Overdetermination (I think that's the word)

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Overdetermination (I think that’s the right word) — Monday 29th Jun ‘26

I recently made a massive amount of redundancy stew, about 5 litres of it. It was, admittedly, way too much for a single person, but it allowed me to not have to think about dinner for about a week or so.

I mentioned this to my family and they told me that eating the same thing day after day is an autistic trait. Obviously, they were somewhat joking, but they also weren’t.

This is something that bothers me about the way we talk now. Autism is an overloaded word, and in general much of our language around mental experience is overloaded. Trauma, autism, narcissism, etc.

Autism is especially galling to me because it lumps together so many categories of things that used to be distinct. There are severely autistic people that require round the clock care, socially anxious people, people with sensory issues, and “characters”, eccentrics who do weird stuff because that’s what humans have always done.

All of these, and many more, get flattened into being “autistic” and I think that’s SAD.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am often described as neurodivergent. It’s apparently written on most things I do. It does cause me some worry at times, but I generally find solace in thinking “maybe I’m just a character”.

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AuDHD is a term that gets used quite a bit to describe me, often to my face, which is hilarious, “You have this developmental disorder, isn’t that funny??”

It’s almost as if everyone knows how unserious the casual use of these words has become. If people really considered what they were saying to be serious, they surely wouldn’t throw it about so willy-nilly. You wouldn’t go up to someone and say “you’ve got bipolar lol” would you??

But I digress. My inner world is not the subject here. I am mostly moaning about the overloading of autism, and frankly, LOTS of other words. A selfish person isn’t just selfish, they’re a narcissist. An experience wasn’t just “painful”, it’s a trauma. An eccentric habit is autism, etc etc.

The issue is not that these descriptions are always wrong, it’s that this language has broken from the context in which it has any precise meaning and has become a universal catalogue for everything a human can do.

I know this all sounds very boomer of me, particularly that last bit. I get that language moves on and literally means figuratively now. I’m not trying to squash anyone’s experiences, diagnoses, traumas or the bad things that have happened to them.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that language is already an incredibly low-resolution way to get across the concepts in our minds. It’s the best thing we have, obviously, but there are significant limitations in how well we can communicate our inner thoughts and experiences to others

So why are we flattening it even more!!

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It’s already low-resolution, and it feels as though all these overloaded words are making it worse. Human beings are complicated and messy, but more and more we seem to reach for a handful of labels that apparently explain everything about them.

Maybe the label is useful in certain contexts, but surely, it should be 1 description among many, rather than the explanation for every odd habit or quirk.

I’m open to the idea that it’s not that deep, and that people say someone is autistic because it’s simply how people talk now. Language keeps moving, words keep changing, and maybe me being bothered by this at all is just another example of how autistic I am, who knows.