Loneliness
Overview
Loneliness is an unpleasant feeling
Emotion
Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...

 in which a person
Person
A person is a human being, or an entity that has certain capacities or attributes strongly associated with being human , for example in a particular moral or legal context...

 feels a strong sense of emptiness
Emptiness
Emptiness as a human condition is a sense of generalized boredom, social alienation and apathy. Feelings of emptiness often accompany dysthymia, depression, loneliness, despair, or other mental/emotional disorders such as borderline personality disorder...

 and solitude
Solitude
Solitude is a state of seclusion or isolation, i.e., lack of contact with people. It may stem from bad relationships, deliberate choice, infectious disease, mental disorders, neurological disorders or circumstances of employment or situation .Short-term solitude is often valued as a time when one...

 resulting from inadequate levels of social relationships. However, it is a subjective
Subjective
Subjective may refer to:* Subjectivity, a subject's personal perspective, feelings, beliefs, desires or discovery, as opposed to those made from an independent, objective, point of view** Subjective experience, the subjective quality of conscious experience...

 experience. Loneliness has also been described as social pain - a psychological mechanism meant to alert an individual of isolation and motivate her/him to seek social connections.
People can experience loneliness for many reasons and many life events are associated with it, like the lack of friendship
Friendship
Friendship is a form of interpersonal relationship generally considered to be closer than association, although there is a range of degrees of intimacy in both friendships and associations. Friendship and association are often thought of as spanning across the same continuum...

 relations during childhood
Childhood
Childhood is the age span ranging from birth to adolescence. In developmental psychology, childhood is divided up into the developmental stages of toddlerhood , early childhood , middle childhood , and adolescence .- Age ranges of childhood :The term childhood is non-specific and can imply a...

 and adolescence
Adolescence
Adolescence is a transitional stage of physical and mental human development generally occurring between puberty and legal adulthood , but largely characterized as beginning and ending with the teenage stage...

, or the physical absence of meaningful people around a person are a few causes for loneliness.
Quotations

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

Well I'm the only one here.

Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver

They're sharing a drink they call loneliness But it's better than drinking alone.

Billy Joel, "Piano Man (song)|Piano Man", Piano Man (album)|Piano Man (1973)

Life is very long when you're lonely.

Morrissey, in "The Queen Is Dead", from The Queen Is Dead|the album of the same name by The Smiths|The Smiths (1986)

All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

The Beatles, " Eleanor Rigby|Eleanor Rigby"

Loneliness / Got a mind of its own / The more people around / The more you feel alone

Bob Dylan, "Marchin' to the City", The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs|The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs

It's not that I hate people, I just feel better when they're not around.

Henry Chinaski in Bar Fly

Loneliness is this world's worst kind of pain.

Gaara in Naruto

That is when I realized that in all of the world no one needed me. I was alone.

 
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