>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.
On the other hand, most interactions I have with people are devoid of this kind of involved emotional inquiry. There is neither the non-psychological characterization of people ("he wears his heart on his sleeve") nor the psychological characterization ("he is anxiously attached"). I talk about these things with some of my family, some of my friends. Never with acquaintances. That is: in normal (not online) life people don't generally talk about having ADHD until they've reached a significant level of trust; and ADHD is about the easiest thing to talk about compared to any other issue.
Maybe this an artifact of the more reserved WASPish circles I run in. We're all very polite. We don't give each other nicknames. We don't gossip. We avoid making assumptions about a person's character. I don't think this serves us particularly well... and maybe therapy talk is our way of getting past this, couching these ideas in acceptably academic language. But without that language (and even with that language) we mostly just don't talk about it.
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.
But if we drop the false nostalgia and think of about the overall "we think too much and feel too little" sentiment - i can relate to that.
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.
capitalism is the thing making too much choice, and to many choices over time.
capitalism set the context for you snapping at your friend, where you are doing work you dont want to to avoid being homeless, while they are doing different work and you feel like its unfair that their work is different from yours.
if you werent fighting your friend to pay off some capitalist to pay them the most rent, you wouldnt be snapping at them
These interactions are not in that sense, they are in the "I say some stupid unvarnished opinion first and immediately realize there was a better way of saying it" variety. It is not downstream of me being stressed out about money or work or whatever. These are things that happen when I am in a perfectly normal mood, not thinking about how to pay rent or whatever.
I have plenty of social failings that are very much unrelated to capitalism. I have also had bad social interactions downstream of money/capitalism/etc too! But that's its own thing
Maybe you subscribe to some grand unifying theory here but I don't. Social structures and norms existed before market capital, and they exist in spaces fairly separate from the economic sphere ("those don't exist!" you might say, but I believe they do exist, at least in a time-and-space limited fashion).
Subsuming all of my issues to capitalism is unsatisfying. Thinking about the texture of it all (and potentially identifying some things that really are linked to that, and become as solvable as gravity[0]) is more valuable to me. I think it's also valuable to others.
[0]: or political action or whatever
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.
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.
In my parents’ time in a (then) Dutch colony, nobody was diagnosed with anything (that was only for crazies), but all the men knew how being hit with a belt felt (daughters were spared, from what I’ve been told). Self-medicating with alcohol and beating your kids if they ‘misbehaved’ was just the done thing, as far as I’ve been told.
This is to say that anyone who showed (what we would now identify as) neurodivergent behaviour probably would’ve been beaten, but this then wouldn’t have precluded them from going on to start a family and business (and maybe beat their own kids).
Actually, this is probably still how it works in many parts of the world. Even here in the Netherlands, beating your children was only outlawed as recently as 2007.
what you're describing is survivor's bias.
1) the most talented people with cognitive differences made it out for sure. But not every person on the spectrum is "amazing with technology" in a useful way. But not all are, and the ones that weren't just didn't make it. Today they do.
2) those people still needed luck. Luck that they were able to come up in a society that didn't expect more from them than to perform a "function". Things like meeting a spouse were "easier" because there was a more rigorous social structure. Depending on which society this was in, potentially to the detriment of your grandmother who didn't have a lot of choices.
2b) and luck that the community around them accepted them. That wasn't JUST because he was a farmer, it's also because he hit the other markers of inclusion whether he wanted to or not.
People in that day and age were not cognitively free. Is cognitive freedom preferable? Well that's the question of our age. We weren't supposed to just kill god and stop. We were supposed to replace a new humanist secular philosophy to replace the theology to find purpose to humanity.
We didn't, society is now full of anxiety and malaise, and the right wing is rising promising to fix it by a RVTRN to the old ways regardless of who they harm.
The views of people you are trying to label as fascist are more accurately described as individualism vs welfare state.
In my perspective, it's less about what you should or shouldn't do; its about making sure that question is down to your individual morality.
You don't even get social benefits, no one excuses your behavior just because it has a label. You get told it's your fault for not managing your disorder properly. Have you seen how we treat people with visible, obvious, undeniable disabilities? Like shit.
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.
In some ways this is a good thing. It is good if bipolar people get the medication they need faster, and can start living their best lives. But as someone who almost died to depression, the "help" out there is criminal. It is not a disease we have a cure for, in fact it's not clear to me it's even a disease in most sufferers, but a healthy and rational response to societal decay. I do not believe some disorders will ever be satisfactorily explained by individual-centric medicine, in the same way history will never be satisfactorily explained by great man theory.
I disagree! There was never a good support system at all. We used to just man up and live with it. Now that stress is reaching it's new heights. We can't cope with it.
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
ICE engines heat up because they burn fuel, but if it’s overheating in normal operation that’s from something else breaking down.
Not that people are so simple, but that transition point to disorder often represents a meaningful transition.
As the guy said, if you think you hear voices but they tell you to go to sleep on time and do a good job at work, you probably don't need treatment.
I believe your analogy is flawed. Can you restate your first statement in any other way?
OCD, clinical addiction, etc are all more involved than just feeling the desire to do something. The lack of control is the issue not just the momentary impulse.
Intrusive thoughts are fine, acting on them isn’t.
Addendum: I believe I’m close to figuring out what you are communicating but for me it’s not working.
I’m reasonably sure we’d agree that neurological conditions are complex and that labels only tell part of the story.
Seasonal affective disorder and bereavement-related depression may have similar symptoms on the surface, but there’s different treatments due to differences in underlying causes.
Some conditions may be a continuum with the same underlying cause taken to different extremes, but that continuum need not be continuous down to normal human behavior.
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.
It sounds like you're presuming those who put a label on themselves don't want to change themselves at all; one could also imagine that those who put a label on themselves want to change themselves most of all
Maybe that wasn't the intention but label does shape perception.
What if the first part of this is true (we all have a smattering of disorders), but thinking about them more just makes things worse?
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.
"we should avoid labels not because they are useless (they aren't) but they are hard to get right. Adding the cost of being wrong to that makes them not worth it"
There's some connection to the "build skill or taste?" dilemma threaded earlier
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44469163
You can make proper use of labels-- that requires taste. To build skill, you try to find new labels that can go viral ;)
Hobart makes a convincing argument that you can: "Fatalism says that my morrow is determined no matter how I struggle. This is of course a superstition. Determinism says that my morrow is determined through my struggle. There is this significance in my mental effort, that it is deciding the event." [1]
i.e., he is a "compatibilist", thinking that you can believe in free will and determinism too.
If you find Hobart persuasive, time-blindness or no, it does make sense to reproach someone for being habitually unpunctual.
https://www.simplypsychology.org/adhd-time-blindness.html
I don't watch TikTok videos, I don't use Instagram, but I have been plagued by these symptoms my entire life, and don't really care about others opinions on it. You probably don't have it if those symptoms don't resonate with you, but there are plenty of people who genuinely struggle, and there's likely some overlap with those who have undiagnosed ADHD.
i don't think it's unreasonable, particularly when she qualifies gen-z, to conflate tiktok and society.
it's really out of hand. the brain rot, beyond just the psych labeling she touches on, is crazy.
Especially with children and teenagers - which is why labeling them early can be so bad (or good, if used sparingly).
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.
There has to be a happy medium. I have some neuro issues, and yet I understand that while I may not be able to control the issues themselves, only me is responsible for my own actions. That is lacking in many folks who share my diagnoses. We dropped the ball somewhere and I don't know where, to be honest.
And it is more important to not stigmatize talking about it at all than it is to optimize for some people not using it as an excuse.
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.
I wish I lived in this reality. It sounds like a utopia over there.
But the idea is: in current society, for some pathologies / personality traits, you are better off with the label than without the label, so people will seek the label rather than avoid it, they would be crazy not to...
Here in the Netherlands, there isn’t any such thing as an ‘autism benefit’ or ‘ADHD benefit’. Only if your condition is so debilitating as to make you unfit for work, then there is a benefit that you could apply for, but not in all circumstances, and only if an unemployment doctor is convinced by your case.
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.
Even the Romans went to war and held slaves, so that seems true enough to me.
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 was a perfectly fine and productive remote worker before the pandemic. Now, every bit of energy I have goes towards "no, really, I'm alright" and the leagues of hustlers.
I'm quite certain the author is a Starfleet captain. So few things make me as excited to be human.
Something along the lines that Japanese people are analog while Westerners are digital.
We try to explain everything, every emotion, feeling, how things are. But sometimes talking about things strips them of their mystery, of the unknowns. We talk too much and get entangled in meanings and what was formless and fluid before suddenly becomes defined and limited.
It can still be endearing to have quirks, but I think there is still value in awareness of yourself and your patterns.
https://dmf-archive.github.io/docs/posts/net-anchor-has-arri...
Instead, I lay blame at several altars of the modern world:
* Late stage Capitalism desperately trying to source novelty and products by convincing everyone they’re a “brand” to be marketed and sold to others
* Social media algorithms forcing people into bubbles for the sake of advertising revenue and data harvesting
* An “awakening” of modern mental health awareness (especially post-pandemic) that’s both (likely) engaging in overdiagnosing while also laying groundwork to understand people for who they are, rather than trying to shove them into neat little boxes of compliance
* The internet and free exchange of information enabling a lot of disparate researchers and experts to realize that these issues aren’t unique to a single cohort, but are likely environmental in nature to some significant degree
Add it all together, and you’ve got the current “label” era of personalities - shorthand for how you’d like others to see you and explain your quirks or eccentricities, but of questionable health if not accompanied by actual therapy (pharmaceutical, medical, behavioral, or otherwise).
tmseidman•4h 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•4h ago
colechristensen•3h ago