So you know how you were driving to work this morning, and some idiot in the left lane of the freeway was going 40 mph because he was yammering into a cell phone, and you got really angry?

You’re not alone, says Dick Meyer.

“We’re mad as hell, and we keep on taking it, again and again,” says Meyer, the editorial director of digital media at National Public Radio and author of the provocative and entertaining Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium (Crown, $24.95). “We watch TV for eight hours and say there’s nothing to watch. We complain about the coverage of the autopsy of Anna Nicole Smith, and yet we watch.”

Meyer, who spent more than 23 years at CBS News as a reporter, editor and columnist, is not a professional crank, whatever you might think. As part of his job, he asks people what they hate about American life. The list is long but hardly surprising: Rudeness. Celebrity worship. Bad TV. Exploitive movies. The media. Politicians. People who lack volume control on their iPods or cell-phone voices.

“One of the things I tried to do in the book by starting off talking about the small irritants of life was to try to draw parallels between them and the big ones, the big institutions,” Meyer says from his office in Washington, D.C. “The forms our irritants take are the same as what we don’t like about the culture as a whole. Politicians are full of b.s., just like road hogs and loud cell-phone talkers.”

Meyer is skeptical of an institutional remedy for the problems of why we hate us, which he says stem from our mobile society and growing lack of ties to community groups, such as churches or even bowling leagues.

“Frankly, I think some of the biggest phonies are people who come forward with prescriptions, self-help merchants or politicians or marketers,” he says, adding that we’re the only ones who can change things. “Everybody needs to go on a media diet. Look at how much time you spend with media. Not just the news media but all information that comes from a device — TV, computer, BlackBerry, cell phone or radio. Add that up in a day, and compare how much time we spend as living, featherless bipeds. It’s shocking.”

So join a book club. Get active in your hometown. Meet your neighbors. Interact. Meyer has his own remedy against the soul-sucking information barrage. Don’t laugh: It’s rotisserie baseball, the fantasy sports game.

Q. What’s your pet peeve?

A. Technological obliviousness is high on my list, like when somebody is in a conversation with me, and they take out their BlackBerry. Or at restaurants or at CVS or in the airport, someone who’s blaring into their cell phone in that way that makes you absolutely feel that you don’t exist.

Q. But you don’t blame technology; you write that you use a BlackBerry.

A. Condemning technology would be like condemning pencils or papers. Technology is not morally or sociologically good or evil. But it does have addictive aspects, so it’s easier to use it for evil rather than good. It takes a lot of self-consciousness and effort to not be taken advantage of by technology. It’s easy to fall into habits; they feel necessary. We can’t remember the day when the office couldn’t reach us.

.

Q. You write that the red state/blue state polarization is a myth. Why?

A. We’re not so polarized at all. I discovered it on an anecdotal level by talking to people across all demographics about what they hate, and everybody hates the same things. You’re not going to find a person who likes to be put on hold by the machine of a multinational corporation that says, “We care about you.” Neither liberals nor conservatives think that’s fun. The common ground is extraordinary, whether I’m talking to an urban Jewish yuppie or a home-schooling conservative.

Q. So what drives this phony culture war?

A. The people involved in politics for a living: politicians, the media and people who are active politically. They are polarized. They’re a small percentage of us, but because of technology they make more noise than they ever did. We didn’t have access to 24-hour cable TV 25 years ago. And the world we see there is unrepresentative of reality.

Q. So what do we do first to improve things?

A. Go on a radical diet concerning what you consume in the world: the information, the media, the entertainment. Strip it down. Think it through, and start over again. … We’re so used to thinking about effort in terms of making money or achievements that we ignore making efforts to live well.