Disaffection is a strange thing. It is not simply frustration, anger, or despair. It is the slow erosion of the sense that you belong in the world as it is currently organized. You become tired of the stupidity, tired of the damage it does to people, and tired of watching the same failures repeat while everyone rushes off to make them worse. It is not that you stop caring. It is that caring begins to feel increasingly disconnected from anything that can meaningfully change the direction of events. You are still here, still participating, still trying to make sense of things, but you no longer feel recognised by the systems around you. That is the central feature of disaffection: not the feeling that you do not exist, but the feeling that the world no longer has anywhere for the person it has effectively made you. The person and the world have fallen out of phase, but neither can fully detach from the other. Both continue by remaining entangled, even when that entanglement has become hostile, exhausting, or absurd.
Alienation binds a person to that from which they are, or feel, excluded.
Daedelus Kite 