What do you think it is? (current state of relationships)

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I look around and notice that, even as aspies, quite obviously, we aren't the only ones.

Our culture seems to have gone off the rails, not in a way that shows that it needs to go back but in ways that shows that it's stepped out on an incomplete thought and is still waiting to figure out how to complete the picture and make the new style of living that we embrace actually 'work'.

I've tended to believe that, even though people can go on and on about how different the genders are, I really get the impression that core selves are similar, articulations of self are what's different as are the strengths and obstacles. It seems like the smartest way out of having the relationship world of our culture being an absolute wreck would be to really endorse self-knowledge, self-awareness, really encourage people to figure themselves out, to know what they want, to know why they want it.

I see where our cultures, in the west for certain but probably many other places as well, really seem to - while not wholly embracing it - embrace its vestiges, as in people who may not necessarily have tendencies in that direction find themselves needing to hold themselves up to the new paradigm of flirting, cracking the devil's smile as often as they can - this might be a departure, I actually don't find anything wrong with that *if* people can sort their way through what they're doing, again know what they're doing, why they're doing it, what they ultimately want.

I'm curious though if anyone wants to get into an in-depth talk on this, call it a love-philosophy topic . Especially this - do you think society could find an in-road to fixing this or bridging the gap? Finding a way to make its new social paradigms actually work? Do you have ideas on how you think it may happen over the next couple centuries?

My suspicions are that I'd readily discuss this matter if I knew what you were talking about.

Are you saying that relationships/dating is screwed up for NTs as well as us? If so then I agree. Even with a standard brain, it's no bed of roses out there.

This is not possible at this time on a large scale and may never be. To any sane person, this seems like a good idea. For individuals, the option is always open for us to do this, but it must be sought and fought for, hard. The reason why a global enlightenment has not occurred is because there are many powers invested in not letting it happen.

In the future? Who knows. I'm thinking in lifespans of universes. Look at the big picture, but address the nearest and most tangible problems.

Well, I'm not 100% clear on what you believe the new social paradigms to be? In my opinion, I guess the best way out of the current wreckage that is our relationship world does include self-knowledge and self-awareness, and one more important factor: self-sacrifice.

Without getting into a debate on monogamy, it's clear that long-term, stable, loving relationships are the best environments in which to raise children. And those type of relationships take a lot of work to maintain. I don't see that people accept that. I think they want relationships to be effortless and romantic and fun, and when they find out they're not, they get out and move on to the next one.

You speak of a kind of disposable culture that applies as much to relationships as it does cheap Chinese plastic goods. The two have grown together.

The new paradigm is mainly I think technologies impact on culture. You look at how people marry later, quite often having their kids outside of marriage, people have a harder time staying together just based on the disorientation or the drastic world of opportunities but at the same time kids generally don't grow up well-adjusted without both parents (at least a functional set of parents) and typically institutions can't and won't make up the difference - which of course, if it were government starting school at age 3 we'd be in terrible shape.

IMO its mostly medical technology that drove this - ie. infant and childhood mortality went way down, women no longer need to have 8 or 9 kids to have a few survive, thus being a full time parent in that sense isn't needed.

The trick is we're all self-sufficient, men and women don't technically need each other although going alone on a house, a rent, and raising a child or two is incredibly difficult. I think most people want to have a healthy relationship but don't know how, its gotten too complicated and culturally, in the last 100 years, we've stepped into territory completely unknown in human history.

Since nobody wants history back though for quite obvious reasons though the question becomes how to solidify the new structure and make it work.


But such large percentages of the population simply don't care about their lives or futures? While it looks like laziness or hedonism on the surface I can't figure that as the biggest problem. I think people get cynical largely because they can't find other people who are worthwhile, they could either be off their rocker or just be the person stuck dealing with other people's lack of reality. The sad thing is, growing up in this plastic, TV, and computerized world its likely very easy for development to go astray - which is another thing of course that we as a culture need to check into.

Overall though, aside from backlash at the 'church' and organized religion, I think people are unfortunately drinking a lot of kool-aid when they do assert that men and women are the same, that culture makes gender, time and time again that's been proven wrong and what scares me is I think these people are worried that, even if its not true, if its not taken as defacto truth then the end desire will be to keep women home or something along those lines, which is absurd - women have very concrete strengths and areas they surpass men, the same is true vice a verse, it may perhaps mean some tendency to gender specialize the workforce but even then I think there will always, and rightly so, be an incouragement on thing like...say...male teachers or female engineers, just because a healthy blend of thought on things is still very much needed.

I think overall, my take on this, current reality and the clash of present and past social norms (many of the current norms being fallacious but something that people feel is needed as backlash to staple 'now' into place - ie. against social conservative reuptake from a religious standpoint) have people dizzy and sick, everything is coming at people too fast or from so many directions that they have quite a challenge telling up from down. That's a problem that I'd like to think the field of psychology, child and adult development, as well as many other professions, are trying to find solutions.

In the end math we need a cohesive culture and, as fast as technology completely changed the paradigm, we need to find ways to stabilize culture or at least help the natural process in that regard.

I think the second may fuel the first a bit, although the likelihood that we only have one life to live and that it can be utter misery if the wrong choices have been made - that largely remains the same.

I agree that medicine has had an impact on women moving into the workforce, but I think economics and industrialization had a huge impact on that as well. Women used to have 8 or 9 kids not just to ensure survival of the line, but so they could help bring in the crops, too. With the advent of industrialization, we ceased to be an agrarian society: fewer farms = fewer farm hands needed. Then there's the economics involved: families used to be able to achieve middle class status with one income. That's really not the case any more, so most mothers are working mothers.

I agree that men and women don't need each other for the same reasons they did a few generations ago. Seriously, think of how much harder it was to take care of the "basics" before the invention of clothes washers/dryers, vacuum cleaners, indoor plumbing, lawn mowers, refrigerators....even tampons. It used to take be so much more actual work just to make sure a family had clean clothes, food on the table, and a clean house to live in. It would have been physically impossible for one person to work full time and be able to meet the family's non-financial needs as well. But even though the reasons aren't the same, I believe that men and women do still need each other....but now the motivators are less about physical survival and more about emotional survival.

I don't think men and women are the same, in fact I think we're fundamentally different - and IMO, that's a good thing. I think men and women have strengths and weaknesses that can compliment each other quite nicely - when we're willing to let that happen. I'm probably the farthest thing from a social conservative, but I do consider myself a realist. I think our culture currently cheapens the things that are truly important, like integrity, honesty, humility, intimacy, love.....and I think people feel the very painful effects of that. If there's a drive to accept more of a "traditional" approach to child-rearing and marriage, I think it will more likely be born of the collective unhappiness of an emotionally and spiritually unfulfilled populace, rather than a resurgence of organized religion.

As far as large percentages of the population failing to care about their lives or futures....yes! Sorry, I think our culture encourages people to be short-sighted, immature, and focused on instant gratification. We're the culture spending our grandkids into debt, who still don't quite have a plan to deal with global warming, and who don't care if corporate America has turned into a modern-day sweatshop - as long as the stock price keeps going up. Seriously, we're not great planners and when things go wrong, we want a quick fix....and we've just about exhausted our supply of quick fixes.

Anyway, interesting topic. Thanks for giving me something to think about.

Offer a refundable tax-credit (i.e. "bribe") to anybody who (sincerely) completes a 12-step program--alcoholic or not. Especially the "fearless and searching moral inventory" step. Take or leave the God part at your discretion.

The next year, scrap the entire system and begin deciding all laws and social programs by popular referendum. Outlaw television, fluff magazines, sporting events... basically everything, other than honest objective journalism (which will have to be built from scratch,) and open-forum internet communication.

Of course, this will destabilize society to a great extent on it's own, removal of the "bread and circuses" influence.

If need be, relocate entire swathes of the population to more suitable geographic clusters based on social paradigm. Erase the current map, and make these clusters the new "states."

Should I find myself alone in the gender-bending-Aspie state, I shall call it the state of Rad Island. Rad Island's sole export will be poems and baskets made out of withy vines.

And I think what Moog said about society being filled with highly disposable and replaceable 'junk' does easily confuse people as - when you're supposed to think of integrity, honesty, intomacy, love, or especially the idea of a permanent life partner - its a concept that has very few if any parallels to spring-board or cross-reference in terms of being able to relate or correlate these concepts. I'd just say as well that I was lucky to have the parents I did, many people didn't have the same fortuitous circumstances in that sense.


This is where I think my determinism gives me a different take on this than what you're presenting. Our behavioral output is in our control, which it seems like the obvious, however when we realize that the input and the processing apparatus our not in control, it means that we technically don't have ownership of self in that regard.

I don't at all see that as justification for license, but what I do see is that people have been 'going with the flow' since time immemorial, its the nature of life in general - sentient or otherwise. I would suggest that we are moving to a different flow and that's what we're really seeing today, most of the fallout is because we have a lot of old and new ideas clashing against each other in rather unproductive ways - ie. liberals have unthinking dogma, conservatives have unthinking dogma, they both have areas where they're very accurate (admittedly I err slightly right of center), but as people go with the sort of self-creating logic that encompasses our times I think they can see where its simply not working - they just have no idea what to do about it.

The best analogy I can think of, its like the bottom of a prestinely clear lake was dredged, all kinds of dirt has been kicked up, you can barely see an inch - if that, and we're still waiting for the dirt to settle in a new pattern under a new system where it will become clear again. That makes these of course both exciting and frustrating times to live in, then again - I have to admit, for whatever spiritual/moral shortcomes we're experiencing, I'd gladly take this rather than the 1800's or any time or place prior to that without a second thought.

Oh dear. This made me burst out laughing. If I was drinking tea, it'd be all over the monitor by now.

But please, carry on with the discussion.

Jumping in at the tail end of a conversation is difficult as there are many points which need to be addressed but basically...

State your question and see what responses pop up. Then address those responses. Otherwise it becomes a "I think the XXX because of YYY" and often times, explaining YYY leads to a lot of rambling causing people to forget what XXX was.

No. Many cultures are not experiencing the problems you later describe and they share many of the same people/environments that "our" culture does.



Yes. This has held true for thousands of years. As religion, philosophy and a method of strategy in warfare.



If you have no idea what you want, what makes you happy then you're only sense of happiness comes from what other people say and how well you please other people. This is a sign of immaturity (e.g. little kids try to please their parents and in doing so, are pleased themselves).



If people walk away from "Freedom" and the focus on the self, then the only way is towards a society of trying to please each other. Let me quote Ronald Reagan during one of his speaches: "There's only an up or down: man's old -- old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism"

Right now, we're going towards totalitarism and unfortunately, there's no where else (continent-wise) to run to. Simply examining history (e.g. Germany and Adolf Hitler) will reveal the milestones.



No. People always look for an external influence: famine, war, technology, and religion. The core of paradigm is how people deal with a changing world. If it wasn't technology, it'd be something else.



No. The number of children required for the species has been on a decline for thousands of years. If it wasn't infant mortality, it was life expectency. If it wasn't agriculture, it was fresh water. It could even be an advancing ice age.



No, again it's not something which has suddenly happened in the last 100 years where there is no charted terroritory, but it's simply many people have forgotten their history and THINK this is uncharted terroritory. How many times has the US continent been "discovered"? Asians, Norse and then Spaniards?



Again, if you think the cause is medical science, then you're right. But medical science has advanced for the last several thousand years without this cultural cataclysm (e.g. Romans and public plumbing)



"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it"



If you have no idea as to what the future may bring, or how to get there, then the present becomes disposable. Everything becomes transitory. The impact of brain disorders (e.g. loss of short term memory) causes strange shifts in human "values"



Yes. Men and women are different. Anyone who thinks they're the same is an idiot.



No. Some people are simply ill equipped to handle the current set of changes. When you're ignorant, everything is a challenge.



No. And where is the diversity? As much as men and women are different, why have the same cohesive culture? That makes no sense. Any species which specializes itself becomes vulnerable to an environmental shift and thus makes itself vulnerable to extinction.



When your "value" system is told to you (and you accept it) that the collection of material goods determines your success, then yes, you will tend to accumalate crap.

The greatest thing you're supposed to value is freedom - but how many people value that any more? We'll sacrifice freedom for love, honesty or intimacy. But realize that without freedom, you cannot love, be honest or intimate without re-defining those core terms.



No. This is a first year philosophy argument about determinism. The truth of the matter is that people do many random things and base many of their decisions on randomness. Simply throw in a winning lottery ticket and the entire attempt to predict what a person will do is out of the window. Even if the result is pre-ordained, the input is not.



No, from YOUR point of view, they have been doing that. From their point of view, its based upon rationale, logic resulting typically in their judgement.



No. What is conservative today was liberal yesterday. The dogma and underlying values change. Is freedom from slavery liberal or conservative today? How about 200 years ago?



Dazzle them with brilliance or baffle them with BS. The lake continuously gets dredged and all kinds of dirt swirls. Look at human history and see how many "epic" moments have happened. You're attempting to make the challenges of today more than they are.

Look, you're confused and trying to find reason and justification as to why this is happening in an uncertain world. But you need to realize this is no large blip in the grand scheme of things. The finding of a new continent (America, China, Europe, etc.), the advent of antibiotics, the nuclear age, the rise and fall of the Roman empire, etc.

I don't have a lot of time so I'll try to keep this concise and to a few of these which I think are teh stems of four or five other thoughts/ideas.

It probably has been, just that it climed a wall in more recent history. I'd think that the Renaissance and things of the like came about as byproduct of similar dynamics to what you're talking about - as the Athenians and Romans had - more time to think and means to feed thought.


I'm being specific to just how much technology has changed the pervasive 'feel' of being alive, what its done in terms of giving us luxuries that far surpass anything we've known to date. I'd imagine metropolitan life has always been a bit more complicated than rural life since the beginning but, I get the impression that detachment from reality comes much easier today.


You don't think we can restore a more accurate social order without destroying individualism/diversity and making ourselves monochrome or in danger of evolutionary issues?

I'd like to have more faith in human enginuity and imagination. To take current society, grind it in a mortar, and make it homogenous, would be a huge stumble backward - it would be forcing things to be what they aren't. My suggestion is to take things for what they are and come up with a structure that will be friendly to shared values.

On the other hand the idea that we'll evolutionarily crush ourselves - to believe that is to believe that environment has far more control than our genes. If you believe that, we're going to disagree on a lot of things. Then again I will give you some food for thought: in that case aspies shouldn't exist, diabetics shouldn't exist, people with sickle-cell anemia shouldn't exist, we'd simply sync ourselves up to the times and, if we were that fluid, we'd really have no problems whatsoever if a catastrophy came because we'd sync ourselves to that too. Genetics are very brittle and very determininistic in terms of a person's apparatus on all kinds of levels. They can't change it, perhaps they can modify or correct with new gene-receptor drugs that are beeing developed but that's about it.



Ah, and that sounds like a second year argument on determinism.

So what about the lottery ticket? What about someone throwing lucky sevens in craps? If you rolled back time and played it forward again, would the outcome change at all? Have any of the inputs changed at all? Would the machine picking the lotto numbers or the person rolling the cage roll it any different? Would the person have any reasons not to go to the store or any difference in atmospherics or needs that would cause them not to buy the lottery ticket? Would there even be the slightest difference in wind gradient?

I may not have had the time to lay out a full thesis on my thought processes of what 'determinism' is but, I don't think you've disproved anything that I've said - in fact I just agree with you that its a much more complex system than the individual, its the sum of everything the big bang set in motion, all the way to subatomic chaotic forces. The inputs in fact are predetermined, as is the processing, so, ultimately, the output is also 100%.


That's called going with the flow.


Every generation has had novel problems, I won't deny that, just that we are in a state where we're going toward something like an Athenian take on relationships. That's the crux of the conversation.


I completely agree - so, we're talking about the now, thinking about the future, in one finite area, and analyzing it. Not sure what the trouble is?

I agree with techstepprgeneration. I think this really is uncharted territory. What has happened in the past hundred years is actually unprecedented in human history and for the exact reasons techsteppr says: it is only very recently that men and women have been able to go an entire lifetime without needing each other. Pairing up as a choice rather than a required certainty (unless you were in a religious order) is new and unprecedented. Throughout our history, humans have colonized land and faced the challenges of living on that land, but they couldn't do it alone. Now, because of technological advances, we can. And often do. What is unique to modernity is the ability for huge numbers of people to simply opt out of relationships if they want to. That is the uncharted territory.



I don't think it has anything to do with accumulating crap. Industrialization has made it possible for things to be produced in enormous quantity and variety. This teaches two things regardless of what parents teach.

1)There's more where that came from

2)You have a choice

These two things are bound to influence relationships.

1)A lot of the things produced en masse by the forces of industrialization aren't crap at all. I can buy a nice cotton shirt that will last me a long time (barring accident) that will be the equal of a cotton shirt made by hand 200 years ago that will cost me less of my resouurces to buy because it was factory made. If I acidentally rip it, I can just buy another one. There is no need for me to mend it. 200 years ago, it would have been an insane waste of resources to discard a ripped cotton shirt. Today the planet has such an excess of clothes that even the ones donated to the poor often wind up not going to use and instead are shredded. This fact about material goods is bound to seep into peoples' brains. Although nobody consciously equates material goods with relationships, the concept of "there's more where that came from" is bound to seep in. On this board people are constantly advised to "move on" . And why shouldn't they? Just as there are more material goods than ever before, there are more people than ever before and more opportunities to relocate and meet them. The downside is that people will give up more easily on relationships just as they will give up more easily on a cotton shirt. Sometimes repair seems more trouble than its worth- whether in clothes or relationships. Just read this board and you will see how often relationship repair is discouraged. I've done it myself. Because you really don't have to stay with either ripped cotton shirts or abusive partners. Today you can move on and start over.

2) You have a choice: Today there are uncountable choices of merchandise. Far more than even a few decades ago, thanks to computerization that makes individualization of products inexpensive. You can go on the internet and have things custom made (cafepress.com for example) which wasn't possible until very recently. You don't have to settle. You can get it custom to you. This will seep into relationships too, although it has a harsher downside than the concept of "more where that came from". The ability to choose from an infinite array of goods and to customize to our specs has bled over into relationships in (I think) a mostly negative way. It is hard to resist the urge to find the "perfect" person just as you can find the perfect car. But unlike goods, people aren't customizable and none are perfect. Nonetheless, we have become accostomed to not "settling" when it comes to goods and are just as loath to "settle" when it comes to people. But holding out for the perfect person just leads to eternal loneliness, as this board is proof of. And it isn't just this board, of course. It isn't just people on the autism spectrum. There are a lot of men who want the perfect woman and women who want the perfect man and don't realize until they are in their 30's that this isn't possible. You can perfect a cheese grater. (I have a perfect cheese grater.) But too much time spent around quality goods that are exactly what you wanted can give you the illusion that relationships should be like that too. And it won't happen.


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But it is a large blip. Although humanity has been making advances in medicine for thousands of years, this is the first time in human history that sex and reproduction have become uncoupled from each other. It is now possible for a woman to be in complete control of her reproduction and that is unprecedented. Other changes have increased human lifespan and decreased human mortality, but those changes didn't alter the fundamental way that women and men had to relate to each other. Those changes let them live longer and see more children to adulthood, but they didn't alter the basic way that men and women related to each other. The technology for women to completely control their own reproduction in tandem with the tech-driven social changes that made women a permanent part of the paid workforce have made marriage and family optional. This optionality is the fundamental change which drives the changes techsteppr describes and which is unprecedented in human history.