Sounds like you're a very 'aware' individual. Life has this way of bringing you to a point where you can no longer consciously identify with what you experience here. Where a physical-based understanding of your identity and of the nature of your existence becomes insufficient and just doesn't work for you any longer. This is often an uncomfortable, disorienting, and challenging experience. Your former foundation begins to crumble and gets pulled out from beneath you. But it serves the purpose in pushing you to expand your state of awareness and your perception beyond its previous limitations. If you were an Earth-centric individual, well perhaps you expand your horizon to include the vastness of the Universe - and once you reach that stage, perhaps you begin to question the nature of physical reality itself and whether there are other dimensions of reality and contribute to a much larger and more complex existence.

Elevating and expanding your state of consciousness/awareness will have the effect of altering your perception - and through modifyng how you perceive, this will have the effect of altering how you respond and react to what you observe and experience in this physical world. In other words, you can bring yourself to a state of being where you are still aware of and you continue to observe and experience all the things you have mentioned in this thread - yet you will elicit a different reaction/response. Not one of ignorance, avoidance, or denial - but you will see things in a different light, from a much larger perspective.

For me personally, what brought me to the point where I had to push myself to seek to extend my awareness beyond my former physical-based understanding of who I was and of this this reality I was experiencing - it was a combination of a the accumulation of mental suffering throughout my life and also the unexpected 'death' of a family member. But, there are a variety of different ways in which a person can find themselves at this crossroads where they begin to distance themselves from their identification with the physical nature of life and seek a higher awareness/understanding. This can include - experiencing prolonged mental suffering, experiencing a deep sense of loss (loss of a loved one, loss of one's identity, or loss of a relationship), having a Near-Death Experience, engaging in spiritual practices, etc - among other things. How you arrive at that point is not significant - what's important is that you get there.

What can you do to have a positive effect on the world and be an agent of change? Focus your efforts on healing and refining yourself. In doing so you will positively affect and influence all those whom you come into contact with. You are not this separate 'being' in a physical world of randomness and disconnected things. Everything is interconnected at the highest level (the energy field that underlies all physical forms) - your very presence and what you do and say, it has a real impact in your surroundings and with all those whom you interact with. Sometimes a subtle influence, sometimes a more significant influence - often this goes undetected. When you get your internal affairs in order you free up vast amounts of conscious energy so that you are able to focus on helping and supporting others, and extending yourself in service to good causes and selfless acts. When there is internal dysfunction you become preoccupied with your own burdens and weighed down by your emotions/feelings. That's why it's important to concentrate on the 'inner work' that needs to be done so that you can free yourself and maximize your ability and potential to help others and improve the conditions that we experience. The external circumstances will not be repaired by trying to implement external solutions (more rules, regulations, laws, etc). Have to bring about internal changes within individuals before the external conditions receives a necessary correction/adjustment. No quick fix on the horizon but you can bring about change within yourself and recognize how doing so will contribute to the greater cause.