What are plastic people? Are they people trying to be something they are not? Or are they just people trying to make it through the miss trails and miss understandings of life. It is really hard to define what “plastic people” are in time period of life.While reading Into The Wild I found that Chris McCandless hatred towards the “plastic people”  came from an honest place.  

Chris McCandless whole life was plastic to him. He felt that after the reveal of his father having a whole other family, that nothing about him was really real. His whole life had been a complete lie that he need to get away from. He not only wanted to get away from his life. He wanted to become a new person. Chris McCandless had made up his mind he was no longer going to be a plastic person.

Someone that is plastic is just trying to make it through life. They are trying to fit into societies idea of what they should be. Society tells them that you have to be super skinny and have a lot of money and live outside of your means. So the “plastic people” being so shallow go into the world trying to model a person they can never be or will be. They buy fancy cars and live outside of their means. Plastic people put on this persona that everything is okay but if you actually look at them. If you actually look right into their eyes and pass the outer persona they have created for themselves. You can really see who they are.

You can see they are hurting and they just want to be understood and excepted into the world. A plastic person is just someone that just got lost in the world and instead of staying true to who they are. They would much whether be this made up version of what society says they should be. Chris McCandless throughout Into The Wild proves time and again that people are plastic and lie.

In Into The Wild Chris McCandless parents are a perfect example of “plastic people”.

They want Chris to be something that he is not. Whether than loving their son for him and what  he believes they push their unrealistic values on to him. They try to buy him things like cars and such to try and make Chris fit into their perfect little world where everything is just plastic. Instead of seeing that what they are doing is pushing Chris away they still continue to do the same things that caused him to hate them in the first place.

The way Chris perceived the world in 1992 is still right in 2015. I do not ever think that “plastic people” will never not exist. Society has created this ideal that you have to be just like the characters hollywood has created in movies or that news has idealized. If you try to differ from this they try to label you as nerd or not a “cool kid”. But lets be honest here for minute who wants to be a “cool kid”. Usually speaking and statistically speaking “cool kids” are the ones that have the most problems.

They grow up thinking everything should just be hand to them. That there is no hard work involved in get want you want in life. Those quote cool kids are the biggest plastic people to me. Its Chris McCandless who could see that too and this is  why he so depressedly did everything in his power to leave the life he had behind and start over.

Through out Chris’s journey he meets lots of people. Each time he met someone they would offer to help or give him something to help him on his journey but each time he would turn them. He never wanted to take help from anyone he was determined to do this by himself. But I think otherwise, I think he never took help from anyone because he could never really trust anyone. Chris had grown up in a family full of “plastic people”. When ever they would give him something they felt as though he owed them something in return. So in Chris’s mind the people that he was closest to had turned out to be “plastic” people and he felt as though if he could not even trust his own flesh blood to not be “plastic” how could he trust anyone else.