I saw an "on the road" film this week that blew open my understanding of travel and confirmed my imagination of what life could look like. Into the Wild, Sean Penn's cinematic recreation of the journey taken in the early 1990s by Chris McCandless - a rich young kid - across North America to the frozen wastes of Alaska is, in the first instance, a magnificent film. It relates McCandless' story with near-surgical detail - the extraordinary central performance by Emile Hirsch would be trivialized by awarding him something so cheesy as an Oscar - and it also succeeds in portraying the character as one deserving both our admiration and critique. He was a flawed hero. On the one hand, he risked social ostracism by donating his trust fund to OXFAM and refusing to obey the death-dealing dictates of upper-middle class society – the big house, the well-paying job, the "respectable" family – so that he could pursue the objective of becoming more human through meeting the goodness in strangers and entering a John the Baptist-type wilderness. On the other, he allowed his family to believe he was missing, presumed dead, for nearly two years.

The film asks the question he asked himself: What is our responsibility to ourselves? Or, better put, what is our responsibility to the image of God to which we all are called to stewardship? Is it to live within the boundaries of commerce, social status, and the monetary value of our homes? Or are we invited to participate in something that transcends the social constructs of economics and society? McCandless knew something of the old adage that making a living and making a life are two very different questions.

I saw the film on vacation, where the closeted hotel I was stuck in due to a connecting flight cancellation seemed to exist primarily to prevent guests from ever having to leave the luxury of a resort. The cultural norms that suggest we find happiness by spending exorbitant amounts of money to have an antiseptic experience of an island thousands of miles away leave me cold. I'd much rather be camping in Alaska, asking myself what it means to be human.

Toward the end of his – ultimately tragic - sojourn in the tundra, McCandless wrote in his journal of his journey's key revelation: 'Happiness is only real when shared'. He had realized that a whole life is always a conversation – with natural surroundings, values, history, traditions, and with the fellow travelers who ground us in community. And that conversation is better held in the light of understanding that making a living and making a life are not the same thing.

Gareth Higgins is a Christian writer and activist in Belfast, Northern Ireland. For the past decade he was the founder/director of the zero28 project, an initiative addressing questions of peace, justice, and culture. He is the author of the insightful How Movies Helped Save My Soul and blogs at www.godisnotelsewhere.blogspot.com