This isn’t me being a luddite. Machinery has massive potential benefit to giving humans more free time to pursue things that fulfill them and the internet is an amazing tool for disseminating knowledge and increasing communication, whether it’s about art, science, or philosophy.
But I realized today, this person is just kneading different textures of dough and this person is just whittling. How many bakers and carvers loved what they did because it stimulated their senses in ways that humans have evolved to be fulfilled by?
I have another theory (that probably aligns with disability theory in some way or other) that people with autism aren’t actually more common now, it’s just that they’re sensitive to bright artificial light and loud noises and weird smells and foreign textures the world we live in is FULL of those. And what’s more, we have ever increasing attentional expectations in the midst of all that!
You used to just have a weird uncle Joe who doesn’t talk a whole lot but man he can knead dough aaaalll day or thresh wheat or maybe he just makes cute little wooden toy horses all weekend and we sell them at the market on Monday. And it’s weird how aunt sally hums like that but damn her lace embroidery is WILD. (we can discuss antiquated gender expectations at a different time).
This isn’t saying savantism/special abilities should be expected of neurodivergent people either, just that a looot of people probably flew entirely under the radar that way for a huge portion of human history and we’re only noticing them now because we’re progressively putting people in more and more noxious environments where even people who could’ve coped in those environments can no longer cope in this one.
And now we have a whole industry of creating stimulation for people who never would have needed it if we just hadn’t created an entire world without naturally occurring stimulation that they’re “expected” to live in after humans spent hundreds of thousands of years learning to make tools out of wood and stone and cook over open fires, and crush and mix their own grain to make breads.
And because all these things occur on a spectrum, we’re seeing more people everyday who would have had no need for the stim industry now suddenly require it because we’re progressively pushing more and more people who could previously have claimed one of those coveted “normal” labels into being “different” as we steadily push them to accept less and less stimulation in their daily lives and steadily push them to stretch their attention span more and more beyond what it ever evolved to do.
TLDR; the ASMR/Stimming industry is only necessary because we created a world where those stimuli no longer occur naturally that people who need them have to live in. The concept of a “disability” is very intimately intertwined with expectations as to what environment any given person “should” be able to thrive in.
I think there’s a serious risk of attributing all mental illness, or even in this case any deviation from “typicality”, to capitalism. It’s made tricky by the fact that capitalism unquestionably exacerbates problems related to mental illness, so there’s a strong undercurrent of fact to it… But eliminating capitalism won’t end mental illness.
Further, I think it’s a mistake to attribute toxic individualism to capitalism alone. Japan, for example, is deeply capitalist, and people there have their own set of mental illnesses that are rooted in being forced to abandon individualism in a rigidly collectivist capitalist society. Toxic individualism is a “western” thing, and it ties into western capitalism like the rest of the culture, but it’s not a specific feature of all capitalism. It is a mistake to boil every single problem down to capitalism alone, even when capitalism is without a doubt making these problems worse. It’s an oversimplification that will lead to possibly fatal issues when trying to implement an alternative.
Capitalism doesn’t cause differences, it makes behavior that isn’t strictly in line with the norm much more dangerous to the person having it.
I didn’t blame capitalism for every mental illness. The world will continue to have mentally ill people (whatever we mean by mentally ill) long after capitalism falls. I’m just saying capitalism makes it worse. Sometimes actively exploits them (see casinos, the lottery and micro transactions in games). And it’s ok for it to be criticized for that. Because it’s inherent to the system to chase capital, even if human life gets in the way. I still remember the time when Goldman Sachs asked “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”. In capitalism, no it isn’t.
Japan is less individualistic than other countries, so it may have less of this kind of problem (regarding OPs post), but at the same time, more of some other kinds of problems, all related to capitalism as well. There is a reason why they have the word 過労死 (death by overwork) and we don’t (we have a sentence).
Which is a shame, I love Japan’s culture so much.