Pt 1.
TEN FORMS OF LONELINESS
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As a prevalent problem within society, it is unfortunate that the feeling of loneliness is felt as such a highly humiliating condition. Thus, I chose the topic of loneliness for my fourth year thesis. Our goal is to get rid of this stigma and encourage individuals to speak up about their feelings, relationships, and difficulties. Through incentives that educate and target audiences starting from their adolesence, we can decrease the number of reports concerning loneliness, which may gradually lead to depression and a shorter life span.
Loneliness is a state of mind, while aloneness is a state of being. While being alone can help us grow mentally and help us develop an appreciation for our own company, when the act of being alone is not chosen but is rather imposed upon, then the individual will start experiencing feelings of loneliness. Either we start with promoting the positive outcomes of solitude and being alone, or go directly into educating the many forms of loneliness. Having decided to start with the latter, I begun exploring forms of loneliness through creative exploration. By choosing objects and photographing strategically made compositions, I wanted to provoke thought and question about the content of the images.
In his text Intimacy and Isolation, John McGraw elaborated on the ten forms of loneliness: social, erotic, cultural, metaphysical, cosmic, epistemological, (in)communicative, (un)ethical, existential, and intrapersonal (intraself).
With regard to the ten-fold typology of loneliness, it is not intended to be exhaustive in number or exclusive in nature. Its foundation is a painful longing for an intimately meaningful and meaningfully intimate relatedness— intimacy unless otherwise stated-which is temporarily lacking or permanently lost. Relatedness specifically signifies connectedness to other personations— namely persons, personifications, and personalizations—but more generally to reality as a whole, the absence of which refers to metaphysical and cosmic loneliness.
I have divided the ten forms of loneliness into these two groups: species (group) loneliness and person (individual) loneliness. Next, by pairing up the ten forms and creating five sub-categories, I was better able to compare and contrast the different meanings behind each form of loneliness. I broke everything down for the audience in a little booklet.
Pt 2.
SOCIETY'S GREATEST FEAR: LONELINESS APP
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This digital publishing aims to educate different views on loneliness, primarily from literature starting in the 17th century. Through examining a curated selection of literature under the categories of companionship and solitude, we begin to develop a better understanding on how the stigma surrounding loneliness may have developed throughout history. Each story within the library includes either illustrations, fun facts, videos, or all of the above to encourage interaction. After the cover page of each story is a short description as to why the story is categorized as is. Other content include views of philosophers, as well as statistics gathered from articles as to what different age groups primarily attribute their loneliness to.
