Imagine waking up one morning to discover you are entirely alone. Everyone else in your home has disappeared.

You look out the window and the streets are empty. No cars on the road, no planes overhead. Shops are abandoned. Schools are deserted. Buildings completely vacant. No phone reception. No internet connection. No electricity. No television or radio.

It is silent and eerie. Lonely.

You are alone on an island with no one else and there's no way out.

Now imagine if all this was happening and you are a child. Book and movies about children abandoned and left on their own are popular in fiction. But they also happen in real life. The most powerless and the most vulnerable have at times in history figured out how to survive on their own and they have lessons to teach the rest of us.

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Late one night when he couldn’t sleep, John Koenig wrote up a definition that hadn’t existed before. It was the word SONDER.

It’s the awareness that everyone around you is the main character of their own story and he posted this word on his website for the book he hoped to write one day. That book became The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. 

The word Sonder became the most famous entry in the dictionary and Koenig still gets emails from readers thanking him for giving voice to something they’ve felt their whole life. It surprised him how universal a feeling that came from inside him could be...a feeling that he only felt in glimmers of solitude. 

How do we give a name to something internal, an emotion? What’s in a name that everyone can recognize but all of us know it in different ways? 

Is there a better name than just calling it loneliness?

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To make a comic book, it takes people working on their own and getting together. 

Many professional comic artists today work on bigger projects that involve multiple talents-- writers, colourists, and letterers. All specialists who contribute separately to make a comic book. But many artists work on their own comic, their own creation and character, making something that has meaning to them, alone. Despite working on their own in dispersed locations, the individual comic book artists and creators are able to address specific submarkets. 

When comic book artists, like Mary Guo and Tristan Bun, and Isabel Torrubia Gortari create using their own lived experiences and their specialized skills, what emerged were topics they were interested in: stories about loneliness and isolation. And those individual stories connected to others, tens of thousands of readers each time they posted their comics online. By telling their own story about being alone, they found their audience. 

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When you’re on the road, the world is suddenly rich with possibility. 

The act of leaving, wrote Jack Kerouac in the stream of consciousness that would become his book On the Road, is surprisingly easy. 

With this publication in 1956, Kerouac found himself torchbearer of the ‘Beat’ generation.

In today’s age, what was once a too-huge world has become smaller and offices can be anywhere, and nowhere at the same time. 

The Beat generation is long settled and gone. 

But in their place, a new generation of nomads--digital ones--emerged. 

And they’ve learned that going on journeys alone is living in one long continuous and often lonely scroll where escaping the rat race can lead you to find many others doing the same thing.

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Are there inventions that can end our loneliness? 

Through the centuries, inventors have found new ways to innovate and design devices that are meant to advance our lives. But sometimes these inventions, in moving us forward actually end up making us feel more alone.

From the telescope to the ostrich pillow, Playboy centrefolds and interactive posters that kiss you back, these are our picks for some of the loneliest inventions.

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Once upon a time there was a way to use fairy tales to tell stories about loneliness and the endings weren’t always happy. 

Fairy tales are stories that matter to those alone and those wanting an escape. Because they are all about isolation--the hero or the heroine are often cast out on their own. 

They seek refuge in forests that seem dark and threatening. But in those scary, unwelcoming places, they find the unexpected and the occasional magic. Not everyone has a fairy godmother who appears and waves a wand. 

But the tale behind these stories is often this: anyone can escape the forest of loneliness. 

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Animals are mostly social, but a research study found something unusual in an animal that doesn’t normally socialize with others. 

Terrestrial hermit crabs have a social agenda that’s more self-serving: they get together to kick another crab out of its shell so they can move on up in the world into a larger, more spacious home. Even hermit crabs need others in order to have more room to grow.

Believe it or not, there are things we can learn from hermit crabs.

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Literature is a good kind of contagion. 

Reading the imagined scenario, the fictional character dealing with the same things we are, helps us process as a community even if we don’t know each other, we can read the same stories. 

We are in the company of others when we read and a single story can represent millions of other tales, infecting millions of readers at once. 

It’s not a solitary act--to hole up with a book. 

It’s an exercise, in human interaction and in faith in yourself that you are changing with each word you read. 

When you turn to the last page, you’re better prepared for camaraderie, collaboration, and connecting to others. 

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A dog’s nose is an estimated 100 times more sensitive than human noses. Humans have five million sensory receptors in our brain, dogs have 300 million receptors and compared to them, our own olfactory receptors are puny.

Human scent is something we all have. The way we smell to ourselves and to others--including dogs and people, can reveal a lot. It can tell us about the kind of food we’re eating, or should be eating, the environment we’re in, whether we slept well last night or if we’re sleepy right now. Our scent can tell us if we’re feeling anxious or uncertain, powerful and confident.

Our smell can even tell us if we’re lonely.

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