<Host>Very interesting. I believe I've spent most of my life post-childhood (now in my early 30s) in a state of feeling detached from life, as a passive observer. To me, the people and events around me seem more like characters and scenarios from a novel than they do reality. Rationally, I understand reality is in fact reality, but my default mental state seems to reject that notion. An example: I remember when 9/11 was live on TV, I just shrugged and went to watch something else while eating lunch.
I spend the majority of my time in fantasies, imagining myself elsewhere, or doing something else, or how I could have done something differently. Fantasies of vindictive revenge feature often, even though I'm a passive and peaceful man in "the real world." I spend a great deal of time distracting myself with story books or story-driven video games, or the occasional TV series. I just have no interest in dealing with reality at all.
That, combined with gradually worsening anhedonia, an inability to motivate myself to initiate activities, no career ambitions, a lack of empathy for people (but enormous empathy for animals and even some inanimate objects) leads me to believe I'm a type of schizoid (perhaps the "secret" subtype given my learned ability to socialize well as needed).
Perhaps I'm something different entirely, since I have no trouble feeling emotions, which I understand to be an issue for many schizoids. I'm also married, which I understand to be odd, although I wouldn't say I love my wife or feel my relationship is all that beneficial.
Still, what you said about how many people suddenly realize their reality and become detached is fascinating. I generally assume most people, when I bother to think about them, are well-grounded in reality, but I suppose that can't be true given the lengths many go to in order to pursue uncertainties.



<reply>You may want to consider the possibility that you are experiencing a clinical depression that is very much skewed towards "negative" symptoms (which is to say that, rather than having something a healthy person lacks like a sense of despair (a positive symptom) you lack what a healthy person has (the ability to experience pleasure and recognize experiences as novel).
Depression and the resulting anhedonia can cause the sense that time is moving very quickly or that the world is very indifferent because the people with it then no longer have the emotional energy to recognize experiences as novel or personal. Novel experience is a fundamental part of how we subjectively measure time and its one of the reasons why some times in our lives seem longer than others regardless of actual duration.
This anhedonia, combined with a depersonalized sense of time leads to what could probably be best described as a deep existential boredom.
I cannot diagnose you or even say with complete certainty that you have a problem (though I suspect it.) But I will give you the most important advice I have about mental illness. You take any group of mentally ill people and you can draw a very crucial line that separates them into two groups. The group of people who understand they have a problem and the group of people who don't. Take two people with equally severe mental illness and I promise you without fail the one who understands that they have a problem and that what they experience comes from within them will have a better quality of life.
When we can't accept that we have a problem, we externalize it, instead of saying we have anhedonia we say that there is no joy to be found in the world. Instead of believing we have a treatable depression we believe that life is inherently sad or pointless.
Stay on the right side of that line... and get yourself some professional help, in some ways you sound like a textbook case of someone who would completely "switch on" with SSRIs. Unfortunately most people will not get treatment if they're only at the point you seem to be at, because you're sapped of your energy and also because there is something at least familiar and stable to you about your current state. The problem is that mental illness doesn't usually exist in a stable form, more often than not, in the absence of doing something to address it it will get worse. And generally it gets very bad before someone with your cluster of symptoms is able to motivate themselves to see a professional, if they do even then. Seriously, take a shortcut past a lot of pain and just go to a psychiatrist now.