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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
It’s not so much the choice of hobby, but the degree of obsession, being so intense that even the participant admits that it’s illogical, yet partakes for the emotional fulfillment.
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.
People often accuse me of being Autistic and it infuriates me to no end. I don’t care if I am or not I don’t give a shit about knowing. I’m perfectly fine without the label and I’ll keep being fine.
I hate that so often we are encouraged to label ourselves in society and that just as often people seek these labels to fit in, gain community or otherwise make themselves more interesting by incorporating some quirky or less than common fact about themselves as a whole personality trait.
I am finding more and more that neruodivergent labels are becoming the new version of houses in basic bitch Astrology.
The insinuation here is the obsessive behavior. The text calls it a madness so I’m guessing it was a sudden occurrence.
I’m not an expert on Autism or other mental situations like ADHD mind you but it seems pretty likely Thrasyllus became hyper fixated on boats one day and he basically became a harbor manager for it much like you see other hobbyists become conductors or train line engineers for toy trains and that before the very modern diagnosis of Autism came about these people were considered strange until the behavior could in some part be explained by neurodivergent behaviors/tendencies.
Seems like they could have just gave him a job keeping track of all the boats and then everyone could be happy…
I bet the sailors were equally thrilled that this random guy was looking out for them. It’s nice to know someone’s waiting for you.
How are the highlighter lines so straight and yet so inconsistent?
I would have to imagine excellent fine motor control and really shit aim 😅
Honestly they did pretty well until the lower section
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.
There’s still people into boats, but it’s not very popular compared to trains/planes/cars. Which is kinda strange, there has never been a time with more shipping traffic. Maybe because ports these days are fairly inaccessible to observers
Wait, isn’t train autism less about the arrival or departure of the train and more anbout enjoying the mechanics of a gargantuan piece of machinery in motion? Or can people experience it in multiple different ways? I’ve just now realized that I know very little about this particular special interest.
As with many ND hobbies. It sprawls out in almost as many ways as people who do it.
Some love the massive powerful machinery that is a locomotive. Others are obsessed with the timings and predictability. Still others love the organisational side of things.
It even overlaps with the model train interest groups. Recreating aspects of the train network, based on their own interests.
ND hobbyists are a bit like cats in many ways. There’s not much pack drive. We tend to wander and explore interests in our own way, independent of the labels that get applied. It can be broadly grouped, but has a lot of spread.
