As an autistic who has been online since the early 90s, this article didn’t speak to me at all. My autistic internet comprised IRC and USENET, and it died when LiveJournal died. I still have close friends from those days, when I have no close friends “IRL”- I can’t say that for anyone I met on Twitter or Facebook, in fact I found both of those platforms to begin enshittifying looong before any of the NTs began to notice it.
I don’t think it’s just because I’m an older AuDHD woman, I think the existence of Facebook and Twitter from the mid to late 00s killed the autistic internet.
@YourHeroes4Ghosts@hedge I started a couple years before that, in the late 80s, with BBSes. Facebook and Twitter in particular have felt like the beginning of the end. Socializing online was suddenly less about meeting new people, and more about catching up with people you knew in high school, which is a big no thanks from me. My friends in high school were from the BBSes, so I didn't need to recapture those relationships on some other website.
I am Gen Z, and besides Lemmy, most of my online life is IRC and XMPP (plus a certain video game, if it counts). Some people there, including me, have personal websites. This internet is not gone, it is just smaller than it used to be)
In other words, it’s really just an improvement in awareness that has led to an increase in identifying who can be helped more effectively than before.
Maybe because there’s an army of us born and raised before diagnosis was common, living undiagnosed, and thinking we’re just fuckwits or that we broke our brains when younger.
A combination of having to live with just themselves for company over lockdown, and finding au/adhd memes that start as funny, and then slide toward “oh fuck, that actually explains a lot… is that… me?” has led a lot of people to seek help and diagnosis, so it looks like a rise of adult au/adhd spectrum individuals.
Even people who were diagnosed may not have been diagnosed properly when it was commonly believed that ADHD and autism could not exist at once in the same person.
Yeah. Memes are like the first step towards watching/reading/hearing lived experiences, which is the most effective way the understanding of these neurotypes grows.
A trick you can use is to say something outrageous and see if they react or not. Like say "I'm gonna take your playstation and sell it on ebay, is that ok?"
And it's also fine in any conversation to occasionally ask "Are you hearing me?" or "Are you following what I'm saying?"
I’m coming at this from a lens of hypervigilance and mirror/model behaviors, so I hope this is helpful and am apologetic if it isn’t.
There’s a certain range of engagement between parties in a conversation that feels “right” to many people. Sometimes that engagement from the listener comes in the form of eye contact, facial expressions, or body positions - or in the slight changes in each of those signalling devices. Most people are more highly attuned to noticing one of these than the others, separate from how well they perceive or interpret these signals overall. There could be a number of ways for your sibling to signal that they’re listening - occasionally nodding their head, making eye contact at times, allowing how they’re feeling to show on their face, or just small comments like ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘okay’, or ‘uh-huh’.
For me, learning how to perform these smaller tasks as a listener made these kinds of interactions easier overall - I could spend a small fraction of my bandwidth getting the information I needed without having to spend the energy on an argument, especially one about whether I was listening. If your sibling gets frustrated when they are questioned about listening, framing it as a way to prevent their own frustration may be a way forward.
Linguistics has the term backchanneling to describe verbal ways in which a listener can engage with a speaker to signal that they are listening. The most common affirmations that fall into this category are sounds like “mhm”, “uhuh”, or simple affirming words like “yes” or “I see”. But there’s a whole slew of ways you can signal this which are more complicated, such as rhetorical questions such as “really?” in response to content that is surprising or repeating some of the content back at the speaker like “he did not!”
If you’re looking to step your response game up, there’s a concept known as “active listening” which incorporates some of the ideas of backchanneling into more complex ideas as well as taking some of the more well studied psychology of intimacy and relationships. It’s a framework or structure for listening to somebody and to show that you are listening by synthesizing and repeating some of the information back at the speaker. As an aside this helps to reduce any issues with comprehension or miscommunication as the act of synthesizing and repeating the data back at the speaker using different words can often trigger the speaker to clarify in ways they may have failed to do or highlight that you understood something differently than they expected the information they presented to be parsed.
My go-to is saying something like "oh, like related term?" Or whatever, and then I get the bonus of a confirmation that I actually am understanding what they are saying.
What you’re referring to is called ‘active listening’.
It’s demonstrating via body language and/or vocalising that the speaker has your attention. It can go further to demonstrating you understand what’s being said but that’s not always the case.
No one is ND in my household as far as I’m aware, but I did have a similar issue with my partner. When he speaks to me, I put down my phone or book, or pause/mute the TV, look at him and make eye contact and at the very least make ‘mm’ noises, or ‘really?’ ‘wow’ ‘huh’ ‘ok’ or paraphrase what he’s said to either confirm or demonstrate I understand him. It’s how I was brought up. It’s how I function at work.
He does none of those things and will get annoyed if I stop taking and ask if he’s listening. He always says he is, but gives absolutely no visual or audible signs that he is.
So it became a point of contention in our relationship. For me what he was doing was rude. I felt stupid talking into the void with no response. Whereas he said he didn’t feel that responding was necessary.
My first approach was passive aggression, I’m not proud to say. I started doing exactly what he was doing when I spoke to him. He haaaaaated it. Kept pausing to ask if I was listening. Got to the point where he’d pick up the remote and pause what I was watching before he started talking to me. It was ridiculous on both our parts and caused a tonne of fights. But the one positive was that I could say to him ‘do you know how rude I felt behaving that way? Did it feel rude to you? Why? Surely you’re not knowingly being rude to me?’
Anyway, the penny dropped. Now he knows he has to give me a perfunctory grunt when I start speaking to indicate he’s listening. And honestly that’s enough for me. If it’s a serious issue or I need his input (so I’m not just rambling about something funny I read or venting about work), I’ll pause, he’ll notice and he’ll drop whatever he’s doing to give me attention.
So that’s all to say, if the person genuinely is listening, they may just need to be told that they’re creating frustration for both of you, and it’s perceived as rude. That all they have to do is make a sound of acknowledgment. That more will be expected from them in the workplace and now might be a good time to start practicing. YMMV with ND but it’s a worthwhile conversation.
Mm no I don’t think that’s it but I can understand how that could impact someone. He’s incredibly opinionated!
If I had to pinpoint it, it’s that his family are all quite selfish and I feel, not well mannered. So his behaviour towards me was a bit of an issue early in the relationship. Seemed he hadn’t been brought up to actually give a shit about other people’s views or how his words and actions affect others. It wasn’t malice, just learned indifference.
I also think his parents drinking habits meant he was around a lot of rambling that didn’t deserve response.
I have the problem with signaling that I am listening as well 😃 as well as my son, tho 🤪
Problem here is, that I keep thinking while listening and sometimes slip away up to a point where I not register what exactly was said, or only with delay, completely unintentional.
This mostly happens if I already kinda know (or think I know) what the other person wants to say. With other ND people, it’s mostly ok for them, that I interrupt them and complete what they wanted to say fastly, while regular people tend to feel insulted, it seems.
So, what I want to say: Unintentionally insult enough people by not reacting correctly in conversations and you start not reacting at because it is the better bet, especially if you don’t know the other person.
It may be in your interests to explain to people exactly what you just said to me.
My current boss is ND and very open about it. It means I don’t get frustrated when he’s not communicating the way I’m used to; I don’t take offense to certain behaviours; but also, I can comfortably say to him ‘hold up, let me finish what I was about to say’ wait for him to process that bit, then continue.
You sound similar to him. He knows that the majority of people are going to feel frustration or offense because some of his ways of relating aren’t what is perceived as ‘normal’, or he comes across as plain rude. So when I started work he explained all this to me. Sometimes he is just being a fuckhead - like anyone can be, he doesn’t have a free pass - and I’ll call him out on it. But day to day, to avoid miscommunication or irritation, we’ve found a way of interacting positively.
So I think for you, you’ve got to realise that it’s not about shutting down. I think even in a passing conversation with someone you don’t know, you can probably say ’ Hey, I’m ND - sometimes I can interrupt/talk over you, I don’t mean to - I’m trying to listen but it’s hard for me to stay focused’.
Maybe review any videos or podcasts that hold your attention and figure out if there’s a speech pattern that helps? Is it short sentences with pauses? Is it asking rhetorical questions? Or is that what makes your mind wander?
Anyway, I’m no expert in this specifically but I’m a writer and do a fair amount of public speaking. You can tell when you’re losing someone and I typically don’t think it’s the audience’s job to change how they listen, but rather how I speak. For you though, I think it’s a bit of give and take.
Hahaha, I don’t want to explain to everyone what neurodivergent is meaning 😅😂 no time for that, and I can’t really explain it on demand, that is a very difficult task for me. But I have good way working/living with it. Here in Switzerland, it seems like generally only people below 30 know about this stuff, lol
FWIW I think the majority of people struggle with mental and physical health working 40/hr a week in earnest. It’s not sustainable and I wish we’d stop pretending like it is just because it’s less heinous than what predated it.
From what I understand, most employ various strategies to avoid literally working for 40 hours. The jobs that aren’t conducive to this (cough cough Amazon delivery and warehouse) are especially barbaric.
If you’re neurodivergent it’s much harder to retain a job in virtue of likability/social connections so you’re more likely to have to put your nose to the grindstone to get by.
Humans should not be coerced to sell all of the concentrated effort/time they get in a week (and then some) just to survive.
I’m neurodivergent (ADHD, dysthymia, panic disorder). My job is not physical, but I have very few ways of minimizing my work; I teach 3-4 two hour tutoring sessions to multiple students at once, 5 days a week. My boss and coworkers are very supportive, but the job can still be absolutely brutal, and I find myself coping with burnout often. Half the time, I don’t even have the energy to interact with my friends because I’m so drained from work.
The sad part is that this is STILL the “easiest” job I’ve ever had.
After a while (a few months to a few years) the workplace politics becomes unbearable, or culture becomes too toxic, or managers straight up ignore our feedback.
In all likelihood, these are not time-variable conditions. When you first start you don’t know about the politics - who’s going behind your back to sabotage you, who’s a climber, who is getting preferential treatment from management or HR. Ignorance is bliss. As you learn what terrible people you work with you find their existence to make the workplace “toxic.” And it doesn’t matter where you work - there will be terrible people, just different grades and distributions. Finally, the managers were ignoring your feedback from day one - they just pretended that you mattered so that you would settle in and become part of the machine. It’s basic onboarding.
This isn’t going to help you, but I quit and started my own business. It was…challenging. Prior to that, I found routines and resets in my daily work which let me (mostly) ignore the noise. Most were mental, setting timers to focus on tasks; learning to be a non-joiner with tact; roll with the sameness and view the work as “just a job”. Some were physical, like eating lunch quickly and spending the rest of my half hour lying down in my car.
I should say that I still get burnout, even though I’m a one-person consulting company. I recognize that my focus comes and goes and I when I get a manic period I try to push though work to “get ahead” (or at least catch up). More importantly, I try to recognize when my energy is flagging and not try to push through it. I let myself have the afternoon off. Two years ago I started taking an “admin” week every quarter. I put a message on my phone that I’m in training or in meetings (so people think I’m “working”) but I mostly just clean up the office, get personal project done around the house, and generally reset my focus. Sometimes I even do a little online training. Specifically - I don’t go away on vacation. Vacation doesn’t reset me like removing the life clutter that builds up when I’m busy at work and can’t get to (or are too tired to) do the peripheral things. I fully recognize that this is not really a valuable strategy for a most jobs, but if you have a certain amount of autonomy and you’re getting your deadlines met otherwise, scheduling some “training” time might be good. Just make it as regular as possible - put it in your year’s calendar on Jan 1. For me, it’s my reward for getting things done, and if I don’t make it a hard commitment, I’ll just move it - and it will never happen.
I think it’s only a time thing because at some point our poison meter fills up and we can’t take it anymore. In my case each of those time limits coincided with some stupid event. Like new management coming in and swinging their junk around trying to make an impression.
I think the main problem for my friend is the corporate politics. They say one thing, like “If you come on full time we’ll give you training for X.” And then months later there isn’t even a hint of that happening and they’re full of excuses. It seems like most companies pull that kinda crap, then get surprised when we quit and go somewhere else. Like yeah we have ADHD and autism and stuff, but we’re really fucking good at what we do so getting another job doesn’t take much. It’s just exhausting going through this every 1-2 years.
eta: I did work for myself for a bit. But dealing with finance people and VP’s trying to convince me that I wasn’t worth my contract rates was infuriating. It’s so hard to not say “we both know you’re lying and if you went through a firm you’d be paying 2-3x this much”. I have a much more relaxed job working for an organization teenage me would have dreamed about. So hopefully this is my forever job.
I’m not neurodivergant, but I’ve definitely had to consciously get better at this. Booking regular holidays throughout the year is what helped me, don’t just take holiday when you get to screaming pitch. This gives you something to look forward to and hopefully means that you’ll be able to decompress before all the various annoyances build up.
I haven’t yet found a job that hasn’t eventually caused me to burn out, even the relatively chill jobs with little pressure have eventually had enough niggling issues to cause me issues.
Another thing is to not take on more trouble than you are paid for. If managers aren’t listening or politics is causing issues then just concentrate on doing your job to the best of your ability and nothing more, when issues start affecting the companies bottom line then they’ll take notice.
A well written article on some of the changing tides of the internet, but it seems to miss the forest for the trees. Every website goes through a process of enshittification or at least of cultural relevance or peak participation which shapes what it looks and how people interact with it. Even during these periods of change some people thrive and others do not. I think its fair to talk about seeing a particular flavor of interaction or website disappear from your immediate vision with no clear alternatives in sight, but it’s also quite clear that the as others have stated the author clearly hasn’t set out on a pilgrimage to check out large slices of what’s out there on the internet. There are platforms with tens to hundreds of millions of people out there which are hardly mentioned (such as tiktok, mentioned elsewhere) which have thriving autistic communities. Hardly no mention is given to platforms more dedicated to chatting than posting, or the plethora of tools which facilitate the creation of communities which float between those which primarily are virtual but host occasional in person meetups.
I’m also a bit confused about why the author believes it is dying? They don’t seem to talk a lot about how these folks are being pushed out, so much as perhaps they are being more difficult to find. Rather than being in the town’s center, they are lost in the crowd? If that’s what they are lamenting, then perhaps they should be mostly avoiding platforms above a certain size. You wont find many oddballs in a sea of normal people, and the size of places they remember from their childhood, where they claim these individuals were around were much smaller. I would argue even more strange people exist on these massive platforms today than they did back then, it’s just that their voices are lost to the sea.
It’s funny how small a bubble they seem to have been in, because in my recollection Tumblr was always seen as being much more ND-friendly than Twitter.
There is always another website to move to, another chat app to talk on, another forum where people will coalesce together to discuss their particular interests and identities.
This must be authors first recession. The easy money is drying up and that means an extinction level event for some websites. Large sites are consolidating or changing, but new places always spring up like the mammals rose after the KT extinction. When Geocities was dying, we got Myspace which died and we got Facebook. Reddit is dying and we have Lemmy. AIM servers were turned off half a decade ago and people still communicate online. Something new always comes along. TikTok is now the place for Asian creators to go after they were whitewashed from YouTube.
The article reads more like a coming to terms with Twitter dying and that’s all. I am only a couple years older than the author and I missed out on Twitter completely. It was just never a thing for me. But my TikTok account is half a decade old and a place where I can experience my culture without it being whitewashed or mispronunced. And I’m the guy still checking email with alpine in tmux like it’s 1999. But one day, TikTok will also die; who would have thought it would be Rand Paul of all people who saved it from Facebook congressional lobbying?
On the other- On an aircraft, if you're in a situation where oxygen masks drop, you're always reminded to put your own mask on first before helping others with their own masks. If you did it the other way around you'd likely pass out and not help anyone.
I've been using meditation to train the less controllable parts of my brain to shut up when I need them to. It's been said that mindfulness meditation can make people more selfish, but if I'm passing out trying to help other people, the best thing I can do for my community is to first make sure that I'm a self-sufficient human being physically, mentally and materially.
Since some of my beliefs are wildly unpopular, this often winds up in me feeling ostracized, rejected, and depressed.
In this case, the phrase "speak softly, but carry a big stick" sometimes applies. If you're somewhere where there's enough cultural / social resistance to an idea, particularly among lots of people, you're probably not going to get anywhere, as you've already found. Potential alternatives include talking to individuals when you're able, helping individuals when you're able, if only by letting them know they're not totally alone, and by operating on that oxygen mask principle again. If no one's gonna do anything, sometimes you need to do it yourself, but it might take a long time to get there.
Our society can be, at times, so unjust and irrational. Two of my biggest mental health nemesis’s in life. And two of the things my NT friends and family don’t understand why I get so fixated on. I feel like I’m screaming into a dark void when they don’t understand my concern— because, the way I see it, if everyone cared about injustice even half as much as I do/did, the world would be an incredibly kind, safe, beautiful place to be.
Before I started therapy and meds I was literally driving myself batshit insane feeling completely out of control all the time. I had to learn to redirect my energy on what I actually could control: my mental self-care, and being emotionally healthy enough to help those in my social onion layer who need it.
I’m sorry we have to feel this way. And I truly hope anyone who can relate to this finds some solace and new wisdoms about it. Much love.
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