'Readers don't care about the writer and are distracted instead by small things like their own lives'

Loved this.

Personal writing should entertain the reader. (And by this I do not mean the voyeuristic train wreck entertainment that one gets from reading, say, Naomi Wolf's account of losing the Technicolor Wizard of Oz–like effects of her orgasms. It should be deliberately entertaining, not accidentally funny.) Most readers don't care about the writer and are distracted instead by small things like their own lives, and so it is incumbent upon the writer to make them care or draw them in by being fascinating or funny or unusually observant.

-- Katie Roiphe in Slate

Carried to extremes, this attitude might be expressed with a degree of hostility:

It turned out a couple of students had complained to the chair about my comments on their stories. He showed me a page with red slashed across: "Who cares? I don't care! Make me care!"

"What did you mean by this?" he asked.

"Simply that a narrative is worthless unless the reader can be made to care about the characters and what happens to them," I said, as simply as I could.

"You were trying to tell the student that her story is worthless?"

"In its present form, it is worthless."

-- The Secret Diary of a Prisoner in the Creative Writing Gulag

Turns out there's a word for that: platzangst

In an essay in Harpers, a writer describes a circular effect in a story by Robert Bolaño:

The circular temporality, the idea that they are undertaking a repetition (but with a slight variation), owes something to Borges. It also evokes a variation on the phobia that the Germans call Platzangst: the illusion that one has made no progress at all while attempting to cross a vast, unending square.

(From The Wandering Years: Roberto Bolaño's nomadic fiction, April 2007)

Wow, I had no idea there was a word for that, or that it was regarded as a common psychological affliction. I thought it was just my own impatience and anxiety. I often experience it after getting out of my car and walking up to the door of a building such as the post office -- I know rationally that the door is only a few feet away but it seems enormously inconvenient to traverse the wide, ugly sidewalk to reach it. And it's also a feeling of selfishness: I'm not allowed to park in the handicapped spaces which are closest to the door, so I have a feeling of irritation while making those twenty or thirty extra steps. Platzangst! Now I know.