It’s typically felt by survivors of serious trauma or severely mentally unwell people. I think it’s misunderstood by people who like to list their mental disorders on tumblr as a critique of the world around you.

Capitalism causes a dull sense of derealization because the world around you isn’t natural and it isn’t real. It’s all a market. You’re just shoveled off the plane of true reality to be a more efficient consumer and worker in service of capitalism. That’s a depersonalization we all experience, but it’s more of a conscious realization than a mental disorder.

Maybe this take is a little hot, but I think if people stopped using terms like this to make themselves feel “more real” or more interesting or more enlightened than others, then we could find some solidarity and fight against this fucked up system that is killing us earlier, killing the planet, and co-opting our entire reality for profit. That’s a serious problem that has corrupted our one shot at life. We are born into a system that churns us into perfect cogs for a machine that runs on us instead of for us. That is a hard pill to swallow. But instead of that realization being held over your title so as to make people see you differently, maybe that is the exact kick we all desperately need to ardently fight for a different system, a different world than the one we’ve been herded into.

It’s real. And it’s fucked up. But it’s not an individualistic problem for probably 80% of the people that google it/think they feel it. It’s a product of this warped system of capitalism. Unite over it. Don’t pin it to your lapel.