My new series is all about going back to sites that were once significant in my life. These sites are now new sites of loss, loneliness, and emptiness of what once was but will never be again.
Loneliness is a feeling in which people experience a strong sense of emptiness and solitude. Loneliness is often compared to feeling empty, unwanted, and unimportant. Someone who is lonely may find it hard to form strong interpersonal relationships.
Common symptoms
Loneliness can evoke feelings of social inadequacy. A lonely person may become convinced there is something wrong with him/herself, and that no one understands their situation. Such a person will lose confidence and will become reluctant to attempt to change or too scared to try new things for fear of further social rejection. In extreme cases, a person may feel a sense of emptiness, which may become a state of clinical depression.
In modern society
Loneliness frequently occurs in heavily populated cities; in these cities many people feel utterly alone and cut off, even when surrounded by millions of other people. They experience a loss of identifiable community in an anonymous crowd. It is unclear whether loneliness is a condition aggravated by high population density itself, or simply part of the human condition brought on by this social setting. Certainly, loneliness occurs even in societies with much smaller populations, but the sheer number of people that one comes into contact with daily in a city, even if only briefly, may raise barriers to actually interacting more deeply with them and increase the feeling of being cut off and alone. Quantity of contact does not translate into quality of contact.[4]
Loneliness appears to have become particularly prevalent in modern times. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century families were typically larger and more stable, divorce was rarer, and relatively few people lived alone. In the United States, only 5% of households were single-person households in 1900; by 1995, 24 million Americans lived alone; and by 2010, it is estimated that number will have increased to around 31 million.[5]
A 2006 study in the American Sociological Review found that Americans on average had only two close friends to confide in, down from an average of three in 1985. The percentage of people who noted having no such confidant rose from 10% to almost 25%; and an additional 19% said they had only a single confidant (often their spouse), raising the risk of serious loneliness if the relationship ended.[6]
Loneliness has also shown a strong connection to internet usage,[7] and many people suffering from loneliness tend to flock to internet sites in attempt to find help or mend their pain, as seen in phenomena such as the "I am lonely will anyone speak to me" thread.
"Loneliness." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 14 October 2010. Web. 24 Oct 2010. .QUOTES:
"Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, cars, sidewalks, stores. Everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man."
-Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver
"Life is very long when you're lonely."-Morrissey, in "The Queen Is Dead", from the album of the same name by The Smiths (1986)
"We suffer a lot in our society from loneliness. So much of our life is an attempt to not be lonely: 'Let's talk to each other; let's do things together so we won't be lonely.' And yet inevitably, we are really alone in these human forms. We can pretend; we can entertain each other; but that's about the best we can do. When it comes to the actual experience of life, we're very much alone; and to expect anyone else to take away our loneliness is asking too much."
-American Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho: The Way it is
"Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty."
-Mother Teresa
Epistemic loneliness is the fundamental and unsolvable paradox between the desire of mans consciousness to have meaning met with the universe seen as existing without God Mans consciousness can be thought of as a hole in Being, or nothingness. Just as nature abhors a vacuum consciousness abhors its own vacuous vortex and is constrained to seek in futility the plenitude of being in order to fill up the lack, or non-being, that it is. One attempts to unite the emptiness and nothing that comprise his consciousness (Being-for-itself) with the fullness of Being, as objectively instantiated by the non-conscious Being-in-itself. However, according to some philosophers, this unity is impossible, and thus humans are nothing but a futile frustration to be something they cannot.lt;/ref>
Loneliness as a universal principle
Epistemic loneliness is seen as innate. In the view of Ben Mijuskovic all acts of consciousness and conduct are inevitably motivated by the wish to escape or evade loneliness.lt;/ref> However, to do so is impossible because consciousness is so constituted that loneliness serves as its sovereign a priori In other words, loneliness is an absolutely universal and necessary principle. Because of this, loneliness is the prism through which man views reality, without being aware that it is a prism. Mijuskovic believes that there can exist no theory through which one can rescue himself or others from this loneliness, as any action he takes is simply a result of the "master motivator;" loneliness itself.Sartre's view: man as an isolated entity
Jean-Paul Sartre saw the essential struggle of epistemic loneliness - to unite the emptiness of nothingness with the fullness of Being - as only unifiable in the concept of God Indeed, mankinds frustrated attempt to create this harmony within itself is yearning for divine-like repletion. Thus, Sartre viewed God as the projection of human epistemic loneliness, while man himself is nothing else but loneliness forever frustrated by its fruitless endeavors at self-completion.lt;/ref> Sartre believed that love is mankinds most radical attempt of consciousness to transcend its own loneliness. Through love, he argued, man endeavors to annihilate its contingency and satisfy its esurience for the abundance of being. Sartre believes that lovers are attempting to preserve their "internal negation" (freedom) while eliminating their "external negation" (epistemic loneliness). However, since these two freedoms cannot be reconciled into perpetual unity, love is doomed. Any apparent unity between the two is self-deception; an "illusion of fusion" which will serve to propel the lovers into more devastating epistemic loneliness than had they not tried to escape it."Epistemic Loneliness." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 14 October 2010. Web. 24 Oct 2010. .
PhotographMartin Usborne
MUTE: The Silence of Dogs in Cars
2010
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