Honestly, the weariness and disgust you feel appears to be almost universal in Western Civilization, and I think it traces to the growth of government and overbearing taxes on citizens. Increasingly civilization has become nothing more than people struggling to survive, handing most of the fruits of their labor to the government, and government then pisses 80% of that money away through bad incentives, huge organizations that accomplish nothing, and completely ineffective administration of what few programs might help people. Government now tinkers with private decision making through huge numbers of stupid, overlapping, contradictory, and pointless laws and regulation. I think people feel a loss of control in their lives, a loss of personal freedom, and a pointlessness of contributing into such bad social systems.
If you had a significant other as defective as the government in most countries, you would drop her/him because she/he sucks the life out of you. We all want to do that with our governments, but we cannot and that creates a growing sense of despondency.
