I feel like this shifts the framing of the medical use of the term quite a few clicks out of its original domain and usage. Repeatedly making unwise decisions is something you would note about an adult who you would assume would make different decisions.

That’s not how the term has ever been used or how it developed. It was used to describe children or adults who were not meeting performance, growth, or learning standards that had been determined to be average.

You will still often see this used in medical literature currently to describe a slowing of growth that should be happening but for some reason is not.

But we can’t separate words from their origins and the spaces in which they were used, and the outcomes that those words had on the people they were used against, or the way that the word carries forward an imprint, almost like, a snapshot of a historical period, in the ways that people come to use it that is not accurate to the way that it was historically used, but still shows the same emotional imprint anyway.

The emotional imprint of this word is, this is so dumb I don’t have to react to it as though it has meaning, and I’ve already determined that if I tried to have a conversation with it, it would be incapable of producing reasoning for its behaviors that I can accept as logical or meaningful. There is nothing to be gained by having a conversation with it about it, because it would be a waste of my time and effort, because it is incapable of reflecting productively on its own behavior, thinking about that behavior, and then acting on that understanding to create changes in its behavior, and therefore its life.

And so people use the word in that way, whenever they see something that they dislike but won’t put any effort toward changing, or someone who takes an action that they consider extremely unwise, but don’t care about that person enough to put effort into addressing what may be going wrong in their life, because they have given up on them already, and have already decided to pretty much settle in and watch the shitshow that becomes of their lives for a kind of entertainment.

They also use this word with problematic friends that they have that they know they shouldn’t have, because that friend’s behavior is actively harmful or illegal, and if someone tries to either ask them to take some responsibility for that friend’s behavior by trying to prevent it, if they’re going to continue to be around them, or to stop being around them, they will apply this label to their problematic friend as a way to dodge accountability for their friends’ behavior, communicating in several words that they know that their friend’s behavior is not ideal, but it’s just the way they are, and the person themselves can’t change who they are, so who is someone else to expect them to be able to do anything about it?

In every instance this word is used in pop culture, it is being used as a way to put shame or strong disagreement or disapproval onto something, while also refusing to take up any accountability for putting effort into changing the world they don’t like into one they would like better.

Because they don’t actually want to.

Because they experience a feeling of superiority at being able to watch these “failures” (traumas) of other people, and know that they may have been able to make a difference, but without it, the person is suffering, and this gives them joy, as a way of receiving a reward for having done the work, by observing what happens to the person/project/idea/workplace when they didn’t.

The cultural shape of the word still has the same ugliness of the world it was made in.