Playing a game of me

hey hey! decided to update. and i admit it. i'm too lazy to come up with an explanation for the previous post. so go figure it out urself!
but this is a cool article which i feel is very relevant to me. it's from the New York Times by Keith Ablow.

Teenagers are showing a profound detachment from self - the inevitable result of society's escalating affair with unreality, says Keith Ablow

Almost from the moment he walked into my office, something bothered me about my 18-year-old patient Mark, sent to me by his parents after they found marijuana and steroids in his bedroom.
He was tall and muscular, with tousled, dirty-blond hair, wearing a faded T-shirt emblazoned with the words "Sunset Strip", distressed jeans made to look threadbare at mid-thigh and a 1970s retro leather choker with a few clay beads on it.
A shiny silver bolt pierced his left brow. He shook my hand and introduced himself with a smile, then sat down in the suede armchair opposite me, his legs outstretched, his ankles crossed.
"So tell me what's going on," I said.
"I'm in a serious jam man," he asid. "I think I need rehab to get my life back. You know?"
He didn't sound upset about it. I asked: "What have you lost?".
"Got two weeks?" He chuckled.
"I'm listening."
"I don't know if I ought to head to rehab or really go deep into analysis with you or what," he said. "Or maybe we just go theProzac route."
"You think you're depressed?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I'm kind of like the quiet guy who goes to the gym, you know, keeps to himself, maybe hooks up with a girl here and there, but doesn't make a big deal of it. He's, like, sort of on the outside looking in, never letting anything get him too down."
Mark's lapse into the third person -- "He's ... on the outside, looking in" -- helped me realise why he disturbed me from the start.
He seemed fake, as if playing a role. He showed no anxiety or sadness or anger. He spoke in cliches -- "I'm in a ... jam. I need ... to get my life back. Got two weeks?"
His hair looked intentionally messy. Everything about him, down to his carefully chosen, probably pricey, "worn out" clothing, felt scripted.
I have treated several other teenagers this year who display a similar kind of profound detachment from self. It is a kind of identity disorder I believe has its roots in a society that has drifted away from reality and is creating adolescents (and, I would venture, people of many ages) who are at most participan-observers in their own lives, with little genuine emotion, like actors playing themselves.
The signs and symptoms of this identity disorder are everywhere.
They not only buy clothing made to look old when it is new, but they also buy T-shirts emblazoned with logos from bars and bait shops and resorts they never visited, and that sometimes do not exist at all.
More and more, they use illicit substances and alcohol to keep their genuine feelings at bay. They use steroids (and plastic surgery) to alter their physical appearances and athletic abilities.
They pierce themselves and tattoo themselves and have sex more and earlier, in what I see as desperate efforts to anchor themselves to some sort of reality -- the reality of flesh.
If a teenager can feel a steel bolt through her tongue move whenever she speaks, at least she knows she inhabits her own body, even if she doubts her own soul.
If she can use low-cut jeans or a glimpse of thong underwear to attract glances from boys around her, then at least she knows she occupies space and time at the centre of their attention.
The soil from this detachment from self has been sown for decades, partly by psyichiatry itself.
By not opposing vigorously enough the dangerous myth that psychoactive medications are a complete answer to depression and anxiety, we have allowed the idea to take root that we need not heed our emotions as evidence of life crises with real and crucial meaning, that we should turn off our inner voices and "listen to Prozac" instead.
The growth of technology has cleaved us from the reality of self, as well. We say we are "going" places on the Internet without ever leaving the room. In elaborate Internet-based games, people pay thousands of dollars to own "real estate" that is not real at all.
We can wage wars that kill tens of thousands of people with "smart" bombs. But we see little, if any blood. And we can count the dead between episodes of our favourite sitcoms.
We sit still for a cloudy sense of whether whether our president was elected for his forst term. Then the president in the TV drama The West Wing delivers a political statement about the war in Iraq, and people actually pay attention.
A senator appears as himself in the film Traffic, in which Michael Douglas is the nation's drug czar. Unless Mr Douglas really is...
The trouble with all this is that the truth always wins. Reality will not be frustrated forever.
You have to pay back emotional debt, like the national debt, with interest. A crushing major depression lies in wait for Mark, if I fail to help him face whatever demons from the past drove him away from the reality, to drugs.
Ever-increasing rates of substance abuse and attention-deficit disorder and depression lie in wait for adolescents emerging into adulthood. And, in not many decades, our nation's sense of itself will, inescapably, depend on theirs.