In the world of sociology, discordance between the standards held by an individual or a group and that of the society within which they exist is sometimes called "anomie."
This term has meant somewhat different things to different people, and part of that definitional fluffiness is the consequence of the term's migration from Greek into French into English.
In Greek, the term "anomía" means something like "without law," or "lawlessness."
In French, the term "anomie" means something like "lacking social values."
Converted into English, though, this term took on additional meaning, as it was understood to also possibly refer to a deviation from norms, not just laws, and work by the sociologist Émile Durkheim defined it as a retreat from or reaction to society's rules and incentives.
So back in the day, in Greek philosophical thinking, this concept meant something like existing outside the law, or a situation in which the dominant laws were not applicable or enforceable.
It then became a reference to someone or something that was beyond the contemporary, acceptable social order (someone behaving rudely or incorrectly, as "rude" or "correct" would have been understood to the average person).
And then by the time it entered the English lexicon and Durkheim's books, it was also used as a reference to someone who was a bit of an outcast, possibly because of their beliefs, possibly because of a conflict in values or perspective, but in any case someone who was outside (to some degree) the confines of those social expectations and the forces that enforce them.
In some contexts (including Durkheim's books), anomie has been used to point at people who find themselves outside the usual (and formerly familiar) social order because of a rapidly changing world.
Someone who grows up in a world in which men rule and women should "know their place," and in which oil is used for lamp lighting, but who then finds themselves—seemingly overnight—in a world of relative equality for women and electric lamps all over the place, might feel discord with their own time, and may consequently experience a sense of anomie (maybe even to the point that they reject the world they live in and push further away, and possibly even to the point that they want to kill themselves to escape this bizarre new reality in which they don't believe they fit).
Some thinkers have posited that anomie can be prevented (or its impacts reduced and salved over time) by the widespread adoption of community structures like religious organizations, political parties, and other social groups.
Others contend anomie is a useful response to social evolution, and can spark creative inventiveness and revolution, nudging things in a more appropriate (by someone's standards, anyway) direction (and maybe even away from that second direction down yet another path).
While some perceive this to be a universally harmful psychological state, then, others consider it to be a natural component of social push-pull dynamics, and it may be part of what allows groups of humans to move forward—away from the norms of one moment to the norms of a future moment—in the first place.
Paid Brain Lenses subscribers receive twice as many essays and podcast episodes each week. They also fund the existence and availability of all the free stuff.
You can become a paid subscriber for $5/month or $50/year.
You can also support all my work (and receive gobs of bonus content) via Understandary.