“I share therefor I am” Shimi Cohen is a graphic artist who has struck a cord exploring loniness in the age of connection. Nearing a million views on You Tube, the Video addresses the connection between Social Networks and Being Lonely? Quoting the words of Sherry Turkle from her TED talk – Connected, But Alone and drawing inspiration from Dr. Yair Amichai-Hamburgers hebrew article -The Invention of Loneliness, Cohen’s senior project at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design. Cohen explores the paradoxical nature of becoming connected with technology which can isolate our natural social instincts. He spent 3 weeks sketching and translating the script into visuals, using Adobe After Effects and Cinema 4D to create the 2-D animation. 

What does positive psychology teach us about loneliness?

Leverage your strengths:

VIA has been researching the role using strengths in your life and how they impact your mental well being:

• Using one’s signature strengths in a new way increased happiness and decreased depression for 6 months (Gander, Proyer, Ruch, & Wyss, 2012).
• Using one’s signature strengths in a new way increased happiness for 6 months and decreased depression for 3 months (Mongrain & Anselmo-Matthews, 2012).
• The use of one’s top strengths leads to a decreased likelihood of depression and stress and an increase in satisfaction in law students (Peterson & Peterson, 2008).
• Using one’s signature strengths in a new and unique way is an effective intervention: it increased happiness and decreased depression for 6 months (Seligman, Steen, Park, Peterson, 2005).
• Among high school students, other-oriented strengths (e.g., kindness, teamwork) predicted fewer depression symptoms while transcendence strengths (e.g., spirituality) predicted greater life satisfaction (Gillham et al., 2011).
• Grateful individuals report higher positive mood, optimism, life satisfaction, vitality, religiousness and spirituality, and less depression and envy than less grateful individuals (McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002).

While the above are not specific to loneliness, you can see the connection between depression and loneliness.

Make meaning in your life
Sam Mullins struggled with finding meaning. A few years ago, he moved to Vancouver to pursue his dream of being a big city writer and actor. So he poured his heart and soul into it. And failed. But one night at work he was challenged to make a tinfoil dinosaur and his life changed…because he shared something authentic with a stranger. It was not always that way:

I have a social anxiety disorder, and an increasingly large hunch-back.  I write stories for CBC’s DNTO sometimes.  I perform one-man shows sometimes.  I have suicidal thoughts sometimes.  And then I write one-man shows about said suicidal thoughts.

The backdrop to the story is fascinating as he reflects on it and where it has all led:

 I felt like I was the poster boy for everything wrong with my generation. I felt foolish.

My sense of entitlement, my solipsism and my delusional belief that I was a unique and talented person led me to acting school. I had graduated four years later, at great expense to my parents, and then naively stepped out into the big wide world without having the slightest inkling of how to survive. And by the end of that year, I wasn’t against the ropes. I was on life-support.

So, just like that, I was back in my childhood bedroom. I was working a labour job. And I was eating a casserole prepared by my Mother every night. I didn’t know what to do next. I felt like I was lost in the universe.

Sam is doing what Victor Frankl calls making meaning:
“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”

For you see, you are always free to choose; perhaps not your experience, but the meaning you give that experience:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Frankl goes on to explain the significance of love in our lives:

“Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.”

By the way, NPR picked up Sam’s story for the Moth