call of the Wild* is also a book, but I haven’t read it yet.
*(Not to be confused with Jack London’s classic The Call of the Wild.)
The thing is, it’s not like you have to choose one extreme or another. Just buy some land out in a rural area, build yourself a cabin, and only visit the general store once or twice a month or so. That’s a sustainable lifestyle. It’s not particularly radical either, plenty of people do it. You’re not dependent on never getting sick, because you can be rescued, and you can get whatever creature comforts you like.
So dreaming about a one-way trip to an isolated island is just a dream, because you don’t have the desire or ability to even live in an isolated rural community. There are plenty of bush villages in Alaska that people live in. There are plenty of tiny farming towns in Iowa, or wide spots along the highway in Nevada.
This lifestyle is available to anyone, it isn’t a pipe dream or only for a select few. You just move there and do it, and the people who really want to do it actually do it. And worst that happens is after a year or five you figure out that lifestyle isn’t for you and you leave and go back to your current crappy lifestyle, albeit after blowing through your savings.
You are exactly right about that. One of the many world famous, influential Boston area people was Henry David Thoreau. He specialized in philosophy and living in the natural environment at Walden Pond, His times of seclusion in the wild are taught in high schools and colleges everywhere.
The thing most people don’t realize is that Walden pond is in the town of Concord, MA. It is a gorgeous and exclusive suburb of Boston even today but it was also well developed before the Revolutionary War and one of the towns where it started (neighboring Lexington, MA being the other).
Walden Pond was simply a nice pond on the edge of town. It takes 30 minutes tops to walk back into Concord center which was well established well over 100 years before Thoreau decided to build his retreat in the woods. Even then, the pond itself wasn’t isolated at all. There were houses all around almost within shouting distance.
I don’t mean to criticize Thoreau because I don’t think he ever implied what people think he was writing about. Walden State Park has an exact replica of Thoreau’s cabin along with some popular swimming beaches for this moderate sized pond. Concord itself has remained mostly intact since Thoreau’s days in the 1840’s. Not being from New England, I found it a little disturbing that Thoreau could just walk back and forth into the town center with little effort and wasn’t even out of earshot people most of the time.
His idea of roughing it was about the same as people have today.
As for wanting to do this, there was a time when that would have held a certain appeal for me. Older now, I insist on my creatue comforts, like air-conditioning and hot water. I would not want to do it now.
I don’t think I giving anything away by mentioning that when I was in Thailand I had a pretty bad case of the runs. On Ko Phi Phi Lee where The Beach was filmed, there is no development of any kind including outhouses. While I was out there snorkeling I started to have some severe gastrointestinal distress. I’m not about to shit on the island or in the lagoon. I’ve never had to shit so bad in my life and just sort of barely made it back to my hotel room to experience the worse case of blasting diarrhea shits ever. I can relate to your sentiments.
I’d certainly consider doing this, depending on how I felt about my life at the time (or, as is the case in reality, the way it’s been going for the better part of 11 years) and who my SO was. If things were the like they typically are, I wouldn’t care about whether or not / how I’d be able to get back.
If an emergency boat was involved, I think that would sway me even further. I couldn’t care less over the ratio of men to women. Possessions I’d bring would definitely include some major bookage (like the collected works of Twain or something), my puppy, a super fluffy pillow, a small sentimental trinket and depending on the answer of who I’d bring with me, my Alice scrapbook. But hey, if he’s in attendance, I can ditch that for a game. Maybe Twister.
As for not doing it now? I don’t think I’d be capable of pulling it off without a really good reason and a push. The rest? Like like of creature comforts or the horridness of dealing with life-in-raw (mega diarrhea – argh!), I’m assuming I’d just do the best adjustment that I could do and soldier ahead. Isn’t that what we all do now anyway?
“As the river widened and joined others, we emptied out one of our barrel packs and filled it with fresh water, for soon we would be tasting salt from the tide pushing up the river. As we approached the river delta, the trees dropped away, replaced first by grasses, and then sea grasses. We could smell the change, and taste the salt on our lips when the wind picked up. We were awed by the ocean as it opened up before us, for upriver there had been no open spaces. To us the water and the sky seemed huge and inviting. The tide was running as we left the Kattawagami, so rather than set camp, we continued out into the sea, cooking our dinner on board, and paddling well into the evening. The slow sunset over the water was a brilliant ending to our day.”
“As we made our way along the coast we grew used to the marvellous openness of the ocean. We would take the tide out for kilometre after kilometre, far out of sight of land, and then return on it many hours later. Every hour we would stop to take a fix, set our next bearing, and lie back in the boat, surrounded by nothing but water and sky and each other. Hour after hour, day after day, we paddled and sang and slept under the hot sun on the northern ocean, wanting never to return.”
My idea of an isolated island community lifestyle is staying at Atlantis on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.