Shortly before Christmas 2011 a man known only as "Peter" decided that he couldn't face the jollity – not even the rather limited jollity of a Christmas in northern Sweden – so he drove his jeep up a forest track outside the town of Umeå and parked in the forest to wait until it was all over. He was provisioned with bread, sausage slices, grilled chicken, yoghurt, vodka, coffee with a camping stove to cook it on, cans of energy drink and lots of cigarettes. He passed a peaceful Christmas.

On 28 December the food ran out, but he still had plenty of cigarettes and booze. Besides, the woods were peaceful. It was snowing, and he realised the car would soon be unable to move, but he was parked only 3km from a petrol station, which was easy to walk.

He decided to stay and to see in the New Year in the forest. After that, he stayed longer. The cigarettes ran out on 8 January and he realised his situation was serious. The car would no longer start and when he tried to walk out the snow was a metre deep and he was too weak to walk more than 10 metres. He returned to the car. The battery in his mobile phone died before he'd got round to using it. So did the car's battery, and he had run out of petrol.

"I decided not to give a shit about anything," he told the Swedish paper Aftonbladet, which has carried his first ever interview.

He stayed in the car, dozing, dying and almost hibernating, until a snow scooter found the car on 17 February. When the police opened the door, he asked them if they had any coffee. They said no. So he asked if they had any cigarettes and when they disappointed him again he told them to shut the door because it was getting cold.

The story was a sensation when it made the media. Peter refused to talk to any journalist, even though one British tabloid photographer was found sneaking round the hospital opening ward doors at random in the hope of finding him.

He refused even to talk to his parents (apparently divorced), who could not reach him on the phone in hospital because of the Swedish laws on patient confidentiality. It's this last detail that really blows my mind. After all, there are lots of places around the world where you can drive off into the woods and be lost in snow for months. You don't even have to be in the Arctic, or the sub-Arctic, to dream of escaping Christmas by simply hibernating. Lots of people all over the world do that every year. But to come so close to death and then to refuse to speak even on the phone to anyone from your family – to whom you have not spoken in 20 years – seems really remarkable. "He's always been really stubborn," his brother told Aftonbladet.

But for all the stubborn, and undramatic determination to be rid of the world that Peter showed, the moral of the story is surely the opposite: that it is simply impossible to get away from society, even in Sweden, even when you're starving yourself to death in the woods.

The crisis that had overwhelmed his life in the small town where he had lived before was nothing too unusual: a break-up and overwhelming debt. It's the sort of thing you go into the woods to get a perspective on. But this is what he was unable to do.

The only way to make sense of the story is to understand that even when he was out in his jeep, the woods and the snow around him were less real than the small-town troubles he had left behind. What mattered was not to be where he was, but not to be in the place he had left. What looks like a story of pure isolation is actually a story of being trapped forever in the human society you can't escape.