For the past couple of weeks, I have had a bizarre feeling. It is the same as I have felt before (overwhelming boredom and futility) but in a strangely more thorough or "deep" way.

OP work is slow-going as the motivation is hard to find in large quantities. This is mostly due to futility, but some of it also feels like a sort of tiredness in attempting to concentrate. It is as though, when I try to focus on something, the effort drives the interest from me and leaves me feeling strangely tired. This isn't that unusual, though, as my ability to focus on such things is always ebbing and flowing in response to various other factors (and optimization problems can be very interesting but usually aren't or take a long time to realize).

The stranger part is that I feel as though I am more desperate to feel understood. By this, I mean that opinions which I don't think are truly thought-through and authentic are upsetting me more than I think that they should. This is relevant since there is no longer 2-way communication around shared interests, where you can talk your way to the depth of a topic where both participants are engaged. In my world, I know few people, see them little, and share few interests.

As a result, I look into the online space to find that sense of connection (fake as it may be). However, I find that the online space is the end result of multiple iterations of my old "quick to judge, slow to understand" criticism. I am not at all interested in someone's "judgment" of a character in media, a person in reality, or an idea in discourse (ultimately, where I want to take the other 2 avenues). If it doesn't interest you, I get it, but your "safe condemnation" of every trivial thing is not interesting in the slightest. It just reminds me that I don't really belong here.

It kind of reminds me of what I am sure is a pretty common experience: Meeting a handful of people, over the course of my life, who have said that I am the smartest person they had ever met. I always just sort of dismissed this as "saying something nice which they think I want to hear" or "being generally hyperbolic" (although that wasn't as common in earlier years as it is today). I end up reading these threads talking about some topic or listening to people talk about things which interest them and I can't shake the feeling of "why does it seem like people are not actually trying to think about the idea but just find a way to use overused buzzwords in the context where they are speaking?"

This worries me due to the 2 immediate potential interpretations I can see: (1) I have developed some kind of ignorance which means I cannot see the insight they are bringing to the table or (2) I actually am so far beyond them that their perspective seems so simple as to appear inauthentic. (1) is the simplest explanation but really testing that would require being able to drill-down into their statement to understand its more nuanced facets and that isn't the kind of conversation which exists on the internet. (2) just sounds like dismissive nonsense I have heard too often before (the old, "the reason I don't get along with people is that they are threatened by my awesomeness" - UGGH), so it is hard to place it in reality without it collapsing on me.

I suppose a potential answer could be "(2)-lite", where the problem is terrible selection bias: The only people interacting in the spaces where I am looking are morons since more interesting people are living more interesting lives and are happily busy with them... somewhere else. This is highly believable since "terrible selection bias" is probably the full legal name of the thing we call "the internet".

I am not sure if the world I used to know ceased to exist, moved where I am not looking, actively excluded me, or was never there in the first place (a warping of memory due to shifting perspectives and assumptions).

In any case, I am increasingly feeling as though I don't belong, and probably can't belong. The friction of the universe trying to force me out of it hasn't ramped up yet but I know that that is also on the horizon,
...Nights