At the age of twenty, Christopher Knight quit his job and left town. He had no plans. It began as a spontaneous road trip and turned into 27 years of living in the woods and committing an estimated thousand robberies from vacation homes to resupply himself about every two weeks.
He had a burgarly style akin to the advice about take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints. Other than the items he stole, the place was untouched and he locked up after himself.
It was so bizarrely clean and respectful of the owners, he impressed law enforcement looking for him and for a time people tried to leave out bags of stuff for him to take and even requested he make them a grocery list because he wasn't stealing what most burglars steal from vacation homes.
People with vacation homes are pretty wealthy. People who rob them tend to go for cash, jewelry, cameras and other expensive items easy to carry and readily sold for cash.
He had no need for cash. He didn't go shopping. He stole in place of shopping.
He stole a lot of food and batteries and propane. He stole other things as needed, like clothes, tools, bedding.
To rich people with vacation homes, it was obvious he was stealing what he needed to survive. For a time, some people with second homes in the area tried to resolve the problem by treating him like a charity case and offering to buy him what he needed and give it willingly so no crime was involved.
He declined.
He walked away to get away from people. He never felt comfortable with people. He didn't want any social contract of any sort, though he hated stealing. He wanted no social contract at all, no matter how well meaning, not even to put a stop to his life of relatively harmless crime, even though he found the act of stealing emotionally agonizing and extremely stressful every single time.
He initially tried to forage and simply wasn't able to get enough to eat. He was in Maine, a state where it's possible to disappear into the woods (unlike most states), but there simply wasn't an abundance of wild foods readily available.
To supply his own food adequately under such circumstances, he would need a means to hunt or trap or fish, which he hadn't brought with him on his spontaneous road trip that ended in the woods. He also would need substantial knowledge, skill and resources for skinning, butchering, preparing, cooking, and storing food.
Wild game is more likely than farm-raised animals to carry parasites and make you sick, leading to a need for medical care that he seems to have not sought for 27 years. Foods stolen from vacation homes had all the advantages of food culture, food tech and food hygiene standards of a modern civilization.
So he needed some things from the modern world to live in this situation, he needed the products created by other people, but beyond that, he wanted nothing to do with people.
Historically, there was a certain acceptance that some people just don't really want to be around people. The article says it's typically for one of three reasons:
1. Religion.
2. Rejecting a dysfunctional society.
3. "...artistic freedom, scientific insight or deeper self-understanding." which I guess you could summarize as self development or time to focus on a project without distractions.
So the framing of the article suggests people need a good reason to not want to be around people and "I just don't want to deal with people." doesn't qualify.
But some people just aren't that social and we increasingly give them medical labels, like ASD or ADHD, and insist there is fundamentally something wrong with them.
Even though the article lists Jesus, Muhammad and Buddha as important historical figures who spent substantial time in solitude, it seems to skew towards implicitly agreeing that boy ain't right.
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