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I'm autistic, and I can tell that it runs in my family. My family tree has a lot of intelligent but eccentric people who likes model trains and such and have a silly form of humor. I've also heard "Coffee just makes me fall asleep haha" at quite a lot of family gatherings. Every time I watched trivia channels like "Who wants to be a millionare?" with my grandfather he'd know basically all the answers. My family also had a lot of criminals, mentally ill people (manic depression for instance), and millionares, so it's definitely not just autism and ADHD.
But yeah, I can see the traits, even though most of my family aren't diagnosed. Diagnosing mental illness is more of a recent thing, at least where I'm from (which I'm not telling).
I don't know if autism is genetic, or if it's mostly caused by stress like you claim, and my family just happens to be high in neuroticism (which results in high rates of autism). I do think mental illness is on a raise though, as the modern society is less in tune with human nature. Couple this with the modern and much lower thresholds for diagnosis of mental disorders, and the effect is basically explained.
That we're less violent now is a more complicated topic. We might simply have removed most violent people from the gene pool over time, and oversocialization likely has a large effect as well (and the general drop in T levels is probably also relevant).
Finally, I don't mind being autistic, but I do think autism is an illness. The overly systematic way of thinking, the need to be "correct" and find the "truth", the need to be in control, the hatred of ambiguity.. I don't think any of these are good or necessary. But I'm also completely disillusioned about technology by now, and by math, logic, rationality, the computability of reality, the value of intelligence, etc. If you ask me, intelligence itself clusters with mental illness and conflicts with human instinct (and therefore, more importantly, it conflicts with aesthetics).
If you're interested in how Christianity won and made us less violent and in how modern society conflicts with human nature, Nietzsches books covers all of these aspects. His criticism of systematizing philosophers like Kant might very well be a criticism of traits of autism.
This is a weird one for people to say is autism/adhd since there are entire cultures where coffee after dinner / late at night is completely normal, and they’re clearly not all or mostly autistic.
Actually, you might be right. I know it's associated with ADHD, and that ADHD overlaps quite a bit with Aspergers, but it might not be an uncommon trait in general, even in people without ADHD or autism. A related quirk is probably liking having the television running in the background, or concentrating best when listening to music (most people I know with these traits have had ADHD though)
My guesses of somebody being ADHD are usually quite accurate, but maybe I've gotten overconfident after all
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I recall growing up the amount of after-dinner coffee my family drank (with or without something added)... it was about as common at restaurants as bringing around the dessert cart (I miss the dessert cart!), if not more so.
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I dislike my own autistic weaknesses (hypersensitivity to senses and rejection among them) and would shed them if I had the chance, but the one part I am genuinely thankful for is that I have so called "black and white thinking" (or, as I like to call it, having principles). I am amazed humanity developed any sense of indvidualism at all because the majority of people I see are herd followers and comply with any number of nonsensical things in order for the perceived security they get at great cost sometimes to their own personal fulfillment.
Neitzsche does not advocate for a retvrn to ye olden days where man only focussed on the superficial and the vibes. The end result of focusing on that would result in a world full of deanos, a terrible place where the Last Man reigns supreme and humankind cannot advance. His ideal was a merging of the master and slave moralities and something greater yet to come.
I like the sensitivity part, I feel like senses is how you feel alive, so sensing more means feeling more alive than most people, or at least I like to think so. And having strong principles is usually admirable, though bending is better than breaking at times. Putting oneself at a disadvantage like this is great for individual development, but some people enter into unfortunate brittle configurations where it brings them many disadvantages. If I were to describe your trait as something positive, I'd say it's "having standards". Having standards is a mostly good form of inflexibility (plus, it pushes for things to be better).
I sort of both like and dislike human superficiality. I suppose I can forgive deep people for acting superficially, but that I can't forgive shallow people for having no depth. One of my favorite animals are cats, they just chill and do what they want, but they're easy to understand, they lack the layered deception that human have. If a cat wants to talk to you, or if it doesn't, you will know. As an autistic person, this is much easier to deal with than most people, and I quite like socializing with young people for this reason. So I admire even people who act like cats, despite how easily self-determination is confused for egoism, and how easily being in tune with oneself is confused with superficiality (which might be why it's mostly young people doing this - they're less socialized).
One thing I dislike though, is people who live in "shoulds" rather than reality. This is probably you (and it used to be me) so I will try to explain myself. They might follow rules, not for the reasons that the rules were made, but simply because they're rules. Life is too context-dependent for this to be viable, for there's a lot of cases in which "shouldn't"s are actually harmless or even beneficial. It took me a while, but I have learned to love ambiguity and all the advantages that it brings. Undecided parts of life, those kept vague or unknown, are basically pure potential. Once you make them into something specific, you lose the flexibility of choice. And most importantly, unchanging things are an illusion, everything is in a constant state of flux. Instead of deciding that a person is an introvert or an extrovert, you can just decide to experience the person as they are - and not hold them to the restriction of either (and feel bad when they act against the model you made of them). Plus, if you live in reality rather than in formal definitions, you tend to be mostly immune to thought experiments and existential issues.
He didn't advocate for hedonism and materialism at least. But I think he did like "vibes" when they were caused by strong instincts. Nietzsche likes the human body and its potential. But human beings cannot improve without some struggles and hardship, and most people probably won't seek those out if they can avoid doing so, at least those who do seem rare.
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My story is similar, dad's side of the family is Scots-Irish and riddled with alcoholism and autism. My grandfather and one of my uncles are both maybes, and my dad and my other uncle are definitely autistic. I'm more than old enough to have slid through the US educational system without ever being caught, though I did get some attention from a teacher or two that was sure that something was wrong with me along with plenty of, "not living up to his potential," type report cards. Took the Aspie test BITD, laughed at the ridiculously high score that I got out of it, not even understanding that "neurodiversity" was essentially a code word but definitely identifying with not being a normie. Hell, I even made jokes about all of the autism in the family! When I was formally diagnosed a little less than three years ago I just laughed and laughed. There was yet another thing in my life that was hiding in plain sight all along!
I agree that the changing criteria for autism is the primary driver for the huge increase in diagnosis rates, and combining it with Asperger's in the DSM-V further exacerbates that. I'd also say that we have a decent set of criteria for diagnosing autism, which of course is still separate from whether or not it's being over-diagnosed in children. On the question of whether or not it's an illness in and of itself, I personally don't see it that way, though to be fair I've lived with it all my life without having any precise idea of what it was. Rather I see it as a large set of mental trade-offs where things like hyperfocus can be incredibly helpful in some circumstances and brutally crippling in others, to the extent that we can often resemble the "this is fine" meme, drinking coffee at our kitchen tables while our house is burning down around us.
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Yeah same for me. Generations of Engineers and other such types, very easy to diagnose my dad, uncles and grandfather with it on vibes alone but I was the first generation to receive any sort of a formal diagnosis. Just used to be socially diagnosed as 'being a bit of a nerd'
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