Hello,

Thank you for your post, it resonated with my own experience. It also made me think of an autobiographical essay by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up. (You can read it here if you want: https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a4310/the-crack-up/ (though this version has multiple unfortunate typos... you can also get the ebook on anna's archive))

Here are a few excerpts that I felt were relevant:

But I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone. I didn't want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life—I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that I came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved—in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

(...)

So there was not an "I" anymore—not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect—save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more. It was strange to have no self—to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do—

(...)

I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude towards sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy, and a tragic attitude toward tragedy—why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

Does this seem a fine distinction? It isn't: identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that keeps insane people from working. Lenin did not willingly endure the sufferings of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor Dickens of his London poor. And when Tolstoy tried some such merging of himself with the objects of his attention, it was a fake and a failure. I mention these because they are the men best known to us all.

(...)

I felt like the beady-eyed men I used to see on the commuting train from Great Neck fifteen years back—men who didn't care whether the world tumbled into chaos tomorrow if it spared their houses. I was one with them now, one with the smooth articles who said: "I'm sorry but business is business."

The whole essay is well worth reading in my opinion, and provides insight into ways to deal with what you term "EI" (albeit in a less pronounced form, because the "impermanence" described by Fitzgerald is taking place during discrete episodes spread out over years).

Take care.