"Common life strategy for autistic people: achieve/overachieve until burning out and maybe the overachievement will result in enough social and economic capital to see you through the burnout." @theoriesofminds (Twitter)
This jumped out to me.
This jumped out to me.
I suffered pretty horribly as a kid. On top of the autism, my father was abusive, one of the few friends I had died at 9 years old, and my mom was diagnosed with cancer shortly after. I began to act out, and the school I was sent to helped me learn to "pass" was so horrible I ended up writing about it anonymously for Boing Boing.[1]
Later in grad school, a counselor would point out that on top of the autistic spectrum issue, I may have CPTSD from the treatment I received from the teachers in the alternative school that my acting out caused me to be sent to. It's not in the DSM, so I can't really get anything for it.
I went to college hoping for some stability - anything beyond help desk in my hometown required a degree. College made me "overqualified" for those roles but didn't quite get me to the point I could get a systems admin or software engineering role. In fact between self care and classes, my technical skills declined a bit from when I was 18 to 22.
A professor who I took a job with due to the flexible schedule saw promise in me and encourage me to go to grad school. I don't need a ton of money to be happy, so I figured maybe acquiring some prestige would eventually lead to a decent job - I never wanted to be a professor but I didn't see any other path forward.
I burned out partway through grad school... I managed to pass my quals so I could prove leaving was my choice and left with a master's. Tried working for a smaller company who I told I wanted work life balance, but ended up being laid off despite putting in as much (and sometimes more) hours there than I did in grad school.
So now, like many of the guys I went to school with all those years ago, I live with my parents. The difference being that most of those guys spent the past decade as NEETS. I'm not going to claim living on disability is a picnic, but I sometimes wonder who's smarter: the "genius" who spent a decade trying to push boulders up hills until he got crushed, or the American Hikikomori sitting in their parent's putting in their 10,000th hour of Call of Duty.
[1] https://boingboing.net/2013/01/05/pedagogyofthedepressed.htm...
Maybe our perspective is that of someone who was in a similar place, and is now looking back on our lives with the benefit of hindsight.
It's not obvious to me that people will take a low-effort dismissal of their personal issues and turn that into a valuable learning opportunity.
I wake up at 10 AM to work then go to college from 4PM to 9PM and then spend an hour learning a new language and then watch some movies or play some video games. Sometimes I don't know which of them is the most pointless...
But that doesn't matter - meaning is subjective & you make your own. If something is meaningful to you it's not pointless.
Yeah, but 10,000 hours of COD? That's about 5 years of playing from 9-5 every weekday. That's not enjoyment; that's an illness.
I can't even imagine the ennui of playing 10k hours of the same FPS or even the same series. "Soul crushingly boring" wouldn't even begin to describe it.
These are not mutually exclusive.
As such it's a way to feel accomplishment and growth for people who don't have many other opportunities for feeling those things.
It's particularly appealing for people who struggle with participating in the usual venues for this, like sports clubs and other socializing that usually requires meat world interaction, which isn't a very easy thing to participate in for people with social anxiety issues.
That sounds more like a communist prison than a school, I'm not surprised it would result in PTSD.
Anyway, you can do your own research but as for supplements to facilitate extroversion... B vitamins?
There is a large class of people who are not confident about an autism diagnosis.
They read an article like this looking for clues and discriminators about their autism status, and to better understand where they fall on the spectrum.
When the feedback is: "Don't many people have that problem?", it's not meant as a jibe or an attack on the struggle of autistic people. It's meant to ask: "So how do you tell if this symptom is predictive of autism, and why?"
It's like one of the pages with autism spectrum testing tools says: "If you take all of the tests on this page, you're probably on the autism spectrum." - most people won't diligently spend 3 or 4 hours trying to see if they're autistic, to a degree that is somewhat diagnostic.
The best tests available are things like https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient - for reference, I'm diagnosed, and before I took it, I got a mid-level score, because I didn't understand the comparative degree to which those things were true for me, e.g. "I often notice small sounds when others do not" - how do you know if you aren't aware and ask?
So, it's a bit like the old saw about "If you have to ask, you'll never know" - it's worth seeing a mental health professional and asking them, because they can provide you the feedback that people on the spectrum are critically missing out on.
Imagine complaining about an argument with a friend and your friend sympathizes by saying “yeah, I hate him too, he’s such an asshole”. Now you have to empathize with them, while also being unhappy about how they feel about your friend.
Today a recruiter crashed one of my mental containers when she made an API call to me telling me she had an opportunity for me and I responded with 200 "I've got a new role now that I'm happy with" then she fired a GET request for the company I am currently working. I don't implement that method on the social contract (I commented it out recently) and instead just returned a 404. She then immediately fired another GET request for the same information and my mental container just crashed. Just hung up and ended the call. That isolation is great though because I went straight back to enjoying my beer.
> That isolation is great though because I went straight back to enjoying my beer.
Second, I find the isolation to be a bit leaky - rarely am I immediately back to my normal operation. Maybe I need to reimplement my VM.
Third, isolation in theory is great, but in practice requires far too many resources. I agree that the "internal virtual machine" metaphor is fantastic, but if everyone is running it to fit in with society...we're wasting a ton of brain space at the societal level.
I feel like if I ever do get to that point. I would just spend the free time recuperating.
Just try imagining spending a whole day visibly smiling happy.
People who know you will ask you what's the happy occurrence, strangers will think you either mock them or are simply crazy, that's how out of the ordinary visibly being happy is considered, which is just super sad.
And then on top of that, depending on how far one is on the spectrum, it can be hard to judge people. It's not that you can't do it at all - it's that you are never really confident that you've got it right. And having an emergency plan that you're not confident in, but you know you will need to rely on at some point, can be very stressful in and of itself.