Chris McCandless was a fuckup. I read Krakauer’s telling of his story, Into The Wild. I didn’t bother with the movie. He was a boy who acted like he was the only one who’d ever been hurt. He ran away from home, pushed away everyone who loved him, and died alone in the Alaska wilderness.

Before he starved, the hunger made worse by eating toxic seeds, he wrote in the margin of the book Dr. Zhivago (more on this tomorrow), “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED.”

McCandless found the solitude he spent two years looking for when he walked into those woods. And then he realized that what he really wanted was what he always had, but discarded.

Think of the best moments in your life. Are you alone?

One of my favorite memories was killing an elk with my bow in a tough unit. It wasn’t even a nice bull. Chase was at my side when I loosed the arrow. As it cut through the bull’s lungs, Chase said, “Oh… yes!” The arrow didn’t pass through the bull in silence. Half an hour later we found it dead. I couldn’t contain my smile. That smile was mirrored on his face. We shook hands and hugged. Then we shared the work of getting the bull into the truck.

The moment exists in more than just my recollection.

Developmental psychologist, Michael Tomasello’s compares children to chimps. He argues that what distinguishes the human mind is the ability to point your attention at something with another person and know that you’re both looking at it. Chimps hunt in groups, but each one is essentially out for itself. Before humans can talk, we point at things to share them, with no reason except “look at that with me.”

Tomasello’s theory of where this came from is collaborative foraging. At some point early humans couldn’t eat unless they worked together. A hunter who could synchronize with a partner, read the shared moment, and feel it together ate. One who couldn’t, didn’t. Over enough generations, the shared moment came to feel good because it was how we survived.

When people say hunting is in our DNA… when they say this is how we get our protein, they’re only half correct. It’s also how we’re wired to experience joy. McCandless, in his discontent, killed the very cure for it.