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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   414 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for August 5, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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I hate seeing iPad kids in public, and think giving a minor a smartphone is only marginally better than buying them a box of fags. I saw a note on Substack the other day that pointed out that lots of parents (or prospective parents) are concerned about their children becoming addicted to their phones, but this is blatantly hypocritical when the parents themselves are addicted to their phones. Children are imitative: if they see their parents staring at their phones all day, they're going to want to do the same.

I take this seriously, and it's indisputable that my fiancée and I spend far too much time looking at our phones. Rather than trying to address it after having children, we want to get ahead of the problem. To that end, I ordered this phone lock box from Amazon, which arrived yesterday. You simply pop your phone inside and set a timer, at the end of which it will open. We have pre-committed to not looking at screens of any kind for at least one hour (preferably more) every evening: no phones, no laptops, no TV. (Obviously our laptops don't fit inside the lock box, but for that we have each other to keep ourselves honest.)

The box arrived yesterday evening, and as soon as I returned from the gym I put both our phones inside and set the timer for an hour. It also occurred to me that I could leave our phones inside overnight, so that our phones wouldn't be the first thing we see when we wake up in the morning. This turned out to be a fortuitous decision, as last night I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep, but had no choice but to read my book for an hour rather than looking at my phone. It's only been one day, but so far I think this was a wise purchase.

Are you British?

Irish. Why do you ask?

… is only marginally better than buying them a box of fags.

“Fag” is a common slur for a homosexual in the US. Zero people will think you are talking about smoking anymore. I thought you were talking about a gay orgy for a moment.

American here amd I understood immediately.

Yeah, the context of "a box" made it reasonably clear. Probably did raise a few eyebrows though. Like if an Anglo were to read an American account of keeping their CCW in their fanny pack.

Maybe speaks to my suspected autism more than anything. I’m American and can’t understand half the Americans I speak to. Sometimes I come across as awkward in my responses to people because they enunciate a word a certain way, or are too fluid in conversation, or they connect words the “wrong way” to me (i.e. “you’re not supposed to say it like that”); but I just nod along like I understand; mostly because it’s rude if you say “What?,” 17 times consecutively because they make no sense to you. When he said “box” and “fag” in the same sentence my brain just went “????” “Must be a slang term for an orgy of homo’s…” Same reaction I have to a lot of people who don’t understand how I think.

I have seen this called "problems with auditory processing". One scholarly article says (with literally two dozen citations omitted):

As well as a heightened sensitivity to sounds, some autistic people may find busy auditory scenes challenging, such as isolating a single speech source in a noisy environment, and may have difficulty filtering out interfering sounds that capture their attention. Difficulties with detecting speech in noise has been reported across the lifespan, from children to adults as well as in subgroups of the autistic population (e.g., non-speaking adolescents and young adults). Indeed, several studies report that autistic people struggle more than non-autistic people to filter speech sounds amidst noise. Some lines of evidence suggest the difficulties that some autistic people have recognizing target words amidst distracting speech are evident relatively early in development—2–5 years of age. Similar reports of difficulties understanding or attending to speech in background noise have been identified in people diagnosed with ADHD. Overall, such altered auditory processing—including difficulties attending to relevant speech sounds, or difficulties ignoring interfering sounds—are likely to impact significantly on autistic people's daily lives, whether at home, school or in the workplace.

An example of how sensory and auditory differences in autistic people might influence communication lies in social contexts that inherently involve the direction of attention among competing stimuli. “Cocktail party listening”—the ability to follow a conversation in an acoustically challenging environment—is reported as being particularly challenging for autistic people, and a reduced ability to ignore background stimuli—for whatever reason—potentially accounts for at least some of the difficulties they experience in social settings. Using fMRI to investigate sensory responsivity and social cognition in autistic adults, Green et al. (2018) demonstrated that activity in brain areas associated with social cognition were reduced when sensory stimuli were presented simultaneously with a tactile distractor stimulus, consistent with the interpretation that cognitive load may increase with more than one modality. Hernandez et al. (2020) also used fMRI to investigate brain responses in autistic and non‐autistic youth during conversations in noisy environments. Both groups showed activation in language networks, but autistic youth exhibited greater activation in left‐hemisphere speech‐processing areas. The degree of increased activation was associated with better social cognition and suggests that these autistic youth recruited additional neural resources to focus on social cues in the presence of distracting stimuli.

Do you have this problem too? It has been alleged by @self_made_human that you are socially retarded as well, :/. Fluid conversations I can more or less perform very well at. Much better than I could as a kid, but people can sometimes tell there’s something… off, about me. 95% of the time I look completely normal like everyone else, but for me “normal” is often a matter of successful imitation. It doesn’t come naturally to me.

But I also sometimes experience the same issue reading. I think it was a Facebook post I came across once that I started laughing at because someone posted a question asking if “Anyone has ever put fruit in a smoker before?,” and what the results were. The immediate answer someone gave was the exact one that occurred to me before I realized what the questioner was asking. They posted a Wikipedia link to the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany.

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