I'd say there are three sides to this story:
1. it has become a trend that it is cool to be autistic, or more broadly speaking neurodivergent, as a catch all term for all of these things, however legitimate, to pin to yourself as your
identity. Because that is the way that works these days, you cannot just be a guy who eats what he wants, and thereby chooses not to eat meat, but still accepts meat when he is someone's guest, no, he has to
be a
vegetarian--No but's! All or nothing. And thus these new neurodiversity "attributes" are what distances you from being a normie, boring. You can't be boring if you want to be
cool, part of the in-group, especially as a teenager. But how has mental illness become the personality token for being "with it"?
Because
2., an ever widening area of personal traits now belongs to the realm of mental illness, even if you can function perfectly normally in society (or at least in a healthy one.) So called normality is becoming a very tight spot. Remember when people were just different? Back in the day you had, for example, a guy inexplicably obsessed with Elvis, but no one cared! He is a nice neighbor/colleague etc. so why should I? Does some guy really into his job at the railway justify
creating a lesser caste? Shoving a whole load of people into a box for seemingly no reason, calling them "high functioning autists"? It is like the americans who are spreading these ideas (sorry, I love you, but these trends really do originate in the US. Why can't we europeans copy your cool aspects for once?) are subconsciously longing for the days of racism or something. "Oh, he is like that because he is autistic." may as well be "...because he is black."
And
3. I believe the internet is really making people autistic. And bisexual, and depressed, and trans, and anything else for that matter. The internet, I find, even without direct algorithmic psychic attacks (although greatly accelerated by them) worsens any latent bad habit and weaponizes it. As a boy I had a habit of day-dreaming, especially when confronted by responsibilites (homework, bullies, etc.) With a normal development, with time, I would have overcome this. But instead I was given the ultimate form of day-dreaming: The Internet! A new frontier of interactive dissociation, a means of making day dreaming my new reality! And that is the relationship I still have with the internet to this day (regardless of what I do there.) A habit, amplified, and turned into something diagnosible as ADHD.
The internet takes any latent negative tendency and accelerates it, I have noticed this in other people as well. Obvious example, teenagers wanting to please, get sent down their respective beauty and "grindset" pipelines. A loner becomes an /r9k/ user, solidifying the problem. A childhood friend of mine has always been somewhat impulsive and I am sure the internet played a major role in his terrible spiral into benzo addiction, buying loads of random shit online, getting into dept. Would he have done this if he had to go to a store, or call a mail order service? I doubt it.
It is like the Internet is designed to encourage the opposite of self-development, anti-individuation. Maturing halts, boys stay boys perpetually, leading to the manchild, or the "disney adult".
It is a sin accelerator. The gambler can now lose everything from the comfort of his own home. It is like giving an alcoholic an infinite vodka bottle. From a catholic view it would seem it were made by satan himself. (There is already a thread about the internet being made of demons I just remembered.)
No-one has caught on to the fact that the internet is like a drug. We have a relation to it like we had to smoking in the 50s. No one is really aware, although everyone has a hunch it may be bad, but not much more. The only ones who know the full truth are at the top of the industry, that would be the likes of Mark Zuckerberg today. It's just that smoking gave us people like Hunter S. Thompson, and the internet gives us the brainwashed freaks we are today. Smoking didn't stop anyone from self-actualisation. Everyone smoked like a chimney, and still, great academic achievements happened. Smoking is a habit while writing, and the internet keeps you from writing alltogether.
Today, the young Heracles would have even never seen
the choice between between virtue and vice, the latter being techno-accellerated and too dazzeling to have even realised there was one (and no, all that red-pill rubbish doesn't count.) Our physical ailments may have gone, no longer do we have to toil every day just to survive; Ours is an age of psychic battle, each day requires acts of willpower the ancient gods could have never imagined. But just like with smoking, the tides will turn someday. The curtain will drop! And I, saying this as a naiive student, wish to be a part of it!
All in all these three aspects are what I now believe got me to buy into this whole neurodivergency thing, leading me to get diagnosed with ADHD a while back, when I was failing my a-levels, which I now find to be totally bunk, since without the internet I would have never had the idea to find myself the perfect excuse and seek the supposed wonder drug, for the symptoms which without being a terminally online zoomer-brained coomer I never would have had in the first place! And without the medical professionals being down on it I never would have got to being diagnosed for them. The less I use the internet, the less I seem to have ADHD. Since quitting porn, all forms of sexual deviancy have disappeared. After relapsing, they reappeared briefly. I am not saying this is the case for everyone, but I will make the claim that it is so for the vast majority today.
Edit: corrections
