This is one of my favorite things to discuss about this book! See, I enjoy making games and having meaningful interactions with other people, and the world is readily granting me all that. Keeping in mind that (1) I'm NOT The Chosen One, (2) I don't have 600 metric tons of plot armor, and (3) people much wiser and knowledgeable than me still find the world perfectly livable, why should I sentence myself to a lifetime of misery to end up changing nothing? How much exactly should I be convinced that I know best in order to do that?
As for myself, I've always felt like an alien on earth. As a kid, I truly did not understand why people did what they did. I saw people forming all these social connections, but I couldn't understand why they did it: what were they looking for in others? I've always lived in a world of my own. Patterns, structures, associations, have always interested me more than material things and socialization. If I did not have my inner creative world, then maybe I would have been like the others around me...but I was otherwise occupied and so I became an outsider -- an outworlder.
When you're naturally predisposed to be an outsider, the self-preservation matrix of the collective does not capture one's libido. One is freer psychically, but free like a starving man on the hunt for food as opposed to a sated man lounging on a couch. To not be hooked into some preservative frame induces great motion within...but is energetic motion superior to sated stillness? A question I've been trying to answer myself...
This is directly on target with how I felt as a kid to late teens. Is this something you talked with others about or maybe read somewhere? I have never came to grips on why it took me longer to understand people. My siblings close my age did well socializing where I felt out of touch.