Loners Are Freaks: Difference between revisions

* The 19th century poet Emily Dickinson, who gradually withdrew from human society and lived alone for the rest of her life, communicating with the outside world primarily through letters. There is no definite answer as to ''why'' she decided to become a recluse. Some of her poems appear to imply that everyone else thought her to be pretty weird for choosing to live alone in a house instead of getting married and pumping out babies like all the proper, decent girls were doing. (Going into seclusion was one of the very few alternatives to marriage and childbearing in Dickinson's era. Women who did so - and it was only really possible for women who had money of their own - were often considered little better than freaks of nature.)

* "He was quiet; kept to himself a lot" tends to pop up a lot when news outlets interview relatives and colleagues of murderers and other psychologically driven criminals, no matter how social they actually were.

** A man was recently accused of selling US secrets to Israel, and surprise surprise, his neighbor said that she hadn't noticed it before, but he was unsocial and weird.

** The reason for this is that being sociable is the norm, especially for criminals, so people rarely consider it worth mentioning if the criminal in question had a lot of friends. However, if a criminal is asocial it is considered out of the ordinary and therefore news worthy.