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I’m not an expert in autism, but I’m not keen on what seems to be claiming every ‘nerdy’ hobby as an autistic trait ?
Educate me
Potentially unpopular opinion - the term “autism” and “ASD” have expanded way beyond their original clinical meaning. It doesn’t help that even the official definition is so broad as to be useless. Add to that the cooption by the Tiktok culture to describe any “quirky” behavior, and you get the current situation where it’s hard to find a person that doesn’t exhibit at least some “autistic” traits
The term “neurodiverse” (or as a friend calls it “neurospicy”) came about because of this. It turns out that ASD blurs into a lot of other “conditions”. They also tend to blur into each other.
Rather than deal with explaining the details of how your weird, neurodiverse is used to indicate your weird, but not broken. E.g. high functioning autism isn’t naturally a disorder. Instead it makes you better at some things, but worse at others. Unfortunately, one of those happens to be social skills.
Neurodiverse people tend to have a lot more in common than average. It’s both from social conditioning, and commonality of interests. We also often find “normal” to be uninteresting, if not boring. We seem to naturally gather and seek out like minded people. It also runs in families. This makes it seem that it’s disproportionately common. We’re not actually that common, we just tend to just concentrate into a few areas.
ASD etc have there uses, but as clinical terms, for problem management. It’s annoying when it’s overused in media, as a catch all term.
I mean we ARE a lot more common than uneducated people think. They have the “autism = unable to speak or walk normally” mentality instead of that one kid who likes to draw and listen to music.
We are more common than many thing. However, we also tend to self select our groupings. We are a lot less common than WE feel we are.
Basically, about 50% of my local makerspace are ND. That is way higher than the general populous. However, even within family, work, or random friend groups, I still see an abnormally high percentage. I basically self select for weird people and have done all my life. This seems to be common for many of us.
How are the highlighter lines so straight and yet so inconsistent?
It wasn’t till education and office jobs became more common that autistic people started separating from what they were seen as being “oh yeah joe, hes a tad off but gets his work done and he’s nice” to instead where you’re told to stay in a room all day and do this annoying thing.
A few hundred years ago there wasn’t as much to overwhelm autistic folks compared to todays cities and technology. Also the repetitive farmwork (ex. churning butter) is something autistic people excell at as they can zone out and just vibe.
I heard this quote that really makes it obvious, “how come dyslexic people didn’t exist until widespread literacy?”
That’s a pretty rosy interpretation. Another would be that, unless you were wealthy, no one really gave a shit. I’m sure a lot of autistic people just died in the gutters because they weren’t able to find steady employment.
I’m sure plenty were able to contribute to family trades like farming, etc. But human history is full of death and despair.
