New Ways To Tell Everyone That You're A Snowflake Who Can't Handle Life

Are you overly sensitive to rejection? Do you take it particularly hard when you’re criticised, playing the moment over and over again in your head? Are you constantly on the lookout for mild disapproval from others? If so, you might have Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

Or you might just be a terrible human being who cannot cope with life… 

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, or “RSD”, is just one of the latest buzzwords that has become associated with autism and ADHD following the uptick in diagnoses for both conditions. Between 2019 and 2023, there was a fivefold increase in the number of open suspected autism referrals in the UK, while prescriptions for ADHD medication saw a 51 per cent increase over this same time period, according to the Nuffield Trust.

But we mustn’t sneer at this and consider it to be a case of people being eager to gain a tick in the box, even if the Health Secretary has his doubts too! 

As awareness increases (or overdiagnosis, depending on your view), the standard ADHD or autism diagnosis has become insufficient for some sufferers, who are seeking more niche subsections of the condition they can identify with. RSD, for example, is understood to be an extreme emotional sensitivity to rejection or criticism. It’s a fairly recent addition to the mental health lexicon, having been coined by psychiatrist William Dodson in the 2010s.

Of course, one everyone has it, you’re not special any more and have to find something else.

An equally popular cluster of ADHD/autism symptoms is Pathological Demand Avoidance, aka PDA, which is when an individual experiences an extreme resistance to doing something that is requested or expected of them. This can include anything from big tasks to everyday demands, like the mere act of going to work, as per the UK-based PDA Society, which defines PDA as “a determined avoidance of so-called ‘common’ demands of life.” Despite PDA being coined by psychologist Elizabeth Newson in the 1980s, it’s important to note that neither of these terms is included in formal diagnostic systems.

But they are proliferating in the places these people go to find validation of course: 

That hasn’t stopped them from taking root on TikTok, where users are embracing the terms with open arms.

’Users’ being a very apposite term for these people… 

It Seems A Really Easy ‘Fight’ To Win, To Me…

I am uneasily aware that around this time last year I wrote that my drive to acquire material things had somewhat subsided: I was older and wiser, had everything I needed, was repelled by the sheer volume of stuff in the world, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, the internet seemingly viewed that as fighting talk, an impossible-to-turn-down challenge, and in recent months I have once more found myself wanting stuff. Lots of stuff.

I suppose you've not considered putting the phone or tablet down?

It’s not surprising perhaps – stuff is everywhere, whispering, or shouting, to us from every screen we stare at. “The constant stream of ads on Instagram is exhausting,” said my best friend gloomily just last week, and she’s right: my eyes are constantly assaulted with offers of miracle goop for my mature skin, wellness gadgetry, expensive knitwear and greenwashed “disruptors” of almost everything. I just spent a minute scrolling and was offered, in quick succession, a “calfPRO” (no idea, alarming), kombucha, cleanser, an eco frying pan, “reminiscent of Phoebe Philo-era Celine” jumpers and, bafflingly, Canadian sea urchins.

That seems a rather odd selection of targeted ads. 

In this newly lawless age for social media there are bigger problems than the relentless onslaught of targeted ads, but in addition to the urgent upskilling in critical reading the world needs, we need to work out how to fight back against all the stuff the internet wants us to buy.

I already have - ignore them and scroll past.  

I’ve been trying to deinfluence myself in recent weeks and it’s quite the battle – I am weak-willed and made stupider by the minute by internet nonsense, and the algorithm is tireless. But I have a secret weapon: I know my craven, ridiculous desires intimately, which helps me shout them down. Now when tempted, that’s exactly what I do.

There! Wasn't so hard after all, was it?