Some say the main reason universities exist, is to keep the mental "sanatoriums" empty.

And mental "normality" is a social construct ... It's debatable if Penny is healthier than Sheldon.

So welcome at PM, the Perl Mad-Academy! ;)

updates: s/Peggy/Penny/

And mental "normality" is a social construct

More a political artifact: according to a vast critical literature on the subject the "psy" professions and related institutions are self-reinforcing political tools to control and shape the general population according to the prevalent power/economic doctrines.
For instance nowadays in the so called western world Neo-liberalism has shaped the current definition of "normality".

Foucault's "Birth of the Clinic" blew me away. To add, pharmaceutical companies are constantly inventing new mental disorders to sell more product, when in reality they are just part of human diversity. The level of medication handed out to children these days is off the scale.

If I'm permitted some humor, thanks for your auting...

Science is loking at our minds closer and closer and new names are crafted to describe our internal chaos, mostly without adding nothing to de facto situation: we are all different and there is no normal people

The only thing really important for us and for others around us, is feeling good, obviously not in a selfish way but in a cooperative fashion.

Our lives can be seen as an eternal balance of expectations and frustrations and our hero task is to minimize frustrations without wiping out all expectations (doing so falling into a sterile cynicism), treating others as a value and not as a destination for our outlets, outbursts.

The problem is or can be the context. What is a disturb? Who is disturbed? You? Others around you? Both? As long as you (and all of us) find your own way to maintain yourself well and your way to interact with others there is not disturb. Is our current society suited to accomodate all shades of personalities? Not at all. First of all you must be a consumer, you must buy at Amazon and have a gmail account. Then you must accept to be squeezed at the production side of the chain, but just as long as you are rentable then you must learn to die early not being a weight for the society.

But when the context is sane (a nice family, a group of friends loving you, a Monastery of Perl lovers) there is room for all of us (assuming no prevarication goals) to express ourselves in a costructive and posive way.

For me and the monastery you are a wise monk, a genial programmer, a kind people behind a nickname.

> For some strange reason, this is much easier in writing than it is in person.

It is normal, not strange. To write is the oldest artificial filter humans invented and if you look at it closer also to speech is a filter, perhaps just more natural, between our chaotic minds and the rest of the world.

If you lack in social skills or empathic ones and you have more systemizing ones you normally feel more comfort to interact writing than speaking. What bad? Nothing! Problems would have arisen if you were put into commercial division instead than among software developpers. The context.

I was searching about Glenn Gould neuropathy and couriosly I found an article about The Pattern Seekers: A New Theory of Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen, where I read about his battle for neurodiversity and that does not exists the opposite pair of normality and anormality but only an infinite variety of brains, all equally natural.. Exactly what I was trying to say :)

Hurrah Glenn Gould, Hurrah cavac, Hurrah the inclusion of neurodiversity!

L*

Thanks!

I think all will agree a brave great post,

thanks for sharing.

Well, yeah, welcome to the club? I've never been diagnosed, but for me, all of the signposts are there .. mis-reading social situations (I won't bore you with all of the examples), not realizing I'm talking too much, focusing too much, not focusing enough, occasional OCD, etc, etc. Strangely, I'm fine at Perl conferences and at Perlmonger meetings because I just assume everyone else is on the spectrum with me, and I'm way more open to talking to someone sitting next to me.

Thanks for your post. I can assure you, you are not alone in this. :) And, yup, Perlmonks is an oasis.

> Strangely, I'm fine at Perl conferences and at Perlmonger meetings because I just assume everyone else is on the spectrum with me,

Now, is the glass half full or half empty?

Either you could assume you took the blue pill into the Perl community, or that most outside geek-sphere are running a preview of Idiocracy.

;-)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

Now, is the glass half full or half empty?

In the case of "half empty", it's also important to hope that it's not a sudden case of Randall Munroe

:-)
perl -e 'use Crypt::Digest::SHA256 qw[sha256_hex]; print substr(sha256_hex("the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything"), 6, 2), "\n";'

I love garlic and onions. I even grow my own (very eyewatering) onions.

But even just smelling yoghurt will make me queasy. And due to vast overproduction of milk (at least here in central europe), that poison is used as a filler in many products.

perl -e 'use Crypt::Digest::SHA256 qw[sha256_hex]; print substr(sha256_hex("the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything"), 6, 2), "\n";'