Microblog Memes

Meet the owner or meat the owner?

This is what Imma do.

I can attest, autism runs on my mother’s side of the family. I have two uncles who are low functioning.

One’s practically a child mentally with an obsessive recall for music charts over the years, and absolute statistical knowledge of the NY Giants history. He’s brilliant, with essentially encyclopedic knowledge within his extremely narrow interests, but can barely take care of himself otherwise. The other is a somewhat independent and capable of dealing with life, but… just inept and weird, and not smart at all.

I’m also mildly autistic (Asperger’s, on the old system I guess) and smart. Not a genius, but fine. It’s been pretty easy for me to pick up on complex concepts and tasks in life, so long as it’s not too math heavy. I’m working in IT automation/cloud/etc. and generally doing well in life. A little socially awkward and introverted, but happily married and successful overall, more so than average in my age/peer group.

although most issues with autism is dealing with neurotypicals.

We went down the slope once people started using it as the next euphemism for "retarded".

At the same time, to my knowledge autism (and ADHD for that matter) aren't well enough understood that we can say for certain "all these things we consider autism are caused by the same thing", it feels more like a grouping of symptoms and as usual you get the diagnosis it if it significantly interferes with your daily functioning.

I can tell you that it very much did (and still sometimes does, though it really helps that most of my peers now think similarly) interferes with my life that people seemingly expect me to know magic to understand what they mean, and inversely their magic that works on everyone else malfunctions on me and gives them completely wrong ideas.

But I am also entirely capable of living life on my own, and fundamentally it does make sense that there needs to be some distinction between someone that needs constant assistance vs someone that is mostly fine if people show some basic attention to not sensorily overload them/can mitigate the issues largely on their own as long as no one prohibits it.

The thing is, it is very much a spectrum and outside of the clear "incapable of surviving on their own in society" and "does fine but people think they're weird" there's a ton of "does generally fine but if multiple people start talking at them at once they might shutdown", "is caused distress by a few basic tasks but can deal with it, it's just a stress factor" and "needs some active assistance, but is mostly independent" and people (rightfully so) neither want to be told "well your problems aren't real because you seem fine from the outside" nor "you're too disabled to live a normal life" when it isn't abundantly clear that that's the case. And trying to distinguish between the extremes will necessarily lead to that for a lot of people.

The chart of left-handed people historically may help with some insights into that.

http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/CandHchapter06/HistoryGeographyHumanHandedness.pdf

I would say that there's been a lot of ADHD people throughout history, I find that many types of ADHD, and even ASD people, are quite good in crisis situations. Where things are uncertain and improvisation goes a long way.

I know there's also more than a few that have symptoms too severe to be helpful in those situations too.

I digress. In any situation where you see someone who is otherwise normal/unremarkable/a low achiever, who stepped up in a crisis and took care of things, I would strongly suspect that they have some form of neurodivergent trait. I'm sure that's not entirely universal, and there are many exceptions.

I find a lot of the overthinking we tend to do, and analysis of human behaviour (for the purposes of masking), is extremely helpful in crisis situations, where you have to manage several things at once and get things done as rapidly as possible to fix whatever is happening.

And again, by no means an I saying a neurotypical couldn't do that and even excel at it, I've just found that my neurodivergent friends are more prepared, more innovative in the moment, and more focused on something when the pressure is on.

Given this, I would expect that neurodivergent people do very well in highly dynamic environments. So any kind of hunting/gathering/laboring that isn't entirely sterilized down to white office walls and cubicles where you have to do the same repetitive tasks over and over and over again, is something that our brains are good at.

And if you understand ADHD, you know that's the case. The more interesting things happening (for our brain) the more easily it is for us to find the motivation to get going with a thing. The more rapidly we can get to our dopamine from completing a task, the better. A crisis combines these things in a compatible way. There's some urgency so, no time to stop and ponder, we need to move. The thing that needs doing is unlikely to be typical, so it's interesting because it's different. And it needs to be solved as quickly as we can, so we get near instant gratification when it is finished.

Since instances of that are less because of the sterilized nature of modern society, I think has two main effects. First, neurodivergents have more difficult finding jobs that are interesting consistently enough that we do well at them, and there's such an infrequency of crisis because of modern technology and the redundancies, reliability and durability that more modern things have, generally speaking, makes most days quite boring for a neurodivergent mind.

So IMO, is become very obvious that anyone who is ADHD is going to struggle with how boring and sterilized modern living is, vs how things were before we could rely on everything as much as we do in the modern era.

It's not the 90's, I would drop that habbit, not one will get the Chicken Tendies 4chan stuff.

All we loved is dead.