In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T.S. Eliot, why is the speaker so confused?

Regarding T.S. Eliot's work in general, and "The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock," one source notes:

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His early poetry, including "Prufrock," deals
with spiritually exhausted people who exist in the impersonal modern
city.

When I read the poem,
if the speaker is confused, I believe it is a result of fear: the fear of not fully
living or feeling one's life, and/or of challenging the norms of society. For instance,
at the beginning of the poem, Eliot writes:

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Let us go then, you and
I,

When the evening is spread out against the
sky

Like a patient  href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/etherized">etherized upon a
table...

One under the
influence of anaesthetic cannot feel the world or be aware of what goes only around him.
Perhaps what confuses the speaker is that people around him seem to
be living meaningful lives —going through the motions—like the women who drink tea and
read novels, who speak of famous artists —seemingly meaningful
things:

In the
room the women come and go

Talking of
Michelangelo.

However, the
speaker talks to his companion ("you"), comforting [I assume] her that there will be
plenty of time...but not for meaningful experiences, but to put on
the face of acceptability:

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There will be time, there will be
time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you
meet...

How is it possible,
then, that while they look to congregate with those they know, that they cannot seem to
find something or someone of substance with which to spend their time? In the third full
paragraph, the speaker lists things there will be time for; this list seems to echo the
Biblical passage taken from Ecclesiastes 3:1, which begins: "To everything there is a
season..."

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And indeed there will be
time

For the yellow
smoke...

There will be time, there will be
time

To prepare a
face...

There will be time to
murder...

Time for you and time for
me...

And as the poem
continues, we get the sense that this "going out" may not represent simply
one night, but perhaps many nights—even a lifetime, as the signs of
aging appear:

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Time to turn back and descend the
stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my
hair--

[They will say: "How his hair is growing
thin!"]

In that the two go
out to mingle with others, and because Eliot wrote specifically about "spiritually
exhausted people who exist in the impersonal modern city," I can imagine that the
confusion for the speaker is what path to follow. Do we follow the
masses of these "spiritually exhausted people," forever searching for meaning in an
environment that doesn't have the wherewithal to inspire because it is "impersonal" in
its modern-context?

Or do we find ourselves to be
individualists that do not follow the masses, but "march to the beat of a different
drummer?" Do we defy convention:

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To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I
dare?"...

Do I dare

Disturb
the universe?

The speaker
notes that he could be like Lazurus, to seemingly return from the "dead"—from a life of
"spiritual exhaustion"—to tell his truth, to share what he has realized about life, and
"disturb the universe." He alludes also to Hamlet, seeing himself
not as a "procrastinator" but a man of
action.

The speaker may be confused about whether he wants
to shake up the world around him by being different: what is the right way to live?
However, I get a sense from the poem that he is thinking things through here, and will
ultimately have to speak his truth, regardless of how those around
him feel.