I wonder, too, whether Americans’ insatiable appetite for more and more violent films and ‘reality TV’ that wallows in and laughs at the most extreme forms of human misery (both of the inflicted and self-administered variety — these ‘idol’ elimination programs revel in cruelty and ridicule far more than they celebrate any kind of talent) are outlets for this growing detachment that requires more and more powerful shocks to register above the numbness. The media pandering to this accelerating tendency seem to be trying to address not attention challenges caused by information overload, but an attention deficit caused, perhaps, by an unwillingness to even register information that is seen as utterly meaningless and relentlessly boring.

A while ago I threw out the idea of a magazine that would suggest possible individual actions at the end of each article and would allow you to detach, organize and file the articles you were personally acting on. While I still see this as valuable for the socially and politically engaged, I now wonder whether half the population would see this as a preposterous exercise in self-delusion and personal hubris.

I find myself suffering from mild symptoms of this attention deficit: Lack of concentration, to the point I now find reading a complete work of fiction intolerably frustrating. And a constant restlessness during social events (I find myself ‘browsing’ the crowd in an often futile search for a conversation that can hold my focus). Some people tell me I have developed an annoying habit of not looking at people while I’m talking with them, as if something more important is preoccupying me. I notice these symptoms, and more pronounced, jarring ones as well, in others, especially young males, for whom conversations seem like a discontinuous mental journey in and out of reality, as if they’re engaged in a constant internal struggle for any kind of connection and attention.

I wonder if this disengagement isn’t symptomatic of a more profound underlying problem of dissociation in our culture. Dissociation is generally a defensive reaction, to trauma or chronic stress or extreme anxiety, a coping mechanism. In advanced cases it can lead to psychopathy, where the person emotionally distances him/herself from the consequences of his/her actions, becoming wildly impulsive, remorseless, deceptive, easily bored, and prone to blame others (this diagnosis has been, quite seriously, made of George Bush, whose inability to string together a coherent sentence is attributed not to illiteracy but to dissociation). Dissociation isn’t always the result of some extreme childhood abuse or injury, or severe post-traumatic stress. It can result from much subtler, but chronic stresses — thekind many of us face in our modern world every day.