I really believe a big reason why survivors have a hard time transitioning back to a normal life is because they miss the emotional intimacy and sense family they got from others who shared that experience with them.
I can tell you I definitely felt lonely after completing a month-long kayaking course in Arctic Alaska. You really really miss the other people who shared that intensity w/you and, for a while, you feel like everybody else just doesn't get you. They can't. That feeling has to be magnified by like...1000 after a plane crash.
Jack had no strong connections w/anyone at the time of the crash. Once they get rescued and everyone resumes their old life, Jack has nothing. As a surgeon, he needs to be the center of attention, the fixer. His perception of reality has to be all screwed up too because of the drugs, so makes a lot of sense that he would see returning to the island as a matter of life or death for every one from flight 815. What else does he have to fix?
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Originally Posted by charlie98210
I think that the use of the phone Jack had places the flash-forward either in our present, or a little further forward in time.
I've just finished reading a book about some people who survive a plane crash and the writer makes the point that most of these people, the ones who survive while quite a few others with them are killed, or have to survive on their own for a period of time, can't make the transition back to normal once they are rescued.
It's like they have become addicted to the adrenalin rush they were experiencing in their life-or-death situation and the letdown of being safe is too much for them to accept. They also seem to have built-up a picture in their minds that they were supposed to have survived "for a reason." Going back to being an ordinary, nobody special, can bring on a suicidal depression.
In fact, the author commented that 60% of people who have survived plane crashes kill themselves within a year of the incident.
I think that's what was happening to Jack. Plus, I think he mimicked his father's tendencies toward alchohol (he was drinking alot in the pilot episode and in the flashback to the airport bar where he met Ana Lucia).
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