It is a custom of our society to enforce a preferred mode of behavior and manners by way of counterexample. To show the likely outcome when members of a mass engage in an activity condemned by an institution with power over them.

For instance, it is generally frowned upon that people under the age of 21 engage in drinking alcohol; and it is especially discouraged when such people do so just before, during, and right after attending high school prom. To deter this vice, vigilant parents collaborate with schools, emergency response units, hospitals, and mortuaries to demonstrate the hazards of heavy drinking and driving, recruiting real life students to playact their own deaths in often gruesome and melodramatic fashion. The hard results of this endeavor are not altogether clear, but its appeal to the fear of adults and the dreamy mordancy of teens promises its endurance.

It is the same with our private corporations. Since it has been brought to the public’s attention that certain aspects of masculinity exhibit corrosive effects upon the social fabric, the male hygiene company Gillette sought to encourage greater awareness of the situation with an advertisement depicting their consumer base as trapped in a cycle of aggression, bullying, and catcalling.

But perhaps the most potent trove of social policing can be found in our journalism. In fact, it is safe to assume that both of the aforementioned examples were parented by the media. There isn’t much that the media won’t crusade against. There is, however, one item that is nearest-and-dearest to its collective heart.

“Strange, sad and macabre,” begins an article in People from 2014. It is about Andrew and Anthony Johnson, 63-year-old twins whose skeletal remains were found in the Chattanooga, TN home they shared, both sitting in their easy chairs. The state of decomposition indicated that they’d been dead for at least three years. Though police and family made “welfare checks” around 2011, they neither had keys to the house nor sufficient suspicion to break in themselves. No one in the neighborhood knew them.

The curiosity over the death of the Johnson twins had dried up not long after with no new updates, but there is no lack of similar stories making it to print and film. Meticulously reported and somberly composed, these stories depict people who disappeared so completely from the public that the public hardly notices. They retreat to a kind of voluntary imprisonment: in a rent-controlled apartment surrounded by walls of newspaper and empty takeout containers, walking over cat feces, and sitting in front of a TV that is never off. Such stories ostensibly present a mystery and stoke voyeuristic curiosity; but mostly they engender fear. This, these articles and documentaries assert, is what happens when you disengage and disconnect. You lose your energy and self-respect, you will be forgotten. Calls like these are not frequent, but they feel more common as loneliness becomes a more pervasive issue in our society.

It is a curious stance, though, to use recluses and shut-ins as the counterexample. Loneliness, even prolonged loneliness, is a temporary condition, and its abjectness is already pretty apparent to the sufferer. Through self-mastery and therapy, the lonely may be able to cure themselves. Ultimately few if any lonely people are every truly shut-ins, and to say that shut-ins choose to shut in as we would choose a brand of coffee is not quite correct.

Reclusion is a stronger vintage than loneliness. It is denial, often a sweeping and total one, of so many popular ideas of how life is lived that it very nearly approaches a calling infused with moral import. Reclusion is at the same time less clear cut in how it occurs. I would not dare to speak officially for any who undertakes this practice, so in keeping with the aforementioned framework, I will instead offer a counterexample: the hazards of seeing and being seen out of the house. It requires making two smaller points that dovetail into a larger one.

The first is relationships. This is not to declaim platonic or romantic intimacy altogether. The problem lies rather in the relationship as a lifestyle. To get on in the world it is important to have a group and to be seen with it; just as it is important to have a significant other and to be seen with them. Such arrangements confer upon the person a sense of cohesion with the social family. The recluse may not be malcontented by this in spirit, but it is not willingly entered into for some reasons that may be valid. The modern social life is vast and active at the expense of depth. Someone in the midst of it will feel connected and integral but will hardly remember it after the fact. At worst, there is a struggle to distinguish one friend from another, or to parse over the commonality one shares with a loved one only to come up slight or empty. The line between friendship and busywork dissolves in such situations.

It is often assumed that the recluse abstains from all human contact, let alone intimate contact. This is not always the case. Only in the most extreme scenarios (a coma, basically) can one truly avoid intimacy. The chances a recluse has to encountering it are not totally deprived, but they may be reduced in scale and removed from convention.

The second is work. As with friendship, this is no slander against the work ethic. The work ethic suffers greatly in the new society, dominated as it is by the pure pursuit of money—or to use the politically correct parlance, a “career.” Such a pursuit may require one to work 10 jobs over the course of 15 years. One job may have no clear responsibilities while the next job might have numerous and conflicting responsibilities. Whether an abnegation or a demand of one’s energy and skill, this does not strike the recluse as a workable arrangement. They have no one way of earning income. True, some have the advantage of inherited funds that, when apportioned with extreme care, can prove sufficient for a long existence and require minimal supplementation. But others venture out from time to time to do odd jobs around their immediate community. Indeed, despite their self-imposed isolation, the spartan tendency of the recluse makes them more reliable to the community compared to the single striver of the wider world.

And so finally is the wider world. The recluse gets nowhere without being significantly at odds with the culture into which they are placed. It will have dawned on them that not only is the state of culture vacuous and debased, but totally antagonistic. It is not exactly an evil culture, but it is hard-hearted and lacks empathy. It rejects compassion and tolerance in favor of convenience and uniformity. There are two ways to live comfortably within it: to be infected by its ethos or to be devoured by those who already are. It occurs to the would-be recluse that there is a feeling of disdain from the culture toward them and that that feeling is mutual. How long it takes to see those revelations depends upon the person, though it is almost always seen in that order.

The world does not take that rejection well. Pretty soon it loses patience with pathos and reverts very quickly to invective. The recluse is no longer a tragic figure, but an abscess: a fat, unkempt, sedentary, burdensome, vaguely humanoid organism. It bitterly shuns the entreaties of the mainstream way of life deep within the bowels of its parents’ basement. It subsists on a diet of Cheetos dust, much of it caked into its facial hair, while leaving the actual Cheetos for the spiders, centipedes, and crickets that make up its social circle.

The recluses of America will not likely take offense to this, for they will not have heard it. But to be a recluse is indeed to be subject to such misconceptions between willful exile and imposed isolation. On the contrary, the recluse tends to find occupation through more active means, not being crippled by society’s unmet expectations and depleted connections. Even the worst conceivable recluse has this advantage.

Ed Gein is considered one of the most notorious serial killers in America, whose legacy inspired such iconic works as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. This is a slight overstatement, however, given that Gein’s confirmed body count is only two; much lower than the 17 bodies accrued by fellow Wisconsinite, Jeffrey Dahmer (a fitting composite for the lonely if there ever was one). Much of Gein’s time, in fact, was given toward his hobbies. He was a natural and ingenious craftsman, creating his own dinnerware and jewelry, upholstering lamps, and tailoring clothes. That his crafting material happened to come from bodies he pilfered from local burial sites is not a little discomfiting (even if the turn of progress may yet neutralize that stigma in due course), but one cannot argue that he was listless or idle. Nor can one look upon so solitary a life and say with certainty that it lacked for people.