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I have absolutely no sense of direction.
…thank you, modern times, for maps and similar stuff.
It’s not modern times for me. I had to concentrate to discern my left from right since well before the internet. Took a lot of practice to get close to instinctual.
I have a compass, usually on a handmade wrist band, in all my outdoor bags, plus a Casio with a compass. Before I got the watch, I usually had redundant physical compasses. Of course there’s a compass on my phone as well. :)
Went on a new trail yesterday I hadn’t tried because I thought it went a couple of blocks and came out in another neighborhood. After walking a mile I checked Google Maps and I was traveling straight into hundreds of acres of nothing. Didn’t even realize I was headed east and the lowering sun was right behind me!
By “thank you, modern times” I don’t mean those tools caused my issue; I mean I’d get genuinely lost without them. Even within my city.
After walking a mile I checked Google Maps and I was traveling straight into hundreds of acres of nothing. Didn’t even realize I was headed east and the lowering sun was right behind me!
…oopsie. It’s great you actually checked it after just a single mile!
Same. In fact, if there is a wrong directional choice to make, I will make that choice 100% of the time.
Another user in “you’re better off picking a random direction than asking me!” club!
Are you neurodiverse?
Indeed. We’ve spoken before lol
Haha sorry I’ve a head like a sieve
Are you neurodivergent?!?!?! 🤣
Yep diagnosed in my 30s, had no idea before and it changed my life. So now I’m forever highlighting it to people
Are you neurodiverse? It’s a common sign of it
I’m not neurodiverse myself but I suspect I was raised by one; my mum ticks quite a few boxes for the autism spectrum. Plus I think my high myopia since childhood played a role, my “world” is two palms from my face.
Auticate channel on YouTube was a game changer for me
I’m checking it out now - thanks for the rec!
Let me know what you think!
I watched a few videos of the channel. I’ll link it here for the others, it’s some damn great resource, this couple is doing some amazing public service.
And it kind of confirms what I suspected - I’m not autistic, just raised by one (my mum). For example, this video shows it rather well for me:
- I’m not exactly sociable, but I don’t really struggle with group collab or social situations.
- I’m actually quick to get implicatures (implied meaning).
- If anything, people complain my eye contact is “piercing” - I tend to make a lot of eye contact while speaking.
- I’m not really annoyed by changes in routine, interruptions, or multi-step tasks.
- etc.
I do get pissed at being misunderstood, but I believe this is common for all people; nobody likes it, but I think for autists this might be specially aggravating because they get misunderstood far more often.
Could be, it’s worth goggling different conditions and seeing if you fit. I didn’t think I was until I got diagnosed
That’s actually why I suspect my mum is neurodiverse - because initially I did suspect I was, and websearched the conditions. But then as I looked at them, my reaction was mostly “I don’t do this… wait, that’s her”*, and the only criteria that applied to me also applied to her. Then some time later, as I was treating my depression, I asked the psychiatrist about the possibility I was in the autism spectrum; he said “don’t worry, you’re clearly not”.
*not keeping eye contact; not noticing when others are hurt or upset; not responding to her name; failure to understand simple questions (NGL, this drives everyone around her crazy); struggling to even get if the question is directed towards her or someone else, etc. They aren’t age-related issues because a lot of them were already present across my childhood, or relate to things my grandma mentioned about her childhood. She also has a hard time with implicatures; I never saw this being listed as a condition, but I do suspect it’s a common issue among autists.
When did we stop saying neurodivergent? I did not get the memo.
I can’t whistle with pursed lips.
This means I can whistle pretty well like some kind of ventriloquist, but if I try to do it “properly” I’m either way off key or I just make a sad windy noise.
I can’t snap my fingers. At all.
I learned to snap in a dream.
But I still can’t whistle.
Pretty straightforward. You just🫰
For the longest time, I thought people used their forefinger to snap. Changed the game when I discovered using the middle finger and thumb. Also still can’t whistle.
I can quadruple snap with one hand. My pinky isn’t strong enough on my non-dominant hand to make the snap. My dogs get freaked out when I do 7 snaps in rapid succession like finger lady fireworks.
I’ve tried every finger. It’s impossible
I taught a friend how to snap when he was like 23, and that was, uh, the issue was he was trying to make the snap from rubbing his finger and thumb together, but the snap actually comes from the pressure that builds up and smacks into your palm as the tension releases.
The other thing I have seen people have issues with is if they lotion their hands frequently, because then you can’t really build up enough tension to get a good pop.
? Nothing touches my palm when I snap. Now I wanna see you do it!
My middle finger doesn’t touch my palm when I snap, it hits the ball of my thumb.
Adulting
We are all of us just large children trying to do our best.
I have opinions about this if you would like to hear them.
You don’t need my permission, mate. Discussion is always welcome. It’s insults and hatred I can do without.
Okay, I think that there was a time when adults knew what it meant to be an adult and they had an easily identifiable pattern for what their life was supposed to be like.
The options that they had growing up were so limited that it would have taken a radical amount of effort to step outside of the pattern.
Specifically, someone like a serf or a peasant in the 1400s pretty much had the option of growing up to be a serf or a peasant.
They would reach the age of majority and then take up the profession that had been handed to them since birth.
If they really reached, they might have tried to switch from growing up as a farmer to being a priest or a carpenter or a blacksmith or a stone mason. But even so, the options were so limited that it constrained your future potential.
That constraint is a good thing in many ways. It helps you find purpose and meaning and balance in your life because you know there is no opportunity for you to become a king if you weren’t born into it.
So, following that thread, I believe that the people that grew up in those constraints were generally happier because they knew that they had achieved the maximum of their potential just by sticking on the path that was available to them.
In contrast, there’s so many options available to every single person born in the Western world that, now, we don’t really have a clearly defined way of identifying with what it means to be an adult.
Which leads to this feeling of just being a child in a big body.
And, I’m not saying we should go back. I’m just saying that the issue is not with us feeling lost and marooned in a comparatively infinite expanse of life options.
It’s just more that age itself is no longer a defining characteristic of what qualifies you to be an adult.
I have a simpler opinion : information sharing is extremely easy and our understanding of adults has deepened because of it.
I get why older people keep telling that “60 years old isn’t that old”. Unless we have a life changing event, we are mostly the same throughout our life and things we enjoy now, we will probably enjoy in 15 years.
I’m turning 39 this year and my hobbies and personality closely ressemble what they were when I was 15-20 years old.
So I still feel young when I am me, but I definitely have more responsibilities now and they dictate the priorities in my life.
When comes a moment where I am free of these responsibilities, I feel a lot younger. And when responsibilities come knocking, I feel older.
Spelling is not my fortaa, fortae, fourta…. I ain’t good at it.
Forte you get a pass for. It’s borrowed directly from French word “forté” which is pronounced the same but has the accent on the e which signals that it’s pronounced as an “a”. So as an English speller it’s not correct at all.
This is from my high school French so this might all be false.
Math, can’t do math to save my life
Maths is hard, I’ll never forget the joy of realising I never had to do another maths exam.
I can’t remember anything
Anything at all?
I feel like I am the antithesis of this question.
When I was a kid, I had a difficult time learning how to whistle, and so I decided I would learn all of the “stupid human tricks” that I could, and now as an adult, I don’t know of any common skill that I do not have at least an advanced beginner or intermediate level.
Maybe you can help me by identifying what you believe is a common skill and then I’ll see if I know it or not and respond.
I don’t know how to do those loud whistles without using fingers. Teach me, oh master!
It takes some practice and fiddling around to get it, but this guy does a really good job of explaining it
Ooo thank you! I can whistle really loudly with my fingers, but I’ve never got this down.
My front teeth have a significant space between them, seems like that might make it harder for me. I used to be able to do a low whistle with that space before I used braces lol
Swimming properly. Sure, I can stay afloat and move effortlessly in the direction I want, but it’s nowhere near the swimming strokes they tried to teach me in PE when I was a kid. I never managed those.
Same! I cannot coordinate my limb movements like we are all expected to for some reason.
I can, but I must be doing it wrong, because it doesn’t enable me to stay afloat
I’ve been told that it requires you to relax in the water and trust the water to support you.
Most people that have difficulty floating from what I have seen are either very, very dense, like low body fat individuals with high muscle, or they stay tense in the water, and so they can’t actually relax and allow the water to float them.
I think, from what I understand, that that does not qualify as swimming, in that case. I am not a swimologist however, so take my words with a grain of salt.
I can’t sit cross legged
I only have a vague idea of how to make coffee.
Is coffee a common beverage where you live? I have only a vague idea of how to make curry, despite it being eaten, I believe, multiple times a day by hundreds of millions of other humans. It’s not a common home-prepared dish where I live though.
Do you drink coffee?
It’s easy.
You just put the hot water in the brown dirt thing and it creates a brown tea thing.
Ooooh, you mean like… “Good Coffee”. Dude I dunno.
Same. I’ve seen/helped other people make coffee, but I have neither the equipment or the desire to practice the skill myself.
I can make tea, though.
Driving.
I read “diving” and got pissed that I also don’t know how to properly do a dive.
Can’t swim, can’t whistle and the weirdest of all: can’t hold my breath.
Not being able to swim is mostly related to that last one, as when I tried using a mask I was doing reasonably well.
Starting new things that I don’t already have a very clear understanding of the process for
I keep typing the wrong words. Not just typos but entirely different words than what I intend to type.
