Not really while reading a book, but playing through the twist ending of MGS2 for the first time as a kid left me with a sense of disorientation afterwards. I felt like someone had just turned everything upside down because out of nowhere the familiar gaming experience had radically transformed from the familiar to the surreal. Whatever I thought the medium (games, books, etc.) was capable of, apparently there's more to it than I could have ever imagined at the time. It was an experience so unique because it was so hard for me to fathom personally, but it's also an experience shared by other people too. Gravity's Rainbow was a complete reimagining of what I thought a story in literature could live up to. Reading can sometimes feel like a private sharing of knowledge because it's a solitary activity and oftentimes the people you know in real life haven't read the book, so it can feel like you possess your own inside knowledge about something, but Gravity's Rainbow is so discombobulating that the experience is almost wholly unique for each reader. You can get 4 people together to discuss the book, and come away with 4 different perspectives from having read it. It's both disorienting for the individual, but also disorienting for everyone who's read it, and the result is that everyone comes away with their own private interaction with Pynchon, having only seen their own sliver of it, and all the individual perspectives never entirely adding up to anything conclusive. It's a rare genius to have written something that remains so personal for the reader, and yet so elusive for those who have read it.

To be kind of fair to their generation, there wasn't much concern for long term consequences back then. People smoked like chimneys, drank like fish, played with radioactive materials like they were toys, drove without seat belts, did a lot of daredevil stuff like racing, flying acrobatics, etc. Life expectancy was ~45 years on average and the oldest age one expected to live to was about 60, so you didn't have time to worry about life or the future because you were here and gone in a flash. Just ask someone who is 40 right now what they think of their time on earth so far, and they'll all tell you that it's gone by too fast, yet by modern standards they can live to double that age! Not so back then. You turned 40 and were acutely aware that you had a good decade left in you, tops, and then something was going to get you. Since you couldn't really do anything about it, caution got thrown to the wind and you just lived every day like it was your last. You tried to live the most fulfilling life you could, and that was the message of the Beat generation. Prior to that, your whole life was spent in a factory, a mine, or a field. You think of "me time" and "time off work" as entitlements now, but back then you were a lazy, good for nothing bum if you didn't want to work every waking hour. Kerouac and Co. embraced the ideal of the bum, introducing to the next generation the idea that life was more than just all work and no play. Yeah, they took it to an extreme that ended up killing most of them early, but again, the life expectancy was so short back then that they died right when they expected to die anyways. Their legacy looks excessive and irresponsible to people now, but that excessive irresponsibility was a statement back then, and it was a statement that needed to be made (believe it or not) for us to enjoy the ideas of time off work that we enjoy today.