Alienation
Etymology
From Latin "alienus" ("belonging to another"), via "alienare" ("to make another’s, estrange"). The everyday sense of emotional distance is old, but Karl Marx gave it its sharpest modern meaning in the 1840s — "Entfremdung," the worker’s separation from the products and process of their own labor. The word thus carries both a personal and a political charge.
noun · /ayl-yuh-NAY-shun/
A feeling of estrangement or disconnection — from other people, from your work, or from yourself.
What it names
A handle for the specific ache of being cut off from something you should feel bound to, especially the deadening produced by modern work and institutions.
Example
Answering the same scripted questions for the hundredth time, she felt a growing alienation from a job that had once felt like hers.
Related idea
Where anomie names a society-wide breakdown of shared norms, alienation is felt from the inside — the individual’s sense of not belonging to the world around them.