Is it just me?

A few years ago:

I used to be able to sit in one corner of the room with a book in hand, completely oblivious to everything that was around me, food and drink forgotten, a screaming grandmom and mom ignored and could focus completely, totally and wholly on the piece of art in my hand, completely lost in the black print. Of late, I can't seem to focus on any book or movie for more than ten minutes, without fidgeting a million times, looking around the room, completely tuned in to the slightest noise or disturbance in the space around me!

I could listen to the same song over and over again and completely get lost each time in the lyrics, the melody, the voice... Today I find it difficult to listen to a single song from beginning to end without skipping parts I don't like.

I used to be able to remember the most insignificant detail of any conversation or bit of information someone had shared with me, including when and where that bit of knowledge had been imparted to me. I could recognize articles I had read years before and recite its contents almost effortlessly. I could remember whole poems after reading through them once. Statistics, numbers, names, figures, pictures came naturally to me and I could recreate the same vividly in words. Today, I find it difficult to remember my own aunt's phone number! I read the same articles again feeling only a faint sense of deja vu... I look up blogs, articles and other stuff on the internet, read it out to those around me and poof, forget everything that I've read almost the very next minute!

I still remember the physics formulae and equations I learnt years ago, nay a decade ago, but can't seem to recall a simple economics theory I came across in B-school not so long ago.

I used to be able to hold a conversation for hours on end on the most boring topic on earth. Today, I can't focus for more than a minute on the topics that interest me most!

Whenever I visited a place, I used to observe the most intricate details - the shape of the tiles on the pavement, the kind of trees along the road, the colours of the billboards, the building styles, the moustache of the bhelpuri wala standing near the pavement and map it to those details I saw in other places. Today, I noticed for the first time, that the road I walk on for a good ten minutes everyday is not tarred but tiled!

Is it just me? Or is there a larger, darker force at play?