>We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent.
....says who? Who talks like this? I've been fortunate enough to travel a fair bit in the last year and I haven't found any city or country where this is the case.
This advice is cliche at this point but go touch grass. Get off the internet and talk to an actual human, because most actual humans don't talk the way this article says they do.
If everything around you is using therapist talk maybe you're hanging around too many therapists. That certainly happens with people who hang around exclusively with, say, software engineers.
Not like me, I'm on Hackernews, and would never integrate stupid stuff into an important representation of my personality. Anyway, wanna see my NixOS configuration? I just figured out how to get animated wallpapers working on Hyprland and LOTR-themed everything!
Nah never mind I use NixOS too.
Only if you have a personal blog in Times New Roman, with an RSS feed, all diagrams in ascii art, no JS, and especially no scroll-jacking, high contrast font (ideally black on white), and keep in mind that we will find out if you’re not self-hosting your email, in which case you’ll have to profusely apologize.
Every sentence of this article resonated very strongly with me and accurately describes much of the culture surrounding me and my family.
Could this be because modern women have far more social expectations placed on them than boomer men did, and are thus struggling generally speaking more than boomer men had to?
No. "Mental health" concepts have just become prominent in the mythos of young women. Everybody has their struggles and competing over who has the most is not a productive area of discussion. Contemporary young women really like talking about mental health and have their own culturally shared version of psychology diagnosis and treatment. It's not necessarily any better or worse than any previous as psychology has always had a tough time with rigor.
Anyway here's the relevant trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MeasuringTheMari...
>Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful
In the past from, say, 30-40 years ago, if you failed to arrive at appointments and meetings on time you probably weren't labeled "lovably forgetful," and you probably would face punishments for having certain personality traits. We're changing in how we understand those kinds of differences now, and it's not all for the better, but in general the discourse now is better than how things were in the past when neurodiverse folks tended to receive a lot of punishment, invective, bullying, and ostracism.
I've been autistic my whole life, but I'm from the older set where there was no understanding of such things, we used to get bullied a lot, sometimes quite violently, and social ostracism was typical then for folks on the spectrum. I'd be thoughtful about romanticizing the past or get taken in by the false feelings of nostalgia - it's wrong to imagine people used to deal with the neurodiverse in glowing light and thoughtful acceptance, no one ever said I was "lovably forgetful."
If labels make you uncomfortable maybe that aversion itself is something worth holding and looking at.
My dad experienced real trauma but was told to bottle it up. After 30 years, he finally went to counseling and it was transformational for him.
By contrast, I had some mean fifth grade classmates who still live in my head in uncomfortable social situations…
Did my dad have trauma and need to put a “label” on it? Yep. Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...
As a society, we’re responding to the fact that a lot of our family and friends are living with the weight of a past which haunts them or psychological challenges which deeply affects their ability to relate to the world.
I think it’s ok to be overweight on therapy-talk. Kind of like how a little too much inflation is ok after a long period of zero inflation…
But I do think we should let younger people have more time before they get labeled/diagnosed. There’s a lot of 15 year olds who are just kinda weird…
It’s not useful to compare trauma, but not all negative things that happen are trauma.
And perhaps more importantly, not all trauma causes PTSD, which is a defined set of symptoms later in life.
To explain everything shallowly by looking for direct cause and effect and not a multitudes of causes and effects. That complexity is too much to think through comfortably whilst living within it and having an unreliable experience of the self, especially in the younger years. Labeling causes with an easy broad moniker provides temporary comfort, relieving the individual of the burden of deeper reflection.
I still go to therapy. It isn’t helpful.
Therapy is the second worst thing in my life to happen to me. There were the tens of therapists who put me down or told me my life experience didn't constitute "real trauma". By remaining in the therapy system for so long, years and years, and chasing support I could not actually be offered, all I received was a slew of new trauma (of once again having my lived experience denied) and a hole in my savings. Not kidding, I could have set all that money on fire and have turned out better than I did.
But far more damaging than that was how I was pushed into seeking out labels and spurious diagnoses that only covered up the true causes of my shame - my caretakers and the medical system that acted as their apologia. The idea sold to me (indeed sold, with thousands of dollars of uninsured medical practices) was that with an ADD or other diagnosis under my wing, I could start "really" healing, that the "true" causes to my dysfunction were finally in front of me after being lost for so long.
I now disagree. I was goaded into believing I was a product of unfortunate circumstances instead of malicious incompetence or the just plain abuse and neglect I really did suffer. I was bucketed into the same labels everyone else uses to navigate their problems without regard to their appropriatness and was told it was ME and MY condition that was the beginning and end of the problem. Instead of providing a cohesive narrative, that only served to alienate me further.
We need to stop treating symptoms as labels to be celebrated. Therapy-speak needs to be societally ostracized and die out. My label was the consolation prize to the unfairness and abject cruelty I was subjected to in life. Nothing could be more insulting to the fiber of my being. I am now just myself. I refuse to be medicalized any longer.
I dislike the "you don't have adhd, you live in capitalism" meme in general, but there is a big difficulty in knowing how much you might be overloading yourself, trying to get to an unattainable normal because your actual material conditions are not normal.
If you're working 60 hour weeks for most people there's not much saving you from having a very messy life! But your peers might all also be in that environment, and you will see people who navigate that somewhat successfully.
Of course you could be working much less and simply "be lazy" and suffer downstream of that. You might be two mindset changes away from being a lot less stressed.
Or you might have a medical condition that makes certain things harder! Or you might not.
At the end of the day there are medical conditions that exist and are fairly scientifically proven to exist in some form and have treatment. And plenty of people who spend time saying that stuff doesn't exist, so there's vocal pushback against that which rubs some people the wrong way.
But there's also just human introspection (which is part of how we grow). The new thing is that this introspection often happens more in the open, a lot of times with the whole world watching.
Even 20 years ago you might talk with other people around the world but it would at least be in more closed spaces.
Combined with the change in society where most active jobs are being replaced with sitting down at a computer.
So if you "really actually" have ADHD[0], that isn't just manifesting in not getting work done, it's manifesting in saying things before speaking, issues with addiction, issues with self-management leading to hygiene issues etc.
Loads of social effects that go beyond "don't want to work".
Me having a job or not isn't what's causing me to insult a friend by snapping back at them in a way that I _know_ is wrong. It's not causing lasting damage to social relationships because of my behavior. Capitalism isn't causing that.
And hey, meds help my management of those things. Even if I had all the money in the world these are things I would like to continue managing.
Bit of a glib opinion, though.
[0]: Not a doctor, etc.
Why is it everywhere now? Because we diagnose and treat it. In the old days what did we do with ADD kids? Hit them. What did we do with ADD adults? Call them stupid and lazy.
That was an explicit objective of these fields from the get go.
They never even pretended otherwise.
Everyone will have a pathology.
If not the practitioner just consider the field to be incomplete.
Over the course of our childhoods we experiment with personality, and discover the elements that allow us to have stable and satisfying dealings with the world. We may cultivate several different personalities— each of them the real us in some respect.
Of course there are many elements of personality that are autonomic or otherwise habitual. That doesn’t mean personality is somehow not real.
A con artist or an actor can don a fake personality, but all that means is they are telling a kind of systemic lie to the world. This requires a lot of energy to maintain. Your real personality is that which minimizes required energy.
No but you certainly are your own skin.
This is not the same thing as what you show to the world. "What you show to the world" implies that personality is merely a veil that covers stuff. It's not a veil at all. It's an interface. The "real you" that acts through this interface is beyond words, personality is not "showing it" because it can't be shown, but rather mediating it via actions.
People who aren't that interested in talking about themselves just have other interests and don't want to engage in the shallow philosophy of psychology of the social media gen-z class.
It won't be long before we see our genes as something that happened to us. At some point there will be questions about why our parents didn't change them, or why the government lets some change or select their genes but not others.
I guess this essay rubbed me the wrong way. Where they see — I'm not sure what it is they see, maybe embracing responsibility or self-actualization — I see people wanting to improve themselves, understand.
Personality is labeling, it's just labeling without explanation or goal.
For example, sometimes people talk about lowercase "t" and capital "T" trauma. Lowercase "t" is when something affects you enough that recognizing it elicits an emotion, e.g. some people fell uneasy when smelling saline because they associate it with getting shots when they were young. Uppercase "T" is when the emotion is overpowering, e.g. soldiers who wake up screaming or experience lifelike flashbacks when they see military equipment, or people who can't visit a location without panicking because it reminds them of a negative experience. Only uppercase "T" is diagnosed PTSD, although that doesn't mean lowercase "t" is never a problem, it's just not life-altering and can be worked around without medication or therapy.
We have regular adjectives for the manageable "lowercase" version of disorders. "Obsessive" for OCD, "antsy" or "trouble focusing" for ADHD, "strange" or "peculiar" for Autism. I do think someone can be "manic" or "depressed" without having diagnosed Bipolar or Depression. Unfortunately, language is defined by how it's used in practice, so if most people call themselves "ADHD" when they don't have real diagnosed ADHD, you'll have to use their meaning to understand them, and eventually it'll become the norm; but you can speak and write the non-disorder adjective to help counter it. Worst case, we still have "diagnosed X" to distinguish from "X" (unless people start using it like "literally" to mean figuratively...)
Moreover there is the problem of ensuring that when two parties exchange a single label, that label maps to the same referent or construct in the mind of both parties; otherwise you end up in a situation where two people use the same word to refer to different things, yet still think they are both talking about the same thing. Confusion at this layer leads to Tower of Babel-esque effects.
Language is powerful; in a Sapir-Whorfian kind of way, it determines the primitives out of which we compose larger, more complex ideas, but more importantly it also provides a serialization format that allows us to record thoughts and revisit them at a future time. Such thoughts can also include thoughts on ourselves, who we have been, and where we are going; the collection of such thoughts is one's narrative, and "narratization" [0], the process of creating that story of who we are, is an essential characteristic of human consciousness [0].
Subversion of the language we use to describe the self, and the media through which those languages are recorded, is thus altering the life narratives of large groups of people. "Therapy-speak," or overly medicalized language that originates from a fundamentally materialist worldview, does not treat of the existence of a rich inner psychological (i.e. "metaphysical") life, much less offer the terminology to describe it adequately. This therapy-speak gets recorded in our social media as a hyperreal [1] depiction of ourselves, and as one media scholar put it, "we become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." We create this therapized narrative of ourselves, and thereafter this therapized narrative shapes us. The therapy narrative becomes the totality of our self-concept, and, lacking any language to describe the inner life, dispenses with the inner life entirely. Now there is only the label and the physical matter of fact, qualia be damned.
The inner life, after all, is not scientific; it is not an objective phenomenon, nor can the qualia of everyday conscious experience really be adequately quantified in a way that truly captures its character. Science never intended to treat of such matters of the psyche, or the mind, or the soul, whichever of the three terms you would choose to describe the one subject under discussion. Traditionally, such questions would have fallen to spirituality and mysticism; and, I have a suspicion that the sudden interest in "identities" of all stripes is really a resurrection of the old language of souls and psyche into a more modern, secularized context, as a pushback against overly fundamentalist materialist worldviews that do not admit of the existence of any part of the human outside the biological facts of its genetics and chromosomes.
Modern psychology has lost touch with the rich storehouse of symbolic and mystical language used to describe matters of psyche for aeons: that of gods, and demons, and spirits.
[0] Jaynes 1976
The author's other post is fanning the "porn addiction" moral panic, and they're subscribed to someone who says that atheism is bad and only Christians can save the world.
None of this really matters to their argument of course, but it does give you a sense of their motivation.
Their argument, of course, is nonsense and is far outside the consensus of research psychologists and medicine.
i mean they were, if you got lucky.
If you were neurotypical; if you bought in to the local religious sect's particular flavour and embraced it wholeheartedly; if you followed the other local cults of sports fandoms; if you were lucky enough to either have family without their own trauma that didn't take it out on you OR decided to repress it in exactly the same way that they did and just simply passed it forward or didn't talk about it.
i don't know what the ratios are but a LOT of people fell through the cracks.
it's just that the birth rate was high enough to continue the population growth, and there were socially acceptable ways to ignore the inconvenient problems (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy)
it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.
now the stigma is gone and we're finding EXPLICIT paths to treatment, tolerance, and embracement of mental health, neuroatypical brains, spectrums, etc. Is there overpathologizing? Maybe? Hard to know! The stigmas still aren't gone. Go read the comments on any video providing tips on how to parent children on the spectrum and see neurotypicals freaking out about how soft the current generation is.
the western world seems to have peaked in tolerance in the 2010s, and is now backsliding into authoritarianism and fascism. that's trying to recreate a lot of those original support systems (by destroying the new ones). It's a bold plan, let's see how it happens.
The people who, according to your theory, want to reverse the tolerance trend and slide towards fascism/authoritarianism didn't pop out today. They existed and lived in society in the 2010s too. So, from a logical standpoint, what changed?
The algorithms are promoting those views?
By definition roughly half the population in any society must belong to a below average family and/or below average communities.
And it seems pretty likely that those with below average capacities at handling, processing, reflecting, etc., on these issues would be concentrated there.
I think you're understating how well those people were incorporated into society. My grandfather was born in the 20s and was described as quite "high strung", was amazing with technology, would repair anything, and even used to build his own farm machinery. These days he'd definitely be called severely anxious, and probably labelled as being on the spectrum. Yet he was part of a community, farmed his whole life, and built a family. People knew his quirks and compensated for them.
The views of people you are trying to label as fascist are more accurately described as individualism vs welfare state.
Anecdotally, the people I know who have become most immersed in therapy speak are also the most socially connected. The therapy speak and associated language have become tools for establishing themselves within their social support system, communicating cries for help, and even trying to use therapy terms to shield themselves from accountability for their actions by transforming it into a therapy session.
But there are a few things we can learn from this:
- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves that makes them feel unique, they’ll take it.
- if you give people the chance to place a label on themselves to give a name/form to a problem, they’ll take it.
- most mental disorders are an issue of degree and not something qualitatively different from a typical experience. People should use this to gain greater empathy for those who struggle.
One is - everybody thinks they have disorders, so just ignore that feeling it'll mess with you.
The other is - everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more
Less extreme versions of something can be perfectly fine. ICE engines heat up in operation because they burn fuel, but they overheat because something else is wrong.
It's been very helpful for me to pay attention to and think about how my own personality compares to others'. For example, I tend to be a people-pleaser, but I used to think that everyone was just as people-pleasing as me, which only reinforced the people-pleasing because I didn't feel right putting my own needs first when everyone else was already sacrificing their own needs (or so I assumed).
At the same time, medicalizing these things paints them as "abnormal" disorders that need to be "cured", overlooking any of the positives these traits bring. When it comes to my people-pleasing, I like it about myself that I care about others. As long as I recognize that it sometimes comes at my own expense, I can begin to make more conscious decisions about when to allow the people-pleasing to flow versus when to try to subdue it.
This one is widespread among the young people I’ve worked with recently. It’s remarkable how I can identify the current TikTok self diagnosis trends without ever watching TikTok.
There’s a widespread belief that once you put a label on a problem, other people are not allowed to criticize you for it. Many young people lean into this and label everything as a defensive tactic.
A while ago, one of the trends was “time blindness”. People who were chronically late, missed meetings, or failed to manage their time would see TikToks about “time blindness” as if it was a medical condition, and self-diagnose as having that.
It was bizarre to suddenly have people missing scheduled events and then casually informing me that they had time blindness, as if that made it okay. Once they had a label for a condition, they felt like they had a license to escape accountability.
The most frustrating part was that the people who self-diagnosed as having “time blindness” universally got worse at being on time. Once they had transformed the personal problem into a labeled condition, they didn’t feel as obligated to do anything about it.
2. Personally, I think the being more knowledgeable about (and conversant in) common psychological issues is great. Much better if we have a label for "depression" rather than just thinking "The world and everything is awful and I'm the only one who feels this way." Same for anxiety, attachment, all of that.
3. If young girls happen to co-opt it in a way you find self-absorbed, get over it, stop trying to police it and make a fake moral panic over it. It's no worse than astrology or whatever other loose avenue of self-exploration would be otherwise happening.
It to me sounds like the author fundamentally misunderstands the whole thing, this just is soaking in boomer energy. That is -- the premise that recognizing these trends is somehow shaming/bad and it's "better" if we all use loosely-defined unscientific terms like "nice-person" rather than looking at and challenging our overly intense and dysfunctional people-pleasing or whatever.
The way gen-z uses these terms, is that they aren't some hardcore disorder, but as a common parlance for real and addressable things to change about oneself (e.g. that talking on the phone can be uncomfortable, or making an appointment is stressful). Like gen-z may say "Oh I have insecure attachment" and they just mean "Sometimes I'm afraid to reach out for fear of rejection" and that's a healthy thing to talk about, even if the term they used is used a different way in the DSM.
There is a lot of this content out there about mental health and there is a lot of it that tries to explain everything people do. Much of the issue I see is that it is taken to extremes and is very much driven by algorithms pushing particular pieces of content. And if it is ambiguous enough it will reach a larger audience, a beneficial sign for the account posting it.
There's no room for nuance that perhaps the person who is generous both has qualities of a people pleaser but is a generous person because once upon a time they did a generous thing and it made their life happier. Where it becomes a mental health issue is when it starts to reduce the quality of your life and your relationships significantly.
The bigger issue is that each of these things seem to be labelled as problems and how they can be solved, not managed nor be normal human behaviors. At the extremes, yes perhaps they need to be managed to a higher degree, but everything else is still what makes up peoples lives.
I myself am swarmed with reels about anxious/avoidant attachment reels with any random man/women and their dog trying to talk ambiguously about human behaviors and providing an explanation for them.
For young people sitting on TikTok and Instagram late at night being bombarded with mental health related reels trying to explain your behavior and other peoples behavior you like or don't like. It's best to give that type of content a break.
Knowing you have ADHD, childhood trauma, attachment issues, etc. is useless if that knowledge does not enable you to take action or if you don't intend to take action.
Unless you just enjoy the learning for the learnings sake, seek to learn so as to plan and execute.
That’s not actually true, and misses the point.
Knowing you have ADHD, alone, helps you stop blaming yourself and hating yourself for those things that are caused by the ADHD. It doesn’t excuse it, but understanding that those things aren’t moral failures are a huge deal to those who actually struggle with ADHD.
Moreover, most people with actual undiagnosed ADHD have spent their entire lifetime building coping mechanisms to manage it. Recognizing those does help build others in the future, even if just knowing changes nothing right then.
This is the rejection of science applied to a less common target.
90's culture had so much more emphasis on being legitimate (and its many self-defeating imitations). Being legitimate is something that cannot be attempted. Only self-evidence can ever be cool. Only existing as the actualized output and never its abstracted model inputs can be genuine. Through that lens, one's own dignity demands not deconstructing. You should observe and react to what you learn, but whatever fractures are incurred must come back together and be owned. Otherwise you are pretending not to be the person in the cockpit, not the person flying the plane. It's a lack of responsibility. You will not do or do not. You will "try" because you are not in control. You will never be cool.
The engineer wants to isolate pieces of the system. Play the game again to study the situation, learn the pattern, and overcome the error. This is where it applies that no man crosses the same river twice. When people say, "life has no reset button" it does not simply mean that there are consequences but also that that every moment always remains, flowing incessantly, regardless of how it is scrutinized and analyzed to fit into a maze of dots and figures. We cannot own things by going backward in time to try again. Winning the game after many iterations is never cool. The losses must be owned or the pilot is merely creating a lie that they themselves understand while holding a result out to others as evidence of their coolness. It is trying too hard. It is illegitimacy, and its self-knowledge will seek to pull back the curtains on itself so that the pilot will not betray the plane.
Living intentionally constructed is a thought that must itself be forgotten. The idea is a map. Supposed externalized awareness of the being who rides in the skull cannot exist. It is a construction, and once the construction is used, it must be discarded as a map that was used to achieve some perspective. We can remember things far away. We can catalog and connect patterns over time, but the ALU cannot look at itself as lines in memory. The ALU lacks any self-description from which to feign deconstructed awareness beyond control bits that are necessarily less information than the registers, program, and data under computation. It all must vanish to a fixed-point un-calculation.
It's an aesthetic with some jagged edges. You'll always move forward based on what you believe because there can be nothing else, and if you are wrong, you will be wrong. You must own it. There are no outs besides simply admitting mistakes. But what is the opposite of dissociated? Is it worth it to live in your skin? Is it worth it to forget the distances that do not exist between yourself and the controls?
There's a lot of boomer men writing in all caps whose special interest is either trains or WW2 who, if were in their 20s today, would easily be categorized as autistic. Older men, for most of their lives, lacked both language and social permission to think of themselves in those terms.
The entire construct of "disorder" is defined by what a given society is willing to accommodate or tolerate at a given moment. Thus, the problem with the article is that it assumes that we live in a homogeneous social landscape. We don't, so things that negatively impact someone life ie: the definition of a disorder, are age dependent. The threshold for "impairment" is not a universal biological constant; it’s a moving, socially negotiated boundary. Diagnostic categories themselves are historical artifacts, trailing behind the societies that create them.
The failure to recognize this is assuming an objective social reality, that frankly, never existed and never will exist. It only serves to reinforce existing, unexamined, contingencies of a specific time and place.
I don't remember past "acceptable" pathologies, or what was considered a pathology back then, it included being gay. It you have a pathology, then you are mad, and if you are mad, then you lose your rights, at best, you are considered like a child, at worst, you end up in a place worse than prison.
Now, if you are diagnosed with an "acceptable" pathology, you actually get some advantages, people are expected to tolerate your quirks and you get full freedom like normal people, you may even get some welfare benefits as you are considered disabled.
To summarize:
Before: You are diagnosed as autistic, you end up in an asylum and lose your freedoms. No one wants that, so you avoid the label, it is just a personality trait.
Now: you are diagnosed as autistic, you get welfare benefits and people find it cute on social media. You want the label.
You don't lose what you never had.
More like society stops pretending the illusion that you have rights (including freedom) is nothing but a fiction.
I wish I lived in this reality. It sounds like a utopia over there.
The thing is, when you can't talk about seriously antisocial behavior with massively bad consequences for large numbers of people, when the real bad guys seem out of reach, all that angst has to go somewhere. And so everything is a disease or toxic behavior in the small, the family member or coworker has is a narcissist or a toxic personality, but like grinding everyone into poverty and pushing the world into avoidable war is just, how the world works.
If you put the small change shit in the swear jar where its always gone, nor you're asking very different questions about why things seem bad for everyone.
For example, generosity is not the same as people pleasing. They can look the same, but one is born of love and one is born of fear.
We generally want to help people experience more love and less suffering. Give, not to please people, but to please yourself.
I'm quite certain the author is a Starfleet captain. So few things make me as excited to be human.
tmseidman•3h ago
I also found it ironic that part of the OP's argument was that nobody has personality anymore, they just have problems to solve, and this article seemed to be doing the same thing, but for culture at large; reducing it to a problem to be solved.
idontwantthis•2h ago
colechristensen•1h ago