Chris didn’t like stealing from people’s homes, but winter was coming. He had no choice.
Once inside he went straight for what he needed. Steaks, batteries, peanut butter, and books, books, books. If anything looked truly expensive, he ignored it. Chris was a thief, but he had a Code. Occasionally he’d steal a handheld video game, but never one that looked new. He wasn’t going to deprive a child of a favorite toy.
He’d been at this for so long the people of central Maine had almost gotten used to it. Many knew he was harmless, but others were still irked. Law enforcement of all stripes had tried to arrest him and failed. Nobody could catch “the North Pond Hermit.” But that was about to change.
As Chris exited the building, a flashlight blinded him. “GET ON THE GROUND!” If Chris could see anything, it would have been the barrel of Sergeant Terry Hughes’s .357 magnum. Chris got on the ground. Soon backup arrived to arrest the man responsible for over one thousand burglaries. It was a record for the state. Heck, probably for the world.
They asked Chris questions, but he didn’t respond at first. Frankly, it seemed like he had trouble speaking. When asked how long he’d been living in the woods, he replied, “When was Chernobyl?”
Chris had been a hermit for twenty-seven years. The original Ghostbusters was the most recent film he’d seen on the big screen. He had never used the internet. In the past quarter century, he had only encountered other people twice—accidentally. Even then he had spoken a grand total of only one word: “Hi.” This interview with the police was more conversation than he had had in almost three decades.
But how? How had he managed to go this long with almost no human contact? How had he managed to survive the wilderness? Winters in Maine are no freakin’ joke.
Chris took them to his campsite. Despite living in the woods, his home is probably cleaner than yours. The police were shocked. Yeah, he lived in a tent, but it had a metal bed frame and a mattress. Food was stocked in rodent-proof plastic containers. Chris even had a Purell dispenser. He clearly had no intention of returning to civilization. Diane Perkins-Vance of the Maine State Police asked him why he had left. Why did he flee society to live here alone in the woods? He didn’t answer. But, with time, details about how he ended up there emerged.
Christopher Thomas Knight had excellent grades in high school, but he had always felt like a weirdo. Dealing with people was frustrating for him. After graduating early, he took a job working for an alarm company. And then one day, inexplicably, he decided to drive away as far as he could. When the car was out of gas, he put the keys on the dashboard and just walked into the woods. There was no plan. He told no one. Frankly, he had no one to tell.
It was harder than he thought. He’d never even gone camping before. At first, he ate from gardens but eventually turned to stealing to survive. His work for the alarm company helped him break into homes, but he took no pleasure in it. After two years of being a nomad, he found the spot that would be his home for the next quarter century.
This was not Walden and Chris was not Thoreau. For all Thoreau’s talk of solitary living in the wilderness, Thoreau was only two miles from Concord, Massachusetts. He had friends over for dinner parties, and his mother even did his laundry. Chris would later say, “Thoreau was a dilettante.”
For Chris, every winter was an existential threat. He’d begin preparations at the end of summer. That meant a lot more stealing to make sure he had supplies. And it meant getting as fat as possible. He’d pig out on liquor and sugar to pack on the pounds like a bear preparing for hibernation. And he would shift his schedule, going to bed at 7:30 and waking at 2 A.M. You need to be conscious when the Maine nights reached their coldest point. “If you try and sleep through that kind of cold, you might never wake up,” he remarked.
But all this suffering only makes one more curious: Why? Why do this? He didn’t have a traumatic childhood. Why flee the world? Why give up so much that others consider essential to a good life? He sacrificed the possibility of a career, spouse, and children. He’d never even been on a date.
And now Chris found himself in the complete opposite circumstances. He was a resident of the Kennebec County Correctional Facility. It was the first time in decades he had slept inside four walls, and, of course, he could not leave. The hermit even had a cellmate. Food was plentiful, but he found himself too anxious to eat.
He gave no interviews, made no statements, and refused all the numerous offers of help he received after the story hit the papers. But after a while he did talk to one journalist, Michael Finkel. First it was by letter, but eventually Finkel visited the prison. They sat across from each other, separated by plexiglass, talking via phone. Finkel could barely hear a word Chris said. But that was because Chris wasn’t holding the phone properly. He’d forgotten how. It had been almost thirty years since he’d used one.
Prison was beyond hard, and the hermit was coming apart at the seams. He was surrounded by people. All the time. So much interaction was overwhelming. He could barely sleep. After six months awaiting trial, he had broken out in hives. His hands shook. Chris told Finkel, “I suspect more damage has been done to my sanity in jail, in months, than years, decades, in the woods.”
The good news was he would be getting out soon. The prosecutors took pity on him. He was going to be sentenced to seven months, and he’d already been in jail nearly that long. But would life outside prison be any better? It would be a condition of his parole that he couldn’t go back to the woods. He said, “I don’t know your world. Only my world, and memories of the world before I went into the woods . . . I have to figure out how to live.”
Finkel tried to get the answer everyone wanted: Why? Why did he leave? Chris had dodged the question many times before. Finkel asked again. And Chris gave the closest thing to an answer anyone would get: he had never been happy in our world. He had never fit in with other people. But then he ventured into the woods and for once in his life that changed. “I found a place where I was content . . . To put it romantically: I was completely free.”
We all occasionally dream of running away. Of tossing our smartphone. Of escaping the pointlessness of so many trivial daily struggles that weigh us down. We go on vacation and see a place filled with natural beauty, and we fantasize about never returning to our lives. But we do. Chris didn’t.
Finkel would go on to write a bestseller about Chris, The Stranger in the Woods. And he would stop wondering why Chris left the world. He would now wonder why more of us don’t.
* * *
In his 1624 book, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, John Donne wrote, “No man is an island.” But Donne was a poet, so he didn’t back up his statement with any proof. In other words, he wrote a five-word maxim that made him famous for centuries and left me to do all the heavy lifting. Jerk.
Anyway, plenty of classical thinkers have agreed with Donne. Aristotle wrote, “Man is by nature a social animal,” and felt that anyone who could exist alone was “either a beast or a god.” In chapter 2 of Genesis you’ll find, “And the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone.” Throughout much of history, exile was one of the most terrible sentences, sometimes regarded as worse than death. Being Aloofus Maximus was not a good thing in the ancient world. And not all that much has changed. Know what the United Nations calls solitary confinement in excess of fifteen days? “Torture.”
I’m not here to make the case for being a hermit. (If we were really better off completely without other people, this would be a very, very short book.) The irony is, increasingly, we’re all acting like hermits. Social scientist Bella DePaulo writes, “Never before in history have so many people lived alone.”
In 1920, 1 percent of the US population lived alone. Now one in seven adult Americans do, meaning more than a quarter of US households are just one person. The percentage of solo households has gone up in every census since 1940, when the question was first asked. And America is not alone in its alone-ness; it’s not even in first place. The UK, Germany, France, Australia, and Canada have rates even higher. Scandinavian nations have solo living numbers approaching 45 percent. And the rest of the world is following. Between 1996 and 2006, the number of people living alone increased by a third, globally.
But unlike solitary confinement, we’ve been deliberately choosing this. Before World War II, it wasn’t all that economically feasible. As we’ve gotten richer, understandably, we wanted more freedom and control. (I can relate. I live alone and I’m cooped up writing a book, a process I describe as “how to develop agoraphobia in one easy step.”) We love autonomy, but some suggest this is what’s making us lonely.
And we are lonely. Even before the 2020 pandemic, 75 percent of UK doctors said they saw patients every day whose main complaint was loneliness. In 2017 the problem got so bad—with more than nine million lonely Britons—that the country appointed a minister of loneliness. And the number of people in the United States who report being lonely stands, according to one study, at around sixty-two million. That’s the entire population of the United Kingdom. Studies vary, but it looks like just over a quarter of Americans report regularly feeling lonely. Leading expert John Cacioppo has said that number increased by 3–7 percent just over the past two decades.
The health and happiness effects of sustained loneliness on your body is, to use a technical term, poop-your-pants scary. It makes me want to run outside, hug the first stranger I see, and maybe reconsider my career choice. Cacioppo’s research has shown that loneliness is the emotional equivalent of a physical assault. The elevation in stress hormones is comparable to what you would experience by someone beating you up. Loneliness sends your brain into perpetual high-alert mode. In the lab, lonely people notice risks twice as fast as nonlonely people, 150 milliseconds versus 300 milliseconds. We don’t usually think of loneliness increasing reaction time, but the evolutionary theory behind it makes sense. You better have eyes in the back of your head, pal. Because if things go sideways, nobody is coming to help. An attitude like that may have been quite useful in our ancestral environment, but it certainly isn’t conducive to happiness.
Repeated studies have shown that what the happiest people have in common is good relationships, hands down. An economics study titled “Putting a Price Tag on Friends, Relatives, and Neighbours” put the happiness value of a better social life at an additional $131,232 per year. Meanwhile, loneliness leads to depression far more often than depression leads to loneliness. Johann Hari notes that a shift from the fiftieth percentile of loneliness to the sixty-fifth percentile doesn’t increase your chance of depression a little—it boosts it by a factor of eight.
But it’s not just happiness at stake here. Loneliness is so bad for your health, I’m surprised insurance companies don’t mandate you put this book down and go see friends. Studies connect it with an increased rate of heart disease, stroke, dementia, and pretty much every other awful thing you can think of. A UC Berkeley study of nine thousand people found good relationships add another decade to your life span, and a 2003 review of the research said this: “Positive social relationships are second only to genetics in predicting health and longevity in humans.” I could fill a book just with the results of studies on relationships and health. What predicts whether you’ll be alive one year after a heart attack? Pretty much two things: how many friends you have and whether you smoke. Oxford professor Robin Dunbar says, “You can eat as much as you like, you can slob about, you can drink as much alcohol as you like—the effect is very modest compared with these other two factors.”
Seems like a slam dunk for John Donne and his maxim. If I was trying to convince you to be a hermit, it’d already be game over. Being alone is bad. But here’s where things get weird. Really weird . . .
What if I told you that before the 1800s, loneliness didn’t exist. Not that it was uncommon: it did not exist. Okay, I’m exaggerating. But not by much. Fay Bound Alberti, a historian at the University of York, says, “Loneliness is a relatively modern phenomenon, both as a word, and perhaps more controversially, as an experience.”
Yup. Before 1800, you can barely find the word in a book. And when you do, it’s used to mean “being alone” without any negative connotation. In Luke 5:16 it says that Jesus “withdrew to lonely places and prayed,” but it just means he went off to be by himself, not that he was all bent out of shape about it. Samuel Johnson’s 1755 A Dictionary of the English Language uses the adjective similarly. When Johnson writes “lonely rocks,” he doesn’t mean that they were geologically all sad and emo but that they were in the middle of nowhere.
But then in the nineteenth century there was a shift. The Romantics, like Lord Byron, started using the word more often, and it was a clear negative. The best example? Good ol’ Frankenstein. Yup, Mary Shelley’s 1818 monster can teach us a lot about an enormous change in Western culture. The monster says, “Believe me, Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone, miserably alone?” Then he heads north to kill himself. And, arguably for the first time in history, alone is portrayed as a very bad thing.
So how the heck was loneliness not an issue until a couple of centuries ago? Well, we did feel something while alone, but usually it wasn’t bad. You know the word: solitude. That word did appear before the 1800s, and it was almost always a good thing. And you know that today. If I say the word wisdom, you probably think of guys with long beards comfortably alone on mountaintops. Solitude played a critical part in the spiritual paths of Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad. Nobody thinks you find deep spiritual insight at a house party.
Solitude is what you mean when you say “I need time to myself” or to “get away from it all.” We need alone time to recharge and reflect. And we rightfully associate solitude with creative breakthroughs. Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity when he was isolated in Woolsthorpe during 1665. Albert Einstein swore by daily nature walks. Pablo Picasso said, “Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” Ludwig von Beethoven, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and countless others did their best work while alone and wouldn’t have it any other way.
Historically, people generally had a good balance of socializing and alone time in their lives. Your house usually had a dozen people running around, so you got your face-to-face time, but you also did plenty of roaming outdoors, so you got your solitude. (At the beginning of the twentieth century, 90 percent of traveling was on foot if you were going under six miles.)
But these days we’re a bit mistrustful of solitude. Use that word today and you sound like a weirdo. Loner conjures up images of the Unabomber. In the modern world, “quiet guy who keeps to himself” sounds less like a Zen master and more like an active shooter incident waiting to happen. But who would you think was more mature: someone who can spend a lot of time comfortably alone, or someone who can’t stand to ever be alone? In many ways, we’ve pathologized being by yourself. It’s obvious from the statistics I’ve cited above: we have a bazillion metrics for loneliness but nobody measures solitude. Oh, and then there’s this: “Solitude, paradoxically, protects against loneliness.” You know who said that? Vivek Murthy, surgeon general of the United States.
Okay, this is confusing. What the heck is the answer here? Is being alone good or bad?
And that’s the error we make. It’s the wrong question. Loneliness doesn’t care if you’re actually alone. Loneliness is a subjective feeling. It’s not necessarily about physical isolation. We’ve all felt it: lonely in a crowd. And a 2003 study by Cacioppo showed, on average, lonely people actually spend as much time with others as nonlonely people do. So living alone is not the real culprit here. It’s a symptom, not a cause. While a lack of face-to-face contact can certainly create problems, it’s a red herring in terms of big-picture loneliness. Cacioppo writes: “The amount of time spent with others and the frequency of interaction did not add much to the prediction of loneliness. What did predict loneliness was, again, an issue of quality: the individuals’ ratings of the meaningfulness, or the meaninglessness, of their encounters with other people.” Loneliness isn’t about being alone: it’s about not having a feeling of meaningful connection.
But what caused the shift? Where did the meaning go? More specifically: What the heck happened in the 1800s? Don’t blame it all on Frankenstein’s monster. He’s a victim too. In the nineteenth century, our collective cultural story changed. Paralleling the shift in marriage over the same period, a monsoon of new ideas overhauled our societal narrative. It can be summed up in one word: individualism. Alberti writes, “It is no coincidence that the term ‘individualism’ was first used (and was a pejorative term) in the 1830s, at the same time that loneliness was in the ascendant.” We went from seeing life as ensemble drama to a one-man show. We went from a default “someone cares” to “no one cares.”
It’s hard to understate just how many profound ideas and cultural shifts—political, philosophical, religious, and economic—came about in the nineteenth century, moving the individual to the forefront and sticking community in the back seat. Secularism. Utilitarianism. Darwinism. Freudianism. Capitalism. And consumerism. The social contract gave way to autonomy, and we went from communal to competitive. And this only accelerated in the twentieth century with even more isms like existentialism and postmodernism.
We so take these ideas for granted that it’s hard to see past them. We’ve internalized these concepts as the way the world is. I’m not saying those ideas are necessarily bad, but the shift was profound and we may have lost something in the deal. Before, the default was to see yourself as part of a community. You are a child of god. A member of Clan Barker. Warrior in the Tribe of Los Angeles, California. But the focus shifted to the individual as the primary unit. The very positive upside of that is you are free, like our hermit Chris Knight.
But what your brain hears is you are also now, fundamentally, alone. And that’s why you can be lonely in a crowd. We think a lot about the great things we gained from this story shift but have trouble pinning down what we lost. There’s just a vague feeling of unease and an ever-present hum of anxiety. It’s awesome to feel in control and free, not bound by social obligations, but your brain knows that also means others are also free and not obligated to look out for you. And millions of years of evolution taught our physiology that that means one thing. Help is not coming. You’re on your own.
Obviously, I like science and modern ideas. The changes of the nineteenth century produced a world that gives us great freedom and control but isn’t very emotionally fulfilling or meaningful. The ancients were clearly wrong about a lot of stuff, but many of their ideas, though not factually correct, did serve an essential purpose, like binding us together. We haven’t filled that gap. Actually, we’ve dramatically expanded it with our hyperindividualism. But our physiology can’t keep up. Biological wiring that is millions of years old still needs meaningful connection, which is why this new story affects our health and happiness so drastically. Loneliness is less a personal affliction than a cultural pathology.
No need to cock that eyebrow at me. This chapter isn’t some Luddite call to arms or an anticapitalist screed. The modern world and a greater emphasis on individual freedom and control have given us benefits that are almost incalculable. We cannot and should not go back. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t lose something in the shift, something we desperately need. These new ideas are rational, but human needs are not always so rational. Millennia of material deprivation produced a burning desire to escape dependence, but we may have overshot the mark and gone to utter independence when what we really needed was communal interdependence. To feel that we’re free, but still in it together.
Outside the Western world, many people are still connected to everyone around them by communal story and meaning. But our new story, with all its objective benefits, is imposing heavy costs on us. As Sebastian Junger writes, “Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society—despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology—is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness in human history. As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down.” It’s ironic that modern advances gave us vaccines that addressed the medical challenges of COVID-19, but changes in our culture made social distancing so much more painful than it would have been centuries ago.
We used to be forced to be together by necessity, but we got rich and didn’t have to be connected to one another anymore for survival. Understandably, we wanted more freedom and control. Like a nuclear reaction, we broke bonds and released tremendous, useful energy into the world. But a nuclear reaction can go Chernobyl if we’re not careful. We need some of those bonds. According to Robert Putnam of Harvard, 77 percent of Americans agreed with the statement “most people can be trusted” in 1964. By 2012, only 24 percent of people did.
The important question is how are we all addressing this problem right now?
I’ll give you a little hint: it’s not a very good solution . . .