My eldest son is autistic—not the quirky, endearingly eccentric kind Hollywood sprinkles with stardust, but the kind that makes you rethink your furniture layout and develop a healthy respect for reinforced door frames. He’s a big lad, nearly two meters tall, who can’t speak and has to endure the hormonal apocalypse of puberty without any outlet or even the faintest idea of what’s happening to his body.
This means outbursts. Not the sulky slam-the-door variety, but biblical storms—sudden, uncontainable, and terrifying in their force. Picture a two-year-old’s tantrum scaled up to the size of a rugby forward. Naturally, the medical chorus offered the predictable solution: medication. Something to sand down his edges, to make him more manageable.
We refused. Not because we enjoy the chaos, but because numbing someone into docility is never free. The body adapts, the dose must rise, and soon you’re chasing diminishing returns while quietly wrecking the heart and spirit of the person you’re “helping.” So we chose the harder road—enduring his truly diabolical eruptions until he learned, in his own time, to cope without chemical shackles.
It’s the same with society’s appetite for doom. Feed the public a steady diet of scare stories and, after a while, nothing shocks them. The threshold for alarm climbs higher; the narrative needs a bigger monster, a louder siren, a fresher apocalypse. Until, one day, something actually snaps.
Dulling a large autistic teenager isn’t good for his heart. Dulling an entire population with a constant drip-feed of theatrical catastrophe isn’t good for its empathy. In both cases, you may get compliance—but at the cost of something vital.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/a65616655/positive-tipping-points/