Everyone is “dissociating.” Over the past few years, it’s become an open-source cultural term, ripe for applying (or misapplying) to all kinds of circumstances where people feel the need to turn off and tune out.

“Unable to integrate the traumatic memories,” Janet wrote, “they seem to lose their capacity to assimilate new experiences.” In this definition, dissociation describes what happens to memories, not to people. Modern usage of the term fills in that behavioral gap, describing a strategic numbing.

In the absence of treatment or in the face of repeated trauma, however, dissociation can lapse into depressive anhedonia, or the inability to derive pleasure from life experiences.

The term “dissociation” was coined by Pierre Janet in 1889 in the book-length scientific study L’automisme psychologique. For Janet, “dissociation” defined how the memory of trauma split itself off from the rest of the self, where it could not be internalized or assimilated.

Lack of affect is the new affect.

Depressive anhedonia is the moment in this cycle when once-reliable pleasures—food, company, music—begin to yield diminishing returns, until soon they give you no pleasure at all. Or, as Florence Shaw puts it in “Scratchcard Lanyard”: “Do everything and feel nothing.”

After the Nazi death camps were discovered in 1945, and with all the horrors that unfolded in World War II, Western culture became exhausted with itself, with its will to dominion, its appetites, its capacity to destroy. Extravagant emotional gestures suddenly seemed inappropriate, even dangerous.

As a survival strategy, dissociation of this kind is ingenious, serving the precise function for our nervous system that a circuit breaker does for your house. Unfortunately, human minds don’t flip back on so easily. When they do, the process of “reintegration”—reconciling the traumatic memories with the preexisting self—can be painful.

So what’s happening? The easy answer is: everything. A pandemic, school shootings, the climate crisis, looming recession, the collapse of democracies and the existing world order—the response that many have to all of this is to crawl inside a safer space, to find refuge from the chaos.