There's a whole genre of viral social media posts that amount to lumping anyone who appears to have cared quite a bit about something that's not obviously exciting (to most other people) into the autism spectrum. Especially historical figures. "This guy made tons of detailed beetle drawings and cataloged them in books! See, there have always been autistic folks, because he definitely was!"

Like I mean maybe, but also he was a bored rich aristocrat before TV was invented, and sometimes there are no parties going on or everyone's hiding in their country estates because of a cholera outbreak or whatever, and "making shitloads of drawings and organizing them" was like 50% of scientific work at the time. So. Maybe he just had a lot of time to kill.

Going by randos posting online, "liking things" and "knowing stuff" and "caring about things" are all autistic traits when present in any but the tiniest of degrees. It's ridiculous.

It's getting a tad out of hand. A friend "jokes" that I'm on the spectrum fairly often any time I speak with any sort of passion on topics in interested in or care about.

I feel social media has conditioned people to think of you're anything other than bland and "normal" in your personality and have any degree of uniqueness about you then you're on the spectrum.

>then you're on the spectrum.

Sorties paradox. Everybody is on the spectrum, it's only called out when it's noticeable.

It was only after being corrected a few times for saying things like:

> well, were all on the spectrum, that's how spectra work: they're encompassing.

that I began to suspect that we weren't actually on the same page about spectra.

I generally try to avoid tossing disorders around as a way of describing personality, because I don't want to trivialize somebody's experience for whom that disorder is very troubling.

Actually, I'm allowed to be persnickety about language without it implying a diagnosis of any kind.

But I thought it was kind of funny to share it the way I did, so I made an exception.