Do you think that feeling of difference in interaction and being detached from "default" world has anything to do with the drugs? Either yourself taking them or just the masses of people around you?
I ask, because I noticed that same sense of difference and detachment myself while I lived in a lovely commune after college, but attributed it mostly to heavy drug use.
I used to do cross-country backpacking. The kind where you go on multi-day trips out in the wilderness, well out of the range of any technology (except GPS). What is remarkable about such trips is exactly the type of detachment that the parent describes.
It also gives a profound sense of perspective. You kind of realize how inconsequential your day-to-day concerns are. You know, stuff like trying to not be late to morning stand-ups or vertically centering the text inside some div. You realize how small you are in the grand scheme of things. The forests and rivers and mountains existed long before you were born and they will continue to exist long after you die. In their eyes -- if they had eyes -- you don't matter. You're less than a speck. You're nothing. Then when you lie down in your tent that night and the only thing you can hear are the sounds of nature around you, what happens is that you stop giving a shit about your "default" life.
Several days later, on your way back to civilization, your phone beeps and you realize you're now within range of a cellular tower. Annoyed, you punch in your passcode to silence it. Oh, what's this? Your friend texted you two days ago, inviting you to a house party on Saturday. Better respond real quick so he doesn't think you're ignoring him. And maybe check email while at it, too.
And that's how you get sucked back into bullshit.
I feel like a lot of the heavy drug use in our society comes from the fact that so few people get to get away from the nonsense. The promise of drugs is that your time between "real world mode" and detachment is 15 minutes instead of several days. Of course, most of these drugs have supply-integrity and dosage-certainty issues on account of being illegal, and are unpredictable at best and dangerous at worst. I don't intend to say "drugs are bad", because I think that research into the therapeutic potential of these compounds is 50 years behind where it should be, but most people don't know what they're doing and are using them irresponsibly.
I've noticed that as I've gotten older I'm better at dropping into a detached, almost Zen state... and ignoring the bullshit in "the real world". I've learned that you can't let yourself get sucked into the bullshit, even if you have to be at work. There's an almost sociopathic skill I've cultivated of playing the role without caring. I need to be the subordinate? Fine, I'm a paid actor. I've also worked to cultivate that ability to just focus on the moment, in order to make weekends more useful or effective. A long (15+ mile) bike ride can have that effect, or an outdoor meditation session, or just having a purring cat sleep on top of me. Even if I get just 30 seconds of that detachment, I consider it a success.
When I walked the Camino de Santiago, I felt a major difference in interaction with other people and detached from the rest of the world. At least for me the experience gave me a megadose of a kind of empathy for other people I hadn't often experienced before. This combined with the fact of taking off each day not knowing where you would stay or what your sleeping conditions would be created a powerful sense of detachment from the cares of the "real" world.