I have to say that modem society seems to be tailored to neurotypicals, but somehow breeds neurodivergents.
From how many people I know who are neurodivergent, I’m not sure if I’m suffering a sampling bias, or whether there’s just a lot of neurodivergents.
I’m ADHD, my brother is too. Two of my long term friends are on the spectrum. I can definitely go on. I know I don’t generally keep neurotypical friends as well as I maybe should, but it seems like there’s a lot more of us than they would like to believe.
I’m fairly convinced that most people are just walking around undiagnosed, blaming themselves for being “weird” or “awkward” or “shy” when they’re just wired differently.
It’s partially the internet’s fault. It can be addictive to the neurodivergent brain chemistry and in fact, encourages the development of certain behavioral addictions that mimic things like ADHD.
It also causes masking to become harder as the NDs may spend less time learning the rules of their social circles in person and instead opt for purely online social groups or parasocial relationships.
Modern society is increasingly more tailored to neurotypicals, exposing more and more neurodivergent people who used to pass as normal in past cultures.
Its a simple cause and effect and also a demonstration of how disabilities are often purely contextual to the norma and culture of those you live with.
There is a suggestion floated that neurodivergent people tend to group together socially, presumably for the same reasons other people with things in common do.
Im more interested if its always been this way. Have this many people always had adhd before it was recognized? Or is it something in modern society causing it.
I dont know how to get an answer to that question.
Ive seen that before, and sure, its possible its like that with adhd but not at all certain i think. Otherwise that argument could be made for anything, that we just couldnt measure that thing before but it always was like that.
Correlate the data of current diagnoses against the historical data of asylum inmates. That should answer the question of if it has always been there, just undiagnosed. At least for the more extreme cases.
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.
I have to say that modem society seems to be tailored to neurotypicals, but somehow breeds neurodivergents.
From how many people I know who are neurodivergent, I’m not sure if I’m suffering a sampling bias, or whether there’s just a lot of neurodivergents.
I’m ADHD, my brother is too. Two of my long term friends are on the spectrum. I can definitely go on. I know I don’t generally keep neurotypical friends as well as I maybe should, but it seems like there’s a lot more of us than they would like to believe.
I’m fairly convinced that most people are just walking around undiagnosed, blaming themselves for being “weird” or “awkward” or “shy” when they’re just wired differently.
It’s partially the internet’s fault. It can be addictive to the neurodivergent brain chemistry and in fact, encourages the development of certain behavioral addictions that mimic things like ADHD.
It also causes masking to become harder as the NDs may spend less time learning the rules of their social circles in person and instead opt for purely online social groups or parasocial relationships.
Modern society is increasingly more tailored to neurotypicals, exposing more and more neurodivergent people who used to pass as normal in past cultures.
Its a simple cause and effect and also a demonstration of how disabilities are often purely contextual to the norma and culture of those you live with.
There is a suggestion floated that neurodivergent people tend to group together socially, presumably for the same reasons other people with things in common do.
Im more interested if its always been this way. Have this many people always had adhd before it was recognized? Or is it something in modern society causing it.
I dont know how to get an answer to that question.
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
Ive seen that before, and sure, its possible its like that with adhd but not at all certain i think. Otherwise that argument could be made for anything, that we just couldnt measure that thing before but it always was like that.
Correlate the data of current diagnoses against the historical data of asylum inmates. That should answer the question of if it has always been there, just undiagnosed. At least for the more extreme cases.
Yeah that could be helpful.
I’m not sure there will ever be that level of acceptance
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.