this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
415 points (93.5% liked)
Technology
74592 readers
5069 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Gods thank you. If lemmy is any indication of youth culture and beliefs and attitudes, fuck me. (Am middle-aged with mostly 20-something friends, they are not like y'all.)
Freaks the shit out of me how scared young people are of simple social interaction. "LOL, I'm too autistic to answer the phone!" Yeah, well there are reasons we no longer want to do so, but y'all are NOT all autistic and ADHD. "Hate talking to a cashier." Fuck is wrong with you?! I want to scream, "You're not autistic for being socially uncomfortable you wuss! That's a normal part of growing up!"
Fuck me, thought I had a handle on it from my junior year until I went to college, BAM!, like puberty all over again. And then the same damned anxiety hit in my late 20s! "Welp. Guess I gotta do this every 7 years or so." We had words for this: "Growing up." It can suck, but we all have to do it. Get the fuck over yourself, you are not special or strange or different. The horror may be, you are normal.
And yes, anyone trying to mix us up, make us see through rose-tinted glasses, is a liar with something to sell. And anyone trying to make the past into a hellscape is at best ignorant, wasn't there.
It’s more than that, the anxiety and lack of practice in real, that includes the awful, social encounters growing up creates an environment in which those kids, now adults, have incredible anxiety for social engagement. It’s almost like we created our own Black Mirror world by putting a screen buffer up in front of our children’s faces starting as early as 2yrs.
Helicoptering. Planning the child’s week to enrich them, scheduling play dates with no organic initiative by the child, and inadvertently dictating a script so when that ordered script and mommy umbrella are torn away at college, near panic level anxiety hits. And why wouldn’t it? No practice at deciding for oneself or engaging with real people with the full range of normal human emotions. No chaperoned play dates or protections by mommy when a bad grade happens any more.
But there is a haze right now of sorting out true ADHD from the lack of focus and attention fostered by screens. Which we do want to do, because it’s still reparable if we can start on therapeutic work no later than the early 20s.
Again, yes, with social anxiety being confused with autism. Same deal.
Of course both autism and ADHD are very real, which of course I need to spell out in no uncertain terms because this is Lemmy, but the upbringing of the latest crop of kids also, at the same time, can foster symptoms of both and that needs to be sorted through. It’s not right or healthy to assume either way on this one.