Being Alone Doesn't Make You a Killer

Would Henry David Thoreau be a Mass Shooter in 2024?

Last week was Valentine’s Day, where people were expected to spend time with that special someone, or perhaps attend parties with platonic friends mocking the idea of Valentine’s Day. But what if you spent it alone? Society tells us that being alone makes us loners, losers, and maybe even potential killers... but what if loners aren’t the problem? 

A Crisis of Aloneness?

America is experiencing a mental health crisis. Almost half of young adults report feeling depressed or anxious; the teen suicide rate recently hit a record high; and mass shootings have been rising for decades. What’s going wrong?  

If you ask just about anyone, they’ll give you the obvious answer: We’re too isolated. Media headlines warn that social isolation is literally killing us, and interviews about mass shooters often reveal that “they were kind of a loner.” In a seminal book on declining social engagement, Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam summarized the problem with American society in a pithy statement: “Americans used to bowl in leagues. Now they bowl alone.” What journalists, scholars, and everyday people seem to agree on is that being “alone” is the root of our problems. 

But if you told some of history’s most revered thinkers that being alone is destroying society, they’d give you a puzzled look. Not too long ago, solitude was considered a source of meaning and transcendence. Many early Christian saints lived eremitic lifestyles, dedicating themselves to secluded lives of prayer and contemplation. Buddhist monks undertake month-long solitary retreats to cultivate mindfulness and connect with the nature of existence. And the 19^th-century transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau famously “went to the woods” to escape industrialization and live more deliberately. 

There is no doubt that the fragmentation of our communities is bad, but here we argue that we need more balance in the narrative about solitude. We suggest that part of the solution to the thorny questions of mental health and modernity is to look to the wisdom of the ancients and reconsider what it means to be alone.  

When we make being alone something to be avoided and even reviled, we stigmatize “loners,” who lash out when they feel they don’t belong. Unfortunately, this only reinforces our belief that being alone is the root of all evils, creating a pernicious cycle of stigma and despair—the “loner loop” (see Figure 1). The loner loop suggests that one reason people are lonely, suicidal, and even homicidal is not just because they are alone but, in part, because of the misplaced cultural narrative that being alone is the worst thing you can be. 

Figure 1. The Loner Loop

Of course, it’s reasonable to wonder whether being alone really is bad for us. After all, the dominant discourse surrounding our mental health crisis emphasizes that we suffer from a “loneliness epidemic” caused by too much time alone. But is solitude really the problem? 

All The Lonely People

People today seem lonelier than ever. According to recent surveys, roughly half of Americans say that they sometimes or always feel lonely, and one quarter say that no one really understands them. Governments and health officials have been desperately trying to figure out why people are so lonely—the U.S. Surgeon General recently declared loneliness a public health crisis, and Japan and the U.K. appointed “ministers of loneliness.” 

In his 80-page report on the loneliness epidemic, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy argues that the problem is obvious: people feel alone because they are alone. He cites statistics (see Figure 2 below) showing that, compared to two decades ago, Americans spend more time alone and less time with family and friends. 

Figure 2. Compared to two decades ago, Americans spend more time alone and less time with family and friends. Source: U.S. Surgeon General’s report on loneliness.

It's true that we’ve become less connected to traditional sources of meaning like religion and family life, but the idea that a rise in solitude is causing an epidemic of loneliness—the “loner” narrative—isn’t supported by the data. 

To take one example, the share of people living alone has skyrocketed over the past century, but countries that have the highest rates of single-member households, like Sweden and Denmark, are also the least lonely.  

And if being alone is the primary cause of loneliness, then older generations should be the loneliest folks around, since they spend more time alone than any age group. But studies find that people get less lonely as they age and even report that their lives feel more meaningful. Contrary to the loner narrative, loneliness is most common among teenagers and young adults, who spend more time with family and friends than any other age cohort. 

In fact, contrary to the popular narrative, loneliness might not be an epidemic at all. A recent meta-analysis (a study of many studies) found that levels of loneliness have remained remarkably stable over the past four decades (see Figure 3 below). If loneliness hasn’t been increasing rapidly, then recent rises in aloneness can’t be the cause. 

Figure 3. Rates of loneliness among emerging adults from 1976 to 2016. Each circle represents an individual study. The size of the circle represents the size of the sample.

Loneliness is a real problem, but our explanations for it are wrong. And our explanations matter. If we think that lonely people are just “loners” who spend too much time in solitude, then our solution will be to tell them to “get out there and make some friends.” This is what psychologists have been doing for decades, with limited success—we can just as easily be lonely among a crowd of friends.

Studies find that the correlation between social engagement—how many friends you have and how much time you spend with them—and loneliness is just r = 0.2, a statistically weak association comparable to the relationship between height and intelligence. Of course, many people do crave social interaction and feel lonely because of it, but if you want to know how lonely someone is, knowing how much time they spend alone is surprisingly uninformative.  

The problem with the popular narrative of the “loneliness epidemic” is that it only reinforces the loner narrative—that it’s strange and pathological to be alone. And when we succumb to this way of thinking, equating being alone with a deadly disease, it becomes easier to think that people who are alone are sick, strange, and even dangerous. 

Mocking The Loners

When being alone is taken as a sign of mental illness and social defeat, being labeled a loner is like a social death sentence. In the 1984 movie “The Lonely Guy,” Steve Martin’s character sits down at a fancy restaurant to dine alone and receives a barrage of judgment—a spotlight shines on him, the musicians stop playing, and the other patrons gasp and stare. 

Researchers documented this stigma against the solitary when they asked participants to rate other people based on descriptions of them. Some were described as “the kind of person who prefers being alone,” and others were described as more social. The researchers found that people viewed solitude-seekers especially negatively—they predicted that it would be unpleasant to interact with them and said they would be more likely to shun them in a group. 

The social punishment we dish out to “loners” is likely rooted in our evolutionary history as a social species. Ancient humans survived by working together, not by going it alone, a fact reflected in the old French proverb, “Homme seul est viande aux loups!” (A man alone is meat for wolves!). Escaping predators required forming cooperative societies—a group endeavor—which may explain why we feel negatively about people who ditch society to spend all their time alone.

There has likely always been some social stigma towards being alone, but it’s also true that modern society is especially intolerant of solitude. Social media gives us a constant feed of the social lives of others, heightening our expectations of how social we should be and leading to feelings of “FOMO” when we fail to meet those unrealistic demands. As philosopher Philip Koch noted decades ago, we tend to view solitude as “empty, pointless, vain, foolish, lonely, and dangerous.” 

Being alone may have been dangerous for ancient humans, but it’s not anymore—we’re no longer hunted by wolves every time we step outside alone, and solitude is a normal and inevitable part of our lives. In fact, solitude can have lots of mental health benefits, but when we embrace the loner narrative, we often turn away from positive solitude for fear of judgment.  

In one study aptly titled “Inhibited from Bowling Alone,” people rated how excited they would be about doing various leisure activities, like going out to the movies or a restaurant, if they were alone versus with others. People predicted that they would enjoy leisure activities significantly less if they were alone, precisely because of the loner narrative—they feared that others would assume they had no friends. 

Importantly, the participants in this study were wrong about how miserable it is to be alone. When the researchers subsequently assigned them to walk around an art gallery either alone or with another person, they found that both groups had just as much fun. Contrary to Robert Putnam’s popularized critique of declining social engagement, the problem with society might not be that people are “bowling alone,” but that they are getting judgmental sideways looks when they do. The Reddit post below perfectly captures this sentiment.  

The stigma against solitude can make people feel lonely and self-conscious, but it also has even more serious consequences for the psychology of the solitary. Nobody likes to be labelled a loner, and sometimes people lash out when you call them names.  

Would Henry David Thoreau be a School Shooter in 2024?

In May 2022, tragedy struck Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, when eighteen-year-old Salvador Ramos opened fire with an assault rifle, killing 19 students and two teachers. In the wake of the shooting, the media portrayed Ramos as a quiet kid who kept to himself and had few friends. One CNN headline reads, “Uvalde school shooting suspect was a loner who bought two assault rifles for his 18^th birthday.”

The story of Uvalde is all too familiar in the American media cycle. Someone commits a violent act, and headlines portray them as a dangerous loner. But while it’s tempting to conclude from tragedies like this that being alone really does turn people into monsters, psychological research suggests that it’s the peer rejection of the “quiet kids,” not their preference for solitude, that causes them to lash out.

An analysis of 15 school shootings from 1995 to 2001 found that all but two were precipitated by some form of social rejection, whether ostracism, bullying, or romantic rejection. In the case of the Uvalde shooting, reports surfaced that Ramos had been severely bullied, even earning the nickname “school shooter” from his peers. 

School shooters are statistically rare, but another study found that people lash out in more mundane ways when they’re made to feel like loners. These researchers brought people into the lab to play an online game together, but first told some of the participants that no one had picked them as a teammate. When they paired participants up to play the computer game, the socially rejected participants got back at their peers by pressing a button that blasted their headphones with a loud, unpleasant noise. Playing a loud noise pales in comparison to gun violence, but scientists argue that measures like these provide a reasonable approximation of aggressive behavior given the ethical constraints of the lab. 

The Uvalde shooting is a tragic demonstration of the loner loop. Ramos was a quiet kid who spent much of his time alone, and his peers bullied him for being a loner. When Ramos lashed out, the media further emphasized that he was a loner, thereby reinforcing the belief that kicked off this unfortunate loop: that being alone is weird, harmful, and dangerous. While this by no means excuses violence, it shows how our negative ideas about being alone can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that has real societal consequences. 

What would become of the great thinkers who championed solitude if they lived today, like Henry David Thoreau? As it turns out, Thoreau wasn’t as solitary as we’re led to believe—his “isolated” cabin on the shores of Walden Pond was just a 30-minute walk from town, and his idea of “living deliberately” included regular trips to his parents’ house so his mom could do his laundry. Still, Thoreau believed that embracing solitude and connecting with nature were necessary elements of a meaningful life.  

If Thoreau were alive now, maybe we’d recommend that he seek help, warning him that social isolation is deadly. More likely, we’d ridicule and judge him for being alone. Maybe what started as a quest for meaning would end in a tragic headline.  

But what if instead of mocking Thoreau’s solitude, we instead took a page out of his book, viewing solitude as a normative and potentially beneficial experience? 

Returning to Ancient Wisdom 

We recently experienced what it would be like to live in a society that doesn’t judge people for being alone, at a time when we least expected it. In 2020, millions of Americans were forced into months of unchosen social isolation by the COVID-19 lockdowns. Though the pandemic had immense consequences for our physical and mental health, it also had an unexpected benefit: for a rare moment, being alone didn’t mean being a loner—solitude became normalized. 

Research conducted during the pandemic found that when the lockdowns hit, the stigma against being alone subsided. People worried less about being judged as loners and became less judgmental of others who spent time alone. Many people embraced this newfound freedom by spending quality time alone, learning new hobbies, and finding ways to benefit from solitude. Both of us (Sam and Kurt) have personal experiences that resonate with this. I (Sam) learned to meditate and went for solo walks between my online college classes.  

Many other people seem to have discovered the benefits of solitude sans the loner narrative—see the quote below from a solitary person who, for the first time, didn’t feel like a loner during the pandemic. 

Decades before COVID, I (Kurt) went to Australia after college to have an adventure and to (mildly) test my mettle living solo in a new (safe, English-speaking) country. I met some friends at the restaurant where I worked, but for 4 months I mostly kept to myself, surfing alone every morning and spending my days off reading. I wasn’t lonely because I had a long-distance girlfriend, but I was mostly alone. I even spent Christmas day by myself, taking a long walk on the beach just to think. When I tell people this, they assume I must have been sad. And if I wasn’t sad, they figure I must be strange. But this is precisely the faulty assumption of the loner loop. 

My (Sam’s) own research supports this idea that solitude is a better experience when we don’t view it so negatively. In a study (led by Micaela Rodriguez) conducted in the wake of the COVID lockdowns, we brought some lonely people into the lab and had them sit alone for ten minutes. But first, we had some of them read about the benefits of solitude, like enhanced creativity and stress reduction. We found that lonely folks who learned about the positive aspects of solitude enjoyed their time alone much more than people who didn’t learn about these benefits. 

Of course, we're not saying that everyone should become modern-day hermits. This is exactly what is happening in Japan, where over one million young people—the “hikikomori”—have dropped out of society, quitting their jobs and refusing to leave their bedrooms. Social connection is a powerful predictor of happiness, and we would be missing out on some of the best things in life if we didn’t cherish our time with friends and loved ones. 

At the same time, solitude can play an important role in our lives, helping people find balance and improve their relationship with themselves. The choice to spend some time alone is not selfish or weird—it is the assumption that “loners are losers” that is the big problem. And even if someone has difficulty connecting with others, mocking or pitying them for being alone is a poor solution. Many people do want more social connection, but it can also be fun to bowl alone.