If I may edit this a 3rd time. It seemed to me that a lot of the people responding were talking about "advanced" solo backpacking and their own habits based on experience and maybe it wasn't a real good place to get into this on the beginners forum.

There certainly are places for beginners to solo backpack, especially if they stay on the trail.

There are more places where quite a bit of experience is required to solo backpack. I don't want beginners to think that just taking off cross country without all of the skills required is a good idea. And for those of us who do take off cross country, we need to talk about in a different forum.
Jim