Making friends. Like, just casual conversation and distant friends is easy, I just never had a best friend or close friends at all.
Actual Biggest?
Gotta be the fact that society is designed for neurotypical people on almost every level.
Many ( not all ) disabilities that come from autism would simply not exists as disabilities with the right social structuring to accommodate people’s complex need.
But i guess you meant something more personal challenging.
Its gotta be the enshitification of the internet. I once considered the network of free information and knowledge a sort of home, but for a while now greed has corrupted almost every level of it. Social manipulation with (hidden) advertisement is everywhere.
I feel like i am constantly being preyed on for my personal data. Constantly tricked with the promise of something actual useful. It is draining me, its causing me to be overstimulated from things demanding my attention. It makes me no longer able to find information, which the tinfoil hat in me says is probably partly by design.
As a (probably) neurotypical, the enshitification of the internet hits hard… I share with you the feeling of loss over a virtual space that I felt an extension of my home and is turning into the virtual equivalent of a back alley full of muggers.
I am now almost completely refusing to buy online, I rather order through physical stores. And my overall internet activity has dropped.
Sensory issues. Getting hot so easily for example. Also feeling completely wiped out after what seems like a totally normal outing/interaction with the outside world.
My hearing is very sensitive. Over the past couple of years there has been a significant increase of number of motorcycles and street racing in my country. Loads of vehicles are illegally tuned exceed permissible noise pollution norms. Police does fuck all about it. It’s summer so I have to keep windows open at night to cool down my flat. I can’t sleep with ear plugs because they bother me too much. I barely sleep.
Get yourself a standing fan. You specifically want the gnarliest, loudest, most industrial looking fan you can find. The idea is that the fan in your room is loud/close enough to drown out most other sounds, but since it's constant noise with no information your brain will fade it to background processing and you'll effectively stop hearing it. The only downside is that this requires a bit of willingness to learn how to take apart and fix a fan; if the oscillation starts to precess it ruins the white noise and the fan needs to be cleaned or sometimes the blades rebalanced. I really like "Blizzard" brand fans for being cheap plastic pieces of shit that are easy to take apart to clean/fix and are loud as fuck.
It’s not the constant background noise/hum that gets me but the occasional car/bike zooming through the streets to the point where things start to vibrate while also sounding like the most annoying mosquito. Even though I’m almost 40 I can still hear very high frequency sounds (like those devices to scare away animals) and fast vehicles seem to go into similar register. ANC headphones don’t block it well either since they’re tuned for low frequency sounds.
The occasional bike/car zooming through the streets and the associated noise are still alleviated by the fan. White noise works because it makes your brain "turn down the volume" on the sensory pathway between your ears and your brain (Gain control is a much better comparison if youre familiar with it, but I went with the volume one because its more accessible). The car/bike might even be loud enough to hear over the fan, but you should hear it less/be less bothered by it because your brain already set your ears' volume on low to tune out the fan. There are white noise apps you can get on your phone if you want to try it for free; an app playing fan sounds through my phone speaker is the only way I manage to sleep when I'm traveling
This seems like it would work but I refuse to add more noise pollution to account for breaking the law. Introducing hazards to race tracks is more enjoyable (and very effective, racers rarely want to clean up hazards from the race track because it would mean they’re thinking of someone else). If the police ever gets interested enough to look for the source of hazard their presence should prevent races from taking place too.
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