Musings ...

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From my latest blog post. A weird twist on technology. Just a stream of consciousness thing, not a declaration of profound universal truth or anything.

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?

Oh yes. Irony noted. I'm especially struck by this at school. There are the schoolkids sitting right next to each other tweeting and texting, looking at the screens rather than each other. And there's my daughter off to the side, looking at them. She can't make an effective face-to-face conversation with other children. She just looks at them. They can. But they aren't. Because they are looking at their screens tweeting and texting.

And then there's music. Back in my day somebody would plunk a boombox down on the wall ledge outside school and soon we'd all be singing along and dancing on the sidewalk. Very social. Now they sit on the same wall ledge but each has his own ipod with headphones and each bops silently to an individualized song. No one has any idea what anybody else is listening to unless they lean over to peer at the screen. And nobody dances on the sidewalk anymore because they're all listening to different songs.

I see what you are meaning to say there, but only the medium is actually different. The autistic still has his or her own dilemma even while trying to text.


Because they have been programmed to believe their interactions have actually been enhanced via seeming convenience ... and then all those "Energizer Bunnies" become stumped and impotent when their batteries finally do go dead.