I am writing this because it is an idea I’ve had for some time, and I don’t know if there is any truth in it. I assumed that there probably wasn’t, that it has been occurring since time immemorial and that it was just one of those many things rattling round my head that seems like a revolution for all of two minutes before I realise the gaping weakness in the argument I was considering making. It’s possible that I have been reading too much Mark Fisher and watching too much Adam Curtis recently, but I have revised this doubt and am going to release this idea in to the public domain to see if it resonates with anyone.

A dissociative disorder is one that causes a severe “disconnection between a person’s thoughts, memories, feelings, actions or sense of who he or she is”. It is the symptom of horrendous illnesses like PTSD and Dissociative Identity Disorder. It seems increasingly that people of my generation and the generation just above me lead dissociative lives. That is not to say that there is an entire generation whose day to day problems are equivalent to that of the veteran with PTSD, for most of us that would be an absurd thing to suggest. What I am trying to articulate is a feeling of dissociation that I think many of us experience. Driven by the exogenous forces of late capitalism, globalisation and technology, our perception of the world seems to increasingly fragment into unconnected clusters of activity. This feeling was at its most acute for me when I was suffering from a bad bout of depression. My life felt like it had shattered. In the rare occasions that I felt I was living in the moment, it seemed like a flash in the pan, an unexpected moment of occupation that would annihilate itself upon completion and not form part of a broader life that I had created for myself. It is like looking at brush strokes on a canvass but never being able to identify the whole picture, except the canvass, and the onlooker are both you.

This feeling to a greater or lesser degree seems to afflict more and more people, or at least it does in my mind. I would be greatly appreciative if anyone that reads this could comment whether or not this resonates. It seems written into the very structures that govern our lives. Increasingly people work precariatised jobs, where they are unsure how many hours they work, where they don’t know who they’ll be working with or even necessarily, if they work for an employment agency, where they’ll be working. Our culture is increasingly decentralised. We experience it in unconnected streams, it is often not rooted in any kind of scene or hub, subcultures increasingly exist on the internet not in real life, so they are once again disparate and disconnected from us. Social lives based around a place may still exist but often, it will be the bland familiarity of a chain like Wetherspoons. It is unsurprising that the brand has acquired such a cult mythology, our memes indicate a burning desire to find more in the soulless establishments that we work hard to inject meaning into.

In this fractured age even our protest is networked. It occurs in a series of flashes. Students rise up on an impromptu basis, people occupy parks or squares unannounced but once again there is little centralising force. It is not something from which you could derive a sense of purpose or identity. We are also increasingly mobile. I always went to school in places I did not live, so had no geographical root either at home or school as my time was split evenly. And, I move around often enough now that I do not derive an identity from any particular place, so once again a trait of modern youth, our mobility causes a dissociation as we have no geographical centre point. To clarify I am not advocating a conservative return to tradition and family values, far from it. I enjoy mobility and the freedom of individualism and am a proud citizen of nowhere, as Theresa May once spitefully put it. Nor am I advocating a rejection of science and medicine in favour of some bizarre, ephemeral, undescribed “connection” like the charlatan Johhan Hari. But, it seems there must be a limit to our atomisation, that we should search for a way out of the anomie that this disparate nature of our lives brings us. To be sure we live eclectic lives with global culture at our fingertips. We get to live in more of the world than many before us, but there is also this pervasive sense of alienation, this dissociation as an entire generation struggles for meaning. Obviously, I can’t be sure but, the mental health pandemic in the west certainly seems to imply that something is wrong, quite possibly tied to this feeling.

I do not have solutions. I think we need to adapt individualism. Adam Curtis argues we should relinquish a bit of ourselves to something greater. This sounds good, but what, practically does it mean? We need some kind of compromise, a centralising force that allows us liberty while also allowing us to shape a coherent identity and derive our own meaning. Mark Fisher writes of the “Privatisation of stress” and certainly our individualistic conception of what seem to be structural problems is troubling. Do you feel this too? Do your friends? Why? Let’s have a debate, while the internet may fracture connection, it does allow for communication. Please post responses in the comments below.