You can find fights anywhere, trust me. Just be an obvious and “EZ” target.
If you make a battle Heron that’s set up to counter Asteros (yes that does work unless they went full pvp which they almost never do) then you can do your normal exploration and just bait for pvp at the same time, simply by being there.
This is a good idea too, and I have done that here and there. At least I can make a little passive isk on the side without shooting rocks, which makes me want to self destruct.
I do feel a LITTLE bad targeting the explorers who are mostly aiming for a peaceful existence lol. I’d rather bait/switch the PVPers to get a taste of their own medicine. But - sometimes I am feeling particularly morally reprehensible. Hence the battle venture looking for miners. Lol
Don’t.
Kill them all.
You’ll learn how to safely explore yourself, should you wish to do so in the future.
Anyone is a target and no one is innocent, they’re all trying to get ahead (of you), they’re all competitors. If someone is doing a hacking site and you can either bully them out or kill them (getting their loot) that’s good for YOU.
This right here.
So I have 3 bases of operations in lowsec. Hevrice, Iralaja and Laslanier.
Each of those are stocked with about 10-15 frigates fitted differently for different approaches. When I’m out hunting, I stick to a system or two. When I see someone pop in, I d-scan them and get a ping on the ship. Then I go to zkill and look them up and see what kind of fit they have used in the past, then choose from my arsenal of ships the paper to their rock.
So if they typically kite, I’ll hop into an anti kiter.
I have maxed out skills for all the races frigates as well as their weapon types so I have plenty to choose from.
90% of the battle is intel gathering and pre-fitting.
TL;DR: I want to be successful at something that is harder than what everyone else does, but I want to work less for it than everyone else.
Basically, every post in GD, ever.
There is no peaceful existence in EVE. We are all in the arms industry.
Thank you for your valuable contribution.
Hey OP, I have been primarily a solo PvPer for the last 12 years or so. I wouldn’t say that I’m the greatest, but I certainly have fun with it. I also turn a slight profit from it. I do no PVE, I challenged myself way back a decade ago to live by piracy alone, and can testify that it’s still viable to do so.
I’ll admit that I’m not a pure solo guy, because I usually use 2 accounts. One for scouting and one for fighting. I can definitely understand being reluctant to multibox but I will say that having a scout alt is a massive advantage.
Still, even without a 2nd account, there are things that you can do. A few suggestions-
Use a cloaky ship like a T3C, a Stratios, a stealth bomber, or Astero or something and hunt in wormholes. Not having local makes it much more practical to scout targets and engage them with the same character.
Dick around in faction warfare space. You can join FW if you want, but that’s not strictly necessary if you just want targets. Personally FW space has never been my cup of tea, but a lot of people do it and enjoy it.
Suicide missions to nullsec staging systems. Fly out there with a PvP ship and start d-scanning down ratters in the anomalies and ganking them. This will provoke the standing fleet to blob you, and then you can either try to evade them or engage and take a few down with you. Both ways are fun.
Scout out small independent corporations in lawless space, infiltrate them and go on what we call a “safari”, attacking your own corpmates. A great way to catch people with their pants down in their expensive PVE ships, which they would normally dock up at the first sign of neutrals in system. The most fun part of being a solo guy is that you don’t have to worry about your reputation. 
Take advantage of suspect flags to bait people to attack you in highsec.
There’s probably many more things you can do, but these are just a few off the top of my head that I’ve done which don’t require a second account, although they would mostly be more successful with at least a scout alt.
Have fun and good luck. Don’t get discouraged, there are a lot of naysayers out there but solo is very much not dead, although it can be challenging. This game needs more individual content creators.
A lot of good advice / ideas above. But I want to second that, life in lower sec space becomes much more relaxed if your are flying something ready to PvP and in “hunter mode”. Nowadays I rarely switch into “prey mode”, sometimes you have to and you can apply all your knowledge, but I’m really feeling uncomfortable evading … lol.
What EVE misses, is a permanent 1v1 / 2v2 /1v1v1, etc. Arena-Mode with different ship sizes. A lot of people would love it, if it was permanent, instead of only event-based.
I’ve had a solo slugfest between a Gnosis and a Praxis, in lowsec. Went on for almost 90 seconds before I lost to superior DPS. That was a genuine ‘gf’ at the end. I got hold of the fitting for the Praxis ( 1200 DPS…Mega Pulse Laser II ) and now have 3 of those myself. You can also fit a Gnosis with Mega Pulse Laser and get over 700 DPS. If you like close up and kiting, you can fit a fast Moa with Heavy Neutron Blaster an get 600 DPS or so.
My longest 1:1 was somewhere around 30 minutes: Astero v Astero battle where we were attempting to defang each other. 
With T3C vs. T3C draws can easily happen. Whos batphone arrives first then wins. I remember a fight long time ago where I moonwalked out with refitting to stabs before reinforcement arrived. Luckily my opponent didn’t have mobile depots on overview, we figured in convo later.
Solo is NOT pointless. It’s actually super fun. It does preclude you from certain activities or even ship classes, but you don’t need to fly that stuff to have fun. Lots of fun
Condor vs slicer is a good one
I agree with the sentiment. But even from frigate to cruiser class, the number of ship configurations is staggering. There are quite a few battlecruisers roaming the warzone, and blingy pirate cruisers / T3s are great options if you’re looking to spend more.
I think the issue with battleships related to solo pvp - they’re too slow, too expensive and too juicy a target for the blobbers to pass up. People will blops t1 battleships all day long for a ~400m+ isk kill mail. Hell 10 ■■■■ fit 1.5m isk merlins or atrons will drop a t1 BS.
Uggggggh that sounds so miserable lol!
Okay this one was pretty fun, lol
I still don’t need much of a PVE isk faucet though, because my whole Heron fit was… 4.5m isk… but I guess I can just think of increasingly ridiculous ways to cheese kills like this. Maybe that’s my motivation for the game.