My first thought process on this is interesting:  It's said often of Americans, that we are the only group of people who don't expect suffering.  So, when suffering happens to us in a tertiary sense, it creates a sense of novelty.  Who of us, in private conversation, haven't said something along the lines of "I'm looking forward to the next disaster"?  The interesting thing about novelty is that is actually stimulates our dopamine sensors, and is more of a "amusement" reaction than an "alert" reaction (imagine prairie dogs, or such).  Could it be possible we're flooding our reactions with our constant perception of novalty?  After all, that's the same type of reaction that happens under the use of Ecstacy, and one of the long-term side effects of X use is known to be severe depression, as the receptors become "numb."  So, I sort of feel all of the novelties in our lives are actually contributing to this American crisis with depression.  

Now, onto my Fruedian/Jungian analysis (I'm neo-Freudian, with hints of evolutionary and behaviorism thrown in, in case anyone cared).  It's my feeling that we're in a definite existance of Baudrillardian hyperreality, something that's especially set in over the past 5 years with the Bush illusion of government.  When we break down the Freudian model of the brain we have the Id (the pleasure-seeker), the Ego (the reality principle, ie the sharer), and the Superego which acts as the reconciler between desires and reality.  This process has served us well throughout our more "natural" history, but has started failing as we've entered into modernity.  As reality degrades, and the meme of living life "reconciled" to hyperreality spreads through the collective unconscious, our Superego cannot reconcile between the Id and the Ego, and our consciousness degrades.  We rely more and more on the Id and Ego, and cannot conceive of the long-term, nor can we apply any longer the moral and social constraints that create our modern life, causing collapse of our social construct.  So, in this sense, you can almost imagine a Bell curve of modernity, matching almost identically with the Peak Oil curve.  This is why we cannot escape the path we are on.  You can say that we lack Der Wille zur Macht.

Ok, all that babble behind me, I think it's obvious I'm a rather pessimist in the situation.  And further, despite my ability to recognize these trends, I am still helpless to escape the course, which is a huge source of the undercurrent of nihilism in our culture.

My rather long-winded $.02