Weird question of the day:
If a blog gets posted on the internet and nobody reads it does it exist?
One thing I've noticed is that I notice things. An artifact of autism is a poor capacity for socialization. In my case, this means effectively no social life. Let's be clear. It's not that I don't like people, though some are worthy of disdain, but rather that it often doesn't occur to me that socialization is an important part of life. It just doesn't cross my mind. So I just sit on the sidelines watching that part of life go by. A silent observer for the most part. What this has done is allowed me to watch closely, mostly undisturbed, somewhat objectively, as people frenetically try to advance their lives. I have concluded that a great deal of human activity comes from suspect motivations.
My biggest puzzlement is why is everyone in such a hurry? There is this intense pressure to "succeed" - get through school, go to college, get a career, buy a car, a house, plan your retirement, make more money, do it NOW because, well ... just because.
Then you die.
Now I'm no Luddite. I'm posting to a blog, Maybe I don't Twitter and I really am not so enamored with technology that I HAVE TO GET THE NEWEST GADGET. And truthfully, I'm quite content to use the technological tools around me. But all this push towards the next best thing seems to cost us something. We lose sight of the BEST thing - the people around us. We forget that at the other end of a Tweet, text, email or blog post are warm, living breathing human beings. Everything is becoming this highly interconnected abstraction, removing much of the messiness of real human contact. Even holidays are increasingly hyper-kinetic indulgences in fantasy. When did a good birthday party begin to require a bounce house? Is it really necessary to bankrupt the parents for a wedding? Forgotten in the activity is that the best parts of holidays, social gatherings, weddings birthdays and just plan hanging out is the people you are with not the gadgets and toys that you build up around you,
This theme has been broached many many times. But isn't it a little ironic that an autistic, a person that is effectively a social cripple, is telling the rest of the world to drop all the "stuff" and actually socialize?
The take away is this. It seems to me that the world is becoming "autistic". As individualism becomes increasingly the path to contentment, we isolate our core selves with our technology, layering superficial noise via social media on top of our true selves. This superficiality is how autistics are often FORCED to relate. Much of the external traits of an autistic are not indicative of their internal selves, but often more truncations of abbreviations of their mental states. The shallow communications of contemporary culture eerily mirror the isolation of what for an autistic experiences as a communicative disorder, but strangely, it is by choice. Which leads me to wonder, why would people that are so capable of the genuine social inter-connectivity that as an autistic I cannot experience, choose to trade that for a dim replicant?
