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Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

freyaindia.co.uk

81–90 of 537 posts

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#81
I somewhat agree that there is a problem but there is a glimmer of hope. As these medical terms are used more in everyday speech they lose their medical connotations and just become new words for personality traits. A lot of people who casually describe things as ADHD are using it more as an adjective than a diagnosis. We have had medical terms make it into this usage before: moron, hysterical, humourous (we're going all the way back to the four humours).

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#82

The lovable aphorisms we had for people with character quirks were largely from our original support systems. What no one is talking about is the reason therapy-talk has become so pervasive is because all those support systems: family, friends, and local communities (religious or otherwise), have all degraded so severely for most that therapy is the only option for reaching out and getting help.

except they weren't really "support systems" i mean they were, if you got lucky. If you were neurotypical; if you bought in to the local religious sect's particular flavour and embraced it wholeheartedly; if you followed the other local cults of sports fandoms; if you were lucky enough to either have family without their own trauma that didn't take it out on you OR decided to repress it in exactly the same way that t…

> it's why there's now suddenly an influx of ADHD and Autism diagnosis - because in the past anyone outside of the norm who wasn't lucky to do one of the things above was simply ignored, beaten, or died.

I think you're understating how well those people were incorporated into society. My grandfather was born in the 20s and was described as quite "high strung", was amazing with technology, would repair anything, and even used to build his own farm machinery. These days he'd definitely be called severely anxious, and probably labelled as being on the spectrum. Yet he was part of a community, farmed his whole life, and built a family. People knew his quirks and compensated for them.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#83
> This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything. Psychologically, scientifically, evolutionarily. Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves.

This is the rejection of science applied to a less common target.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#84
Reminds me of the "How did you take that picture?" Reddit meme. Who is the observer when we conceptualize of ourselves as deconstructed beings? Occasional self-awareness and reflection can be insightful, but when will you get back into the cockpit and fly the plane?

90's culture had so much more emphasis on being legitimate (and its many self-defeating imitations). Being legitimate is something that cannot be attempted. Only self-evidence can ever be cool. Only existing as the actualized output and never its abstracted model inputs can be genuine. Through that lens, one's own dignity demands not deconstructing. You should observe and react to what you learn, but whatever fractures are incurred must come back together and be owned. Otherwise you are pretending not to be the person in the cockpit, not the person flying the plane. It's a lack of responsibility. You will not do or do not. You will "try" because you are not in control. You will never be cool.

The engineer wants to isolate pieces of the system. Play the game again to study the situation, learn the pattern, and overcome the error. This is where it applies that no man crosses the same river twice. When people say, "life has no reset button" it does not simply mean that there are consequences but also that that every moment always remains, flowing incessantly, regardless of how it is scrutinized and analyzed to fit into a maze of dots and figures. We cannot own things by going backward in time to try again. Winning the game after many iterations is never cool. The losses must be owned or the pilot is merely creating a lie that they themselves understand while holding a result out to others as evidence of their coolness. It is trying too hard. It is illegitimacy, and its self-knowledge will seek to pull back the curtains on itself so that the pilot will not betray the plane.

Living intentionally constructed is a thought that must itself be forgotten. The idea is a map. Supposed externalized awareness of the being who rides in the skull cannot exist. It is a construction, and once the construction is used, it must be discarded as a map that was used to achieve some perspective. We can remember things far away. We can catalog and connect patterns over time, but the ALU cannot look at itself as lines in memory. The ALU lacks any self-description from which to feign deconstructed awareness beyond control bits that are necessarily less information than the registers, program, and data under computation. It all must vanish to a fixed-point un-calculation.

It's an aesthetic with some jagged edges. You'll always move forward based on what you believe because there can be nothing else, and if you are wrong, you will be wrong. You must own it. There are no outs besides simply admitting mistakes. But what is the opposite of dissociated? Is it worth it to live in your skin? Is it worth it to forget the distances that do not exist between yourself and the controls?

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#85
> Only 27% of Boomer men said the same.

There's a lot of boomer men writing in all caps whose special interest is either trains or WW2 who, if were in their 20s today, would easily be categorized as autistic. Older men, for most of their lives, lacked both language and social permission to think of themselves in those terms.

The entire construct of "disorder" is defined by what a given society is willing to accommodate or tolerate at a given moment. Thus, the problem with the article is that it assumes that we live in a homogeneous social landscape. We don't, so things that negatively impact someone life ie: the definition of a disorder, are age dependent. The threshold for "impairment" is not a universal biological constant; it’s a moving, socially negotiated boundary. Diagnostic categories themselves are historical artifacts, trailing behind the societies that create them.

The failure to recognize this is assuming an objective social reality, that frankly, never existed and never will exist. It only serves to reinforce existing, unexamined, contingencies of a specific time and place.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except they weren't really "support systems" i mean they were, if you got lucky. If you were neurotypical; if you bought in to the local religious sect's particular flavour and embraced it wholeheartedly; if you followed the other local cults of sports fandoms; if you were lucky enough to either have family without their own trauma that didn't take it out on you OR decided to repress it in exactly the same way that t…

I agree with everything you said except for the last paragraph. The people who, according to your theory, want to reverse the tolerance trend and slide towards fascism/authoritarianism didn't pop out today. They existed and lived in society in the 2010s too. So, from a logical standpoint, what changed?

> what changed?

The algorithms are promoting those views?

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#87
I think what (may have) changed is that we now have "acceptable" labels. ADHD is fine, autism is fine, alcoholism, schizophrenia, not great, pedophilia, very very bad, even if you have never acted on a child.

I don't remember past "acceptable" pathologies, or what was considered a pathology back then, it included being gay. It you have a pathology, then you are mad, and if you are mad, then you lose your rights, at best, you are considered like a child, at worst, you end up in a place worse than prison.

Now, if you are diagnosed with an "acceptable" pathology, you actually get some advantages, people are expected to tolerate your quirks and you get full freedom like normal people, you may even get some welfare benefits as you are considered disabled.

To summarize:

Before: You are diagnosed as autistic, you end up in an asylum and lose your freedoms. No one wants that, so you avoid the label, it is just a personality trait.

Now: you are diagnosed as autistic, you get welfare benefits and people find it cute on social media. You want the label.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#88
Just earlier this evening I had not one but two commenters issue replies to the effect that successful deception in the public sphere, business and politics, is a marker of high intelligence. And that's just a depressingly direct example of what really seems to be a profoundly entrenched worldview "coming out of the closet" in the last decade or so especially.

The thing is, when you can't talk about seriously antisocial behavior with massively bad consequences for large numbers of people, when the real bad guys seem out of reach, all that angst has to go somewhere. And so everything is a disease or toxic behavior in the small, the family member or coworker has is a narcissist or a toxic personality, but like grinding everyone into poverty and pushing the world into avoidable war is just, how the world works.

If you put the small change shit in the swear jar where its always gone, nor you're asking very different questions about why things seem bad for everyone.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#89
post #76

Decades ago in my first abnormal psych course, the prof warned us that there was an almost iron-clad law that students will immediately start self diagnosing themselves with “weak” versions of every disorder we learn about. In my years since then, it has absolutely held true and now is supercharged by a whole industry of TikTok self-diagnoses. But there are a few things we can learn from this: - if you give people th…

It's interesting because there are two diametrically opposed ways to interpret what you said One is - everybody thinks they have disorders, so just ignore that feeling it'll mess with you. The other is - everybody thinks they have minor version of disorders, because we all do, we live on continuums, and therefore we should probably all think about it more

Disorders are labels for things which significantly negatively impact people’s lives. Thinking of them in terms of a spectrum generally means stretching a label past the point of meaning.

Re: Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you the clothes you wear? No you are not. In a similar manner - your personality is what you show to the world. A construct based as a response to some trauma (or something else very influential, but usually trauma) inflicted on you as a child. i.e. your personality is the clothes your real self wears. It doesn't mean it's not part of you - it is.

I am not the clothes I wear, but personality is not "clothes." If personality were clothing then removing it would be a simple and painless matter, after which you would be interacting with the world "without personality." This is absurd. You can't have no personality. All you can do is replace a personality with a different personality. Your personality is the totality of patterns by which you present yourself to th…

Yes. Language, for instance. Why don't you engage with the world honestly and speak in your real language, instead of one you've learned?
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