A lot of the behaviors this seems to force I don't understand - like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not. I am well aware that for kids with autism frequently there are feeding issues, but what's going on in the "simulation" is very not clear to me.
Similarly, I don't understand the decisions related to the driving environment: it appears to be a personal vehicle, surely you, as the owner, can make the interior environment something that's as close to personally comfortable as possible? Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.
Related, what is or isn't masking seems very confused. To begin with, it's not just code for "hiding or not hiding behaviors that appear socially irregular." But it's also not the case that deciding whether to participate in a non-working-hours event is or isn't masking in of itself.
Presenting behavior in a socialized way when necessary is a skill that's harder (as I understand it) for those on the autism spectrum, but I don't think that makes every application equivalent to masking.
> A lot of the behaviors this seems to force I don't understand - like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not. I am well aware that for kids with autism frequently there are feeding issues, but what's going on in the "simulation" is very not clear to me.
I lost interest after the breakfast question. For someone who’s physically fit (which this person likely is) skipping breakfast shouldn’t cause a noticeable drop in energy. If it does, then there may be more going on than just autism.
I lose energy if I do have breakfast. Which results in lack of focus. Therefore I often postpone my breakfast as long as I possibly can, otherwise, with a large probability, my work day is ruined before it even starts.
Agree, breakfast slows me down, so I rarely eat it anymore and typically eat around midday to 1pm after morning work and exercise. I've fasted only once, it lasted 12 days and my energy level was almost overwhelming and electric. Boxing, running, etc. I gave up trying to understand why. And although it was an amazing experience, have not fasted again in the 5 years since.
For myself, I have low energy if I don't eat breakfast, but there is essentially no hunger signal for me in the morning. Over time I've settled on eating the plainest breakfast I can.
I think this has a lot to do with the 9–5 and my natural sleep cycle being delayed compared to that.
Same. If I have breakfast it seems to kickstart my metabolism or something idk. The result is, if I have breakfast, I’m distracted by hunger all morning. If I skip breakfast I can focus all morning and I don’t get hungry until lunchtime. Bodies are weird.
you also don't fall asleep at your desk as a response to a birthday party in the office early in the morning after a good nights' sleep, but if you play a one-sided game in this that's what happens.
it's not a reality simulator, incredibly few video games are.
the whole thing seems like a conflicted struggle between "I want to make a game" and "I need to get my points across", often to the detriment of the game-part.
This may have multiple causes (past experience/trauma, energy levels, existing depression, sleep troubles, anything on the spectrum of autism, like ADHD...).
As far as energy levels go, if you are already tired, you may lack energy to cope with stressful situations, which leads you to procrastinate or even sleep too just not face it.
From personal experience, low (just below the lower limit, so nothing seemingly dramatic) vitamin D levels may affect one's energy levels negatively (always tired, brain fog, everything feels hard...), and having appropriate vitamin D levels may already provide one with a clear mind and remove the hardship of dealing with most of what others consider as seemingly simple situations.
You might be depressed because of low energy levels, instead of the other way around.
So, make sure your energy levels are appropriate and that your mitochondria work fine. (Any LLM will provide you with detailed info about energy levels and mitochondria).
Of course, that's only based on personal experience, and I'm a software engineer, not a Doctor.
For me it's low stress / passive situations, like listening to presentations or sitting in a meeting where I'm just observing. And that's with good sleep etc.
Any kind of one sided meeting puts me to sleep. So I either don’t go, leave or work on my computer if it is not relevant. Luckily my company encourages not going to meetings where you feel you don’t have anything useful to add.
Unfortunately I haven’t even been able to make it through one phd presentation of my friends.
Same if it involves a human yelling. If I'm in my bed while it's happening , I might actually sleep briefly. It becomes impossible to stay awake sometimes.
Other high stress situations involving actually solving something motivates me though.
It's a nice change of pace around here when people intentionally make themselves the butt of the joke by acting like extremely common phrases are somehow foreign to them. "Lived experience" immediately adds more detail and context to how they obtained their knowledge by explicitly referring to first hand involvement and direct experience rather than potentially from second hand sources or studying, but here you are making a smarmy reply pretending that it was somehow more confusing to the benefit of the rest of us who might take your attempt at quips as humorous. Thanks for the laugh!
No problem friend, happy to help. I still think it's a stupid phrase, you don't have anyone else's experience and you're never not alive to experience anything. All it does is "I'm trying to make my point stronger by making you feel bad about questioning it because I'm going to reply that you can't question what I said"
I guess you could take the idea that someone has an experience that may be different to yours and that you aren't able to dictate as a personal affront rather than a plain fact, but I recommend against it. That doesn't seem interesting or productive, it seems like getting worked up over something beyond your control and of no consequence.
> I guess you could take the idea that someone has an experience that may be different to yours
I do as a default because it is, that's why the sentence is tautological - which was my point. There's also a difference between expressing an opinion and being "worked up".
There's this concept called empathy, and people can share how they experience things. We can also relate our own experiences. So, it might not be a first-hand experience, but we can put ourselves in their shoes. If we see a friend experience something, it becomes a shared experience. When our friends laugh, we laugh too. When they grieve, we grieve with them. Etc
I think you're overly inflating the word "interesting" here. It doesn't imply novelty, innovation or anything groundbreaking. It's just of interest, which isn't a high bar.
I don't even have an autism diagnosis, and I never skip breakfast because of the energy drop. I bike to work, run 5ks, and am not overweight, even by standardized BMI metrics.
I don't even have an autism diagnosis. It never occurred to me that something might be "going on". Breakfast imparts energy. To me, that has been a given.
I was in my 30’s before I realized that other people really need to eat and can’t just decide to skip a day when work / travel / timezones make it inconvenient. So much natural variation.
This is also something you can train your body to get used to. Anyone who started doing intermittent fasting and struggled at first will know that you eventually adapt to it. Depending on how difficult someone finds it, doing a ketogenic diet might be a nicer way to ease into it.
I find I’m happiest not eating until about 6 pm. Usually one large meal and one small late-night snack. I’m a little surprised there wasn’t much evolutionary pressure to align eating schedules considering how social we are but meh. Maybe everyone being on their own schedule is actually better for survival.
part of the challenge with autism is that nearly all it's features are shared partially or individually by ordinary people as pretty routine character traits (eg: socialising is energy draining for "regular" introverts).
It's (a) them being collectively combined and (b) the severity that creates the issue, but it's very hard for autistic people to explain and justify what's happening to them when everybody feels like they already experience these things and manage to just "deal" with it.
I haven't ate breakfast in 7+ years and I've never had an energy issue. I've ate OMAD (one meal a day) for over a year while running 5ks Monday to Friday and never had any energy issues either.
A lot of people in here with similar anecdotes. I'm not saying everyone's like me. I'm just saying that some people feel lower energy if they skip breakfast. And it doesn't mean 'there's something else going on'.
If 50% of the world is just fine without eating breakfast,
that still means 4 Bn people are not.
Posting personal anecdotes as if that proves feeling low on energy without breakfast means something is wrong is a degree of irrationality I can’t believe is showing up on HN.
It’s fine to share personal anecdotes and experiences but so many here are sharing them as if it disproves all other things experiences and responses.
It's even more complicated, because it also depends on what yout eat for breakfast. Some food will sustain you for a longer time, some will give you an immediate sugary boost and then the inevitable fall (which could definitely be a big part of the "I feel lower energy when I eat breakfast" experience.
Interesting. I am also physically fit and if I don't have something to eat within the first half hour of getting up, I am cranky and definitely won't be doing anything approaching information work.
Exercise can push off hunger pangs for quite a while. Your body wants you to know it’s hungry, but if you’re exercising (read:probably hunting according to your brain), the pangs fade because they would simply be distracting.
Thanks. I've never heard it framed this way. I've mentioned my appetite diminishes after aerobic exercise, but a common response is that I'm weird.
Interestingly my appetite sometimes skyrockets after certain activities like bouldering or weight lifting, so the diminished hunger response must be a bit more complex of a phenomenon.
Sorry, I was not clear. A plate of some meat + some vegetables, or variations of that. The kind of things you expect to eat for lunch in France (and, broadly speaking, in Europe).
What I meant by that is that this is a full starter for the day, not a "late French breakfast"
You don't feel it immediately. Notice the bar doesn't reset the next day. You don't feel breakfast immediately but your workout later in the day and tomorrow will be affected by this.
You're unfairly extrapolating from your own experience here -- everyone's body has different chemistry.
I have to eat breakfast in the morning in order to feel energetic during the day. But specifically, I need a high-protein, high-fiber breakfast. Anything else makes me feel lethargic and tired.
Being physically fit past your 30s is a series of building habits and making hard choices that obviously is a challenge of its own that many in sedentary jobs have skipped or fallen away from. OP may be fit, but yeah for average office worker (especially in locations that are car-bound on long commutes) I’d bet there is indeed more going on than just autism.
I'm a mid-packer in the triathlons I participate in, so pretty fit. I definitely notice the energy difference between having eaten breakfast or not, in the everyday (non-training) context. It's not a hunger thing (I'd miss breakfast most days if I didn't literally schedule it) and I can do my strength training and short intervals to the same performance fasted as fed. But I am aware of it.
Since the anabolic window is a lie and you have roughly 72 hours to feed yourself protein after effort you can skip breakfast without any impact if you don’t feel hungry. I don’t think many nocturnal people who wake up regularly at 10:00 really eat breakfast if lunch is 2 hours away, regardless of gym habits.
Skipping breakfast absolutely causes a noticeable drop in energy for most people. Especially if you work an intellectually demanding job. That blood glucose is important.
Also of note given the OP’s subject, several studies show that people with significantly impactful Autism spectrum disorders have higher brain glucose consumption than the baseline.
It's complicated for me. Sometimes breakfast makes me notice my digestive system, which seems to make my ADHD-adjacent traits worse. I also get IBS... Which is different from the meds constipation. So eating is difficult. Because of IBS my bowels are also unpredictable, so dosing laxatives is hard. I don't know how many of these things are caused by meds.
Then there's the energy thing. I guess if I'm in ketosis it's fine, but after not eating for a whole day it's hard to sustain the next day, but eating isn't alway worth it.
The saddest part is that junk foot and Tesco meal deal is so is somehow easier to digest. So I often eat that.
I'm trying Kefir (even though I'm lactose intolerant, but I take lactase with it) for the 10 time probably. My GP recommended it. Alas, maybe it helps.
Soooo, tldr eating yes, I love it, but it can have consequences that completely tank my productivity. And each time I have to ponder this it feels like I've done a chore but without the reward feeling of completing a chore, even though I just say there in silence for 5-15 minutes
i would interpret physical fitness as cardio exercise routine and depleted muscle glycogen stores:
so breakfast is very welcome and without it is not possible to keep up exercise routine
You have definitively diagnosed yourself as not being on the spectrum.
Hard to describe, but there is a tendency to self-sabotage (for lack of a better term) that you have to take into account. Sure, it may be my car, and I may have control of the radio, but I don't always act upon the need to adjust my environment.
This is correlated with the amount of energy and attention you have to give to processing your environment, much like the health bars in the game UI.
> Sure, it may be my car, and I may have control of the radio, but I don't always act upon the need to adjust my environment.
But in the context of the beginning of a game, people without autism are probably confused. Why isn't the car's environment already tuned to the character's exact specifications?
I get some of the potential reasons why after playing the game for a bit. But I still would have liked to see a callback to this. E.g., if I drive to lunch with coworkers I could choose to mask by letting the passenger tune the radio. Then the next morning I get a painful sound when I turn on the car. Ah, I get it now! That seems like more satisfying gameplay-- maybe the game already does it and I died too early to see!
We're definitely reading too far into this, but the game does incorporate this concept, so I'll make the case.
You don't get to choose every option every day. Some days you're on, and you make (almost) all of the right choices for your wellbeing. But not every day is like that.
Try tuning your entire environment and then maintaining it all the time. Best I can do is get it into a failure mode that isn't a disaster.
Mapping anything into a perfect system fails. So I'm surrounded by half working shit that works well enough that the energy from the shittyness that it sucks from me is made up by the fact that it's good enough to not crash out over. But I will still stress. Because I do want to fix the Bluetooth but I also have 8000 other things at home to perfectly tune as well.
My shoes are a year and a half old. A little stained, a little green from mowing the lawn. I sure as fuck don't want to go to a shoe store and tell the poor young worker there that I don't need their help. I'm not buying shoes without trying them on, so internet is out. When the soles fall off and the social impact is great enough, I'll replace them.
I haven't cut my hair in a year and a half because the hair dresser lady that I went to for 15 years moved away. Staring into a mirror while someone talks to me and cuts my hair is a fucking nightmare. I know this makes me look unconventional, but worth it for now. I have to carefully wash, condition, dry, and brush my hair. It's more work. But it's optimized.
Did you play the game? If I'm understanding it correctly (a big if), every single time the author is forced to leave out edge cases when talking to management it is a form of masking. They have to suppress their natural urge[1] to list the edge cases, and come up with a more appropriate message based on a non-intuitive guess about the salient points their interlocutor wants to know.
That implies active work to mask that is almost certainly measured in hours per day, across nearly every domain of communication and human interaction.
How many hours a day does the average employee spend talking to coworkers about their sexual preference?
Edit:
1: An urge probably backed up by a good faith, well-reasoned, ethical understanding of the literal words that the manager spoke to them!
Of course you don't get it: you're not autistic. Did you expect to get it?
There's what's that quote about good art disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed.
Eating is very stressful for many autistic people because of trauma and lack of (non-enmeshing) support in childhood. They don't learn how to make a comfortable environment for themselves or that it is even possible. Every meal becomes stressful. Force feeding or depending completely on others.
Masking goes so deep, it's just not possible to easily convey with words, because after a lifetime of masking you don't even notice all the things that you do that count.
"Presenting behavior in a socialized way when necessary" has a hidden part. Presenting what behavior? To whom? Presenting autism-coded behavior around autistic people is stress-free.
I think masking is easily conveyed with words because everybody does it - other terms used are "code switching" where you talk differently to friends, family, parents, bosses, subordinates or children; "emotional labor", a phrase often used for service industry people (think receptionists) where people pretend to be in one emotional state (happy and cheerful) for the sake of their job or role while they really aren't. This is even worse / more obvious in the US where a lot of people can / do switch their personality on a whim, e.g. when picking up the phone.
What's different is that for neurotypical people they don't seem to be aware of it and it comes naturally, but for ND it's learned behaviour that costs energy and conscious effort to do. And they feel like they have to do it because society is used to people effortlessly doing it all the time, so if you don't you're considered off, or simply don't get to participate in society because you're weird/boring/scary. The latter is the worst, you're just yourself but people get uncomfortable around you. They won't tell you why nor just accept you (which is understandable, biological defense mechanisms etc), but you do become an outcast. Unless you play the social games.
> Presenting autism-coded behavior around autistic people is stress-free.
Anecdotal, but... not necessarily, any one person's behaviours can affect someone else negatively.
> but for ND it's learned behaviour that costs energy and conscious effort to do. And they feel like they have to do it because society is used to people effortlessly doing it all the time, so if you don't you're considered off, or simply don't get to participate in society because you're weird/boring/scary.
And of course, every now and then you fail to do it right and people think you were acting really weird but won't explain why.
I'd like to elaborate a little more on why "autistic masking" is different from "neurotypicals' masking".
For neurotypicals, masking is to exhibit behaviors that you subconciously know how to do because they are part of your natural range of behaviors. When a neurotypical is masking being friendly and happy in a social occasion (when they actually don't feel like it), they draw on their previous experience of having been friendly and happy in another social occasion. They know what it feels like, they know how to behave instinctively whey they really are happy and friendly, and faking it is only the effort of drawing from prior experience. For actors, this is called "the Method".
For autists, masking is emulating behaviors they wouldn't normally exhibit on any such occasion. They don't know how to do it, not subconciously, not instinctively. So they explicitly have to observe others, emulate their behavior on that occasion. That leads to two kinds of problems: First, they need to have observed this behavior, learned and practiced it, and need to know how to reproduce it correctly. Second, they need to recognize the occasion correctly, and not misinterpret their surroundings, the feelings and moods of others. And since autists also do have problems even interpreting their own emotional state (they do have emotions, but no intuitive way to know what they are at the moment) and even more the emotional state of others, the effort is far higher. Imagine an actor who is asked to play a totally alien role without any frame of reference and without prior experience, no do-overs and all the other people around him are also directors and constantly judging his performance and measuring it against their effortless instinct what it should look like.
I can buy your arguments, but not in the context of this game.
Saying "I'm tired I'll go work more silently" is just reasonably workplace behavior. Telling your coworker "can we sit down and talk about this somewhere more quiet" is just reasonable thing to say to improve productivity. Saying "This meeting is a bit unstructured and i feel if would be more productive to write out an agenda" is not breaking a mask or being an ass, it's focusing on getting shit done for everyone. Sending an email about concerns about unclear and un-mensurable performance in a post-meeting summary is productive and useful for the team (and less socially draining than doing it during the meeting).
All humans mask. Autistic people are simply more prone to "over-mask" or mask things others don't. But a-lot of masking behaviors are mal-adaoptions from childhood. A distraction-less focused and structured work environment helps everyone, so be the ass and enforce it. And particularly engineering fields have a higher tendency to attract (certain) autistic traits, which just further makes speaking out even more valuable for everyone involved.
Simply put; The game makes being "breaking the mask" a negative thing, and a failure case for the game. But all options that break the mask seem to improve energy and social connection. (which goes entirely against the supposed benefit or purpose of masking)
> Saying "This meeting is a bit unstructured and i feel if would be more productive to write out an agenda" is not breaking a mask or being an ass, it's focusing on getting shit done for everyone.
But in many cases, it will absolutely be interpreted as being an ass, and autistic people are less adept at spotting those contexts and communicating in ways which don't look like they're being an ass (also, autistic people are probably more likely to be irritated by the agenda of the rest of the meeting or next meeting being to discuss agendas...)
I agree with your wider point that everyone masks to some degree, but its obviously less consequential to non-junior neurotypical people in familiar environments who can reasonably accurately predict how everyone will react to them choosing to take the mask off and hint what they really think about the meeting. Sure, a lot of other stuff like requesting to talk in a quieter environment is usually something straightforward any reasonable person will accommodate, but it's not surprising people concerned that making too many requests perceived as "weird" might harm their career and not really sure what's "weird" or not default to just trying to avoid them.
Being unable to read or intepret the reaction or social cues given as a response to such blunt remarks is indeed a core issue. I think this is a core reason autistic people over-mask.
Beyond simply masking autistic traits, some people mask to the point of changing personalities or interests. Masking to be more "normal" than any "normal" person.
Knowing when and when not to raise or point out issues or concerns can be quite complex.
So in practice, its quite difficult to find the balance. But take issue with the "inevitability" present in a lot the explanations of autistic masking.
Googling "making workplace autism friendly" gives ... detailed descriptions of very nice workplaces. Particularly the examples in this game are things every workplace would benefit from adjusting even for "neuortypical" workers. (And if not pointed out, it will just continue to drain energy the future)
I am, and ironically it prevented me from being able to enjoy this; too many inaccuracies and absolutist perspective frustrated me.
Like others said, skipping breakfast should not be that big of a deal for a reasonably healthy adult, we didn't evolve having 3 meals a day. Intermittent fasting is a thing too.
'Masking' parameter misses the point in my opinion. Picking what I would personally realistically do (having adapted over the years) causes it to drop to 0 over a few days. Picking what i think author wants me to pick, same result. Yet somehow I managed not to get fired in 3 days irl.
I get it, it's an illustration of 'autism is hard' for 'normies'. But it was painfully close to being realistic/enjoyable too.
Not to say it's not useful, ADHD popups were 10/10, general vibe was spot on, will probably forward it to a few friends; it's just not nuanced enough to not annoy me personally.
One of rare times where I can be blunt honest and hopefully not come across arrogant.
> Like others said, skipping breakfast should not be that big of a deal for a reasonably healthy adult, we didn't evolve having 3 meals a day. Intermittent fasting is a thing too.
I haven’t played the simulator but I wonder if it’s also trying to account for more than just the physiological effects. A friend of mine has autism, and we were getting together one day. On the way over I suggested getting some food since it was close to dinner time. They agreed, gave me some items and I bought us some food. When I arrived they were amped up and excited to show me something. I set the food down, and I ate while they were showing me this thing that had them all excited. They ate some of the food too, but were clearly distracted and not all that hungry. No big deal. But a few hours later I noticed they’d gone real quiet and seemed down or anxious about something. Turned out they had been worrying for the last hour that they had offended me because they didn’t eat all the food and they knew they weren’t going to eat all the food because they were going through a phase where eating in general was just a difficult thing to want to do and so were eating just the minimums they needed to not have other problems.
The entire later half of their evening and their excitement over their new thing had been badly deflated all because of a decision / need to not eat all the food on offer. Never mind that this was nothing new for them. Never mind that I could easily see myself skipping food just for the excitement they were experiencing before factoring in any sensory phases. Never mind that it would be a truly shit thing for me to be offended because they only ate some of the greasy fast food I picked up for us. No this simple and normal act caused them an hour of stress and anxiety over worrying if they’d crossed some social line for doing something I didn’t even notice until they said something.
But it doesn’t matter whether I noticed. Their brain latched onto the “you did something abnormal, people might have noticed, now you need to analyze everything that’s happened to figure out what you next move should be” train of thought and it would not let go. So at least from what I’ve seen, choosing to eat or not can have impacts beyond just “hungry”
> like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not.
I can relate to this in that I barely have any energy in the mornings to do anything no matter how early I set my alarm, then end up skipping everything except the bare minimum to function, or maybe less depending on if I happen to have more energy that day.
Autism has become a culturally dominant force that's displaced other kinds of neurodiversity almost completely. All kinds of people have to "mask" aspects of themselves to get along. Black people have to talk white, Asian people have to present themselves in a way white people think is assertive. Gay people have to stay closeted. Just try academia when you grew up in a working class family.
The "simulator" paradigm pretends to promote empathy but it actually does the opposite.
I understand where you're coming from, and I would even agree with the denotation of every sentence in your first paragraph, but I think you're missing a lot.
Being "culturally dominant" is not a good thing for autistic people: it's not autistic voices that dominate, but mostly eugenics groups, with the occasional well-meaning (but usually uninformed) activist group trying to oppose the narrative. If you're familiar with the kind of "anti-racist" corporate training that's mostly just white guilt with a few racial stereotypes thrown in, then you know how far "well-meaning" can take you.
While we can draw many analogies to autistic masking, autistic masking is qualitatively different to the examples you've listed. We have other words for the other things (e.g. "talking white" is a special-case of "situational code-switching", and "staying closeted" is a special-case of something that I don't know a name for). You're skirting (and, I think, crossing) the line between analogy and appropriation in your first paragraph. (See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440873, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45441925)
I'm not really sure what you mean by your "actually does the opposite" remark in the second paragraph, unless you're automatically treating this interactive description of autism made with care, by someone with personal experience of being autistic, as the kind of rubbish that's made by "well-meaning" ignorants for low-quality corporate training.
People with other flavours of neurodivergence have produced similar "simulators" (a kind of RPG, really). You might be familiar with Spoon Theory, originally devised to describe the psychological burden of living with lupus? That simulator is a TTRPG. I suspect that this simulator was made by someone who'd be classified as neurodivergent in respects not classified as autism.
I don't think masking is necessarily the right word, but when people start self-diagnosing themselves they often miss the correct problem in favor of what's popular on their social media feeds.
Right now, Autism and/or ADHD are the two that are most prevalent on social media. Many people, especially younger people who spend a lot of time on Reddit, TikTok, or other sites, see these diagnoses trend with vague descriptions about what they entail. When they encounter struggles, they recall those vague descriptions, make a connection, and assume their life problems are due to the diagnosis.
It's not uncommon to read accounts of people who describe their symptoms as textbook social anxiety or depression who will nevertheless insist they have "AuDHD" as self-diagnosed via their social media consumption.
It can actually be hard to break them out of one preferred diagnosis and get them going down the right path to address the problem.
An example: Someone develops an eating disorder, but they read on Reddit that forgetting to eat and having low energy for schoolwork can be a symptoms of ADHD. They self-diagnose as ADHD and avoid addressing their very obvious eating disorder problem. They might even get insulted when someone suggests they have an eating disorder, insisting that the other person must not understand ADHD.
This pattern isn't unique to autism or ADHD. It's common to all trending internet diagnoses. You will find communities where everyone convinces themselves they have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome or Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. Doctors who treat those two conditions are currently rejecting referrals at a high rate due to extreme self-diagnosis via TikTok. The people self-diagnosing with those conditions usually do have something wrong, but they've latched on to one explanation that doesn't fit and they won't let go because they think it explains everything about them.
I, personally, just really really hate how many people use "neurodiverse" as a synonym for "autistic". I am not neurotypical but am very much not autistic, and I'm far from the only one.
Indeed using the term "neurodiverse" only makes sense if you also want to include, for example, psychopaths (another form of neurodiversity) in the group that you want to describe.
> All kinds of people have to "mask" aspects of themselves to get along. Black people have to talk white, Asian people have to present themselves in a way white people think is assertive. Gay people have to stay closeted. Just try academia when you grew up in a working class family.
The "simulator" paradigm pretends to promote empathy but it actually does the opposite.
Why do you feel this way? Do you not think having to do those things is tiring and exhausting for the affected people? Do you think the simulator’s author would disagree? If someone wrote a simulator for trying to code switch as a Black person or an Asian person and didn’t include all the ways that autistic people have to mask, would you feel they were also not promoting empathy?
Ya, I'm curious about this as well. I'm not a morning person, and certainly am always just-scraping-by until about 1 pm. But is this some mild autism? Or is this just how I am? Or is there even a sensible distinction between those two phrases?
Everyone seems to self-diagnose as slightly autistic these days. “I’ve noticed that I have personal quirks. Must be autism. Couldn’t be that everyone has their own personal stuff to deal with.”
I think this is maybe related to imposter syndrome. “There are people who can easily do this thing that I struggle with. Maybe I’m not qualified./Maybe I’m autistic.”. This thought process assumes others aren’t struggling and also tends to look to those who excel rather than the average so it’s biased anyway.
Ya, I tend to agree. In fact, even if I _do_ have something, I think I'd rather not know. Whatever it is, it isn't too severe, so a diagnosis would mostly be helpful for getting medication. I have my own coping strategies and am able to navigate through life pretty much like everyone else, imperfectly but still making it. Having a diagnosis would not help me in this situation. I know some people feel that having a diagnosis can make a difference, and perhaps it is more important if you have something in an extreme form. But idk if I have something, and even if I do, I don't think the label would help me
> “I’ve noticed that I have personal quirks. Must be autism. Couldn’t be that everyone has their own personal stuff to deal with.”
I would love to live in a society in which everyone is allowed to have personal quirks and their own personal stuff to deal with without being judged for it and without needing a label like “autism” to excuse it.
I have a friend who was diagnosed as an adult with Autism. 40 ish years into their life and they finally got a name to attach to their “quirks”. And the thing that they found most frustrating (and which I find sympathy for feeling that frustration) is the number of people who now treat them completely differently and with much more grace and respect.
On the one hand, of course we extend extra grace and accommodations to a person with a given disability because we expect people without the disability to behave differently. On the other hand, they didn’t just magically get the disability when they got diagnosed. They’ve had it their entire life, and needed that grace and accommodation their entire life. But only it’s only now, half way through their life with their shiny new diagnosis that people give them that grace and accommodation. Is it then any wonder that people who haven’t been able to get that official diagnosis are still trying to at least get people to accept an unofficial diagnosis? If we were better at not needing the labels in order to accommodate, maybe we wouldn’t also have so many “self diagnosed” people. Or ironically maybe we’d have more officially diagnosed people because we wouldn’t be having a moral panic over fakes.
Having to select self care and breakfast every morning (and meds on some routes) is a good reminder for me of the importance of those things in the long run of a whole day. I don’t think I’m any farther on the spectrum than the average software developer, but it’s still a daily decision to be made. (Of course for those people with different breakfast patterns - you still have a best approach for yourself that you must decide to follow every morning.)
Similarly for the masking meter, I don’t know what it feels like exactly to have mask. However isn’t it hard, in varying degrees, to constantly determine and go through with the right forward-looking choice in real life? My guess is what’s a challenge for some is also a heavy toll on others.
Habits help with much of the daily decisions, but are of course their own challenge to implement and maintain.
Autism with adults is rarely presented and very individual anyway. I like to see such issues like some wound. Sure you can continue your daily chores. But if you accidentally rub against it, it gets worse and worse. Eventually you need to make a longer break so it doesn't get infected like crazy.
The whole masking thing isn't about skill. (Like in the intro, the guy is in fact even outgoing at times...) It's rather that you need to run behavior with software instead of hardware acceleration. Possible but it sucks.
That being said, the whole thing with falling asleep at the desk is a tough manifestation. For me it's less drastic but gets me into problems in the long run.
I guess the personal vehicle is fine as long as you don't drive in traffic. Maybe you try cycling on your typical route to work to be more immersed in the traffic and all the stress it causes.
> Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.
I think the point is that for autistic people, a lot of things in their day-to-day life that randomly happen and can't be controlled for, can be the equivalent of just, random people walking by and punching you in the arm all day.
Each individual punch might not hurt, and describing the incident to a neurotypical person is probably met with "Eh, that doesn't sound that bad". An entire day's worth leaves you with a pretty sore arm though.
> like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not.
If you're talking about what happens after the first day, I think it's not due to any of the "stats" but rather because your first day is long and so you're running late on the second day, and for whatever reason you have nothing ready-to-eat at home. (Might be related to that option to go to the grocery store that you probably didn't take.)
In other words, it's seemingly a narrative-driven obstacle.
> it appears to be a personal vehicle, surely you, as the owner, can make the interior environment something that's as close to personally comfortable as possible? Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.
Could be a rental car. Though my guess here is that the author actually comes from a place where the combination of culture and socioeconomics means they commute via public transit; and so they're actually trying to translate their experiences of the social impingement of public transit into analogous experiences when driving.
(Personally, I think a better translation would be being stuck in gridlock, or getting on a highway via an onramp where you keep getting cut off, etc, where there's an autistic itch there to get the other human drivers to realize that, when driving, they should "realize they're all cogs in a global optimization problem and so drive as predictably as possible, in order to decrease burstiness and so increase throughput, even at the expense of their individual perceived end-to-end latency.")
> Related, what is or isn't masking seems very confused. To begin with, it's not just code for "hiding or not hiding behaviors that appear socially irregular." But it's also not the case that deciding whether to participate in a non-working-hours event is or isn't masking in of itself.
AFAICT the "masking" gauge seems to be some rolled-up combination of 1. an odd domain-specific form willpower ("spoons" but you can only spend them on masking-related tasks, and when depleted you can't mask even if you still have motivation to do other things), with 2. a measure how close others are to deducing from your behavior that you are in fact on the autistic spectrum. (As if that's something you could ever expect to keep your coworkers and boss from realizing about you over years of continuous interaction.)
I say this because of the interaction I encountered about coming to a charity event, where literally being explicit about how you have a problem dealing with that kind of social situation... decreases the "masking" gauge. If it was purely #1, I'd expect the gauge to go up. It's only under interpretation #2 where it would go down.
(Or maybe you could describe the "masking" gauge in classical D&D terms as a WIS stat where masking attempts are Will-based saving throws?)
Honestly, I'd like to just see the source code for this. I'm surprised it's not linked; I feel like reading the source (hopefully with a lot of code comments about why the given heuristics were chosen) is the obvious "next step" to the game communicating what it wants to communicate.
I am AuDHD and this is 80% my experience. I saw this post in the morning pondering if I call in sick or work because of insomnia and being unable to have the energy.
I commute to work by train and even though I have great headphones and listen to music on Spotify some mornings it just crackles in my ears. The audio is fine, but I'm extra sensitive sometimes.
At the office people are sometimes very loud. They are excited and having fun but when it goes over my sensory limit (which varies a lot) I become unable to do anything. Ears crackling with headphones means I can't shut their noise out either. And we're supposed to be social at the office but they talk about stuff I don't know what to say about.
When I get home I am beyond exhausted. Can't sleep because of anxiety or adrenaline or something. I just zombie out streaming series or movies while reading Hacker News, Reddit or Bluesky. I promise myself I'll go to sleep early but if I do I can't fall asleep until 2-4am. If I stay up until 1am I have better chance of falling asleep faster.
Weekends are spent catching up with sleep, wanting to tidy up and do side projects as well as gaming but most times I spend half the day in bed and then stay up gaming or something because it is my time and I want to do the fun stuff. Rince and repeat unless I get lucky and catch 10 to 12 hours of sleep.
I'm a 47 year old female principal engineer. I feel like I'm just drifting through the days and months. But I do live my work, the people and challenges. I just wish I could deal with everything better.
I know you're not asking for it, but as someone that has a really hard time with anxiety and sleep: quit caffeine and exercise more.
The quitting caffeine is tough. It's 3 days of really bad headaches that no pain killer will touch, because those painkillers act on a different biochemistry. But, after I did that, my anxiety went way down and I was able to sleep a lot better.
Exercise is a bit harder, as it's a schedule problem. Even just a little bit will help though and increase the sleep 'pressure' or so I have found with myself.
Again, not trying to be a jerk here, just trying to help out however I can. My bad if this is not the place.
I quit caffeine with no withdrawal symptoms by reducing my intake by 10% every day for 10 days. I weighed how much iced tea I drank on day 0, then had 90% of that on day 1. The last day was just a shot glass full.
I probably picked the idea up here, but don't know from whom so I thought I ought to continue sharing it
I never got this, my mom would complain about this when she was out of coffee when I was younger but I have never gotten caffeine withdrawals and I have had periods of time when I consumed a lot! My last two jobs offered free coffee so I drank a lot and when I stopped working I stopped drinking coffee cold turkey because I don't have a coffee maker at home nor want to go out just to get to a coffee and no headaches.
I also drink a lot of energy drinks when I'm working on personal projects, more than the recommended amount per day and I feel like those have less negative effects than coffee, coffee gives me cold sweats for some reason. The energy drinks give me insomnia but I think it has more to do with the other ingredients than the actual caffeine.
I have quit various forms of caffeinated drinks cold turkey many times and never got a headache, but it is a little harder to get the day started the first few days after stopping because I just feel a little sluggish.
I love walking, but the lack of time is the biggest issue. The only advantage of higher intensity exercise I see is that you do not need to do it as long. I could walk for hours every day otherwise.
fair point, but that's one nice thing about adding it to your commute: you are already out, so you can add walking time in short increments as you adjust your schedule. your commute is also variable in time. some days it goes faster, sometimes slower. pad it out so it is always the same length. it may not amount to much, but it is a start. same goes for every other errand you do.
lack of time is an issue of priority. i lack time to get all the work done that i want and need to. but i also know that i need those breaks. and that they potentially make my other work more effective.
higher intensity exercise takes more prep time. and probably a shower afterwards. so half an hour exercising at the gym might take 1 hour or more of real time. walking takes no prep time at all, so i compare that half hour gym with one hour walking.
I used to do it while coming back from work but lately I feel too exhausted and want to be home asap. Going to work no way, too much stress. But I go by bike which is still something.
The point of higher intensity exercise taking additional time requiring shower etc makes sense indeed. And I agree that walking is much more accessible: I can suddenly just decide to go out and walk, other types of exercise do require more of a plan or preparation.
Another thing I enjoy during walks is listening to podcasts. I cannot really stay focused on most podcasts unless I am walking.
well, if you commute by bike you are already doing exercise, so you are already ahead (compared to someone who doesn't exercise at all), but also your commute time won't fluctuate as much, so there is less flexibility. it would be unlikely that you arrive at work early for example.
if i am exhausted after work (which is a problem in itself, but that's a different topic), i'd look for a more relaxing route to bike. sideroads with less traffic, detours through public parks, etc. after an exhausting day i want to relax, and so i would try to start relaxing the moment i get out of the office, not just after i get home. one of the reasons why i like public transport. someone else is driving.
i am not trying to suggest that you should do the same, but maybe something resonates with you.
Ime biking is not the same as walking, mentally. Walking helps much more for a mental winding down. Otherwise I agree with the advice and often I prefer longer but more scenic routes for this reason.
depends, that's my point. i have done a lot of biking when i was younger. for me it does have the same effect, but only if there is no, or not much traffic. biking through a busy street is like walking through a busy market. to relax you want a quiet empty path. for 1 hour walking that path is 4km long. to get the same with one hour biking you need 20km of quiet empty road.
exactly. i listen to fiction, but i work from home. if i don't go out either on errands or just for a walk, i don't get any listening time. that itself is a motivation to go for a walk.
With respect, you weren't asked and it's shit advice besides. I'm happy you have something that works but you may rest absolutely assured anyone with these issues that is a day over 20 has heard this "advice" hundreds, if not thousands of times.
At this point the bad advice (yes it's bad, it doesn't work) is almost as alienating as the fact that nobody seems to understand.
I think it's good that people give advice. I need people to be explicit and not leave things unsaid. Better be upfront. I have needed this advice. Of course it takes luck for it to land, when you need it, but I have needed it. Quitting caffeine definitely did wonders for me (and 2 years after I ramped it up very carefully).
Indeed. As someone who deals with the exact same issues as the original comment and have been fighting with sleep issues for over a decade, it's pretty fucking insulting to think we haven't tried to vary caffeine intake. Apparently we're too fucking stupid to think that the drug most known for wakefulness might be what is keeping us awake! It's like when I talk about crippling executive disfunction they chime in with the ever helpful, "have you tried setting a five minute timer to get started?"
I can guarantee that folks who suffer from these symptoms have read far more about mitigation than the average drive by commenter who doesn't suffer from them. Our whole lives at some point becomes about mitigation. So the "just drink less caffeine" is stupid and insulting and unfortunately way too common.
It is a public forum, people say all kinds of stuff. The commenter did not try to insult anybody, and they were trying to be polite and share how that worked for them. If you think their comment has no value to you, ignore it and move on. Hopefully you find other comments more stimulating/interesting (or not). Maybe some people find some value in that comment themselves. Not all people here are in their 40s with decades long insomnia issues.
I can respect you but not respect one of your actions. You say "with respect" to mean "this isn't a commentary on what you are as a person, but on what you did specifically". Given that context, I don't agree with you.
I have a child with AuDHD who has trouble masking consistently. That coupled with impulse control issues and an inability to regulate between the two just looks like chronic deception, lying for the sake of lying. It is exhausting for him and it never works in his favor. We spend a lot of effort coaching him to not mask and to not seek unearned attention, and its a huge challenge.
There is a death by a thousand papercuts situation with being disabled where you will have to explain yourself dozens of times a day and you get stuck with having only one conversation subject with any given stranger you meet.
For some people, masking is just an easier, freer form of existence. It's like asking for a dressed up coke at a happy hour so your coworkers wont grill you about abstaining from alcohol. Or how people who work in callcenters seem to converge on a way of speaking that makes the interactions a little easier.
It's just that for autistic individuals, they are highly analytical about how everyday social interactions work and doing this costs them more cognitive load than you would expect.
I completely understand why people do it. My point is to pick your battles well. There are many cases where masking brings far greater pain than return on investment. When masking does fail people see right through it AND the thing you were attempting to hide is now exposed in great glorious fashion when like a Striesand Effect.
Masking is a learned behavior - learned specifically because the person in question had sufficiently unpleasant experiences being unmasked that they decided they needed to try hard to mask in order to avoid said unpleasant experience.
No one masks at birth. If you want your child to stop masking, perhaps it’s helpful to investigate what caused them to learn the behavior in the first place and what could be done to make the experience of being unmasked more pleasant and less aversive for him.
Just as you say, masking takes an incredible amount of energy and is exhausting and often backfires. Why would anyone expend such exhausting amounts of energy without some extremely strong motivating factor? The alternative to not masking must be perceived as exquisitely undesirable.
I think people think masking is just for those who have Autism. I think at some level all people mask. Most people behave differently outside of work or in public places when they are alone or with close friends.
I think with Autism the process of masking is just harder, and the ability to read social queues takes extreme focus to understand the general emotional state of others around them.
Does that example really require masking? Absolute not. You don't have to lie when you provide a neutral response. Examples: "Busy day", "Just feeling tired", "Many things to get done.". Those are not necessarily good or bad and suggest you aren't making small talk.
Or, if you provide a never ending story they will see your disability for what it is and they won't ask you a second time.
I'd say that's not masking, since literally everyone does it. As a famous comedian that I can't quite place right now once said, (paraphrasing) "the only valid answers to "how are you doing?" are good, fine, or okay.
Honestly, some things like this are solved with learning certain skills, practicing them a bit, and then it becoming easier. Answering to "How are you doing?" does not require masking, people asking it in casual contexts usually do not expect any kind of "honest answer". It is as hard as answering "hi" to "hi". There are plenty neutral answers that neither require you to smile and play it happy, not invite some long, awkward conversation. It could also depend on where you live though, of course.
Thank you so much for writing this. I have a feeling there's way more of us that we realize.
I have lived very similar to what you're describing during a few periods in my career.
> it goes over my sensory limit (which varies a lot)
This line hit home. Some days I feel randomly very "thin" for no apparent reason.
> When I get home I am beyond exhausted. Can't sleep because of anxiety or adrenaline or something.
This is the worst and it doesn't make any sense so nobody understands when you explain it to them. With anything else autism related ymmv but CBT-I is the best tool I found for this. It didn't totally unfuck my sleep but it at least made it a tenable balance.
I didn't really have a point in writing this I just found your story touching and my heart goes out to you.
I'd love to interview you (anonymously or by name) for my blog if you'd be open to that. You can contact me at d+rjoshcs+immons@+gm+ail+.com (remove the + signs, my crappy attempt at bot-defeat)
On overstimulation: there is something about office conversations that I find overwhelming now, and it's that, since COVID, people seem to have lost their inside voices and are talking at volumes that seem quite a bit louder than usual.
Because of this the 'pub conversation' effect comes into play, where multiple conversations take place in the same room and the different groups compete on volume in order to remain heard.
I pretty much shut down at that point, especially if someone is also trying to talk to me at the same time. I can't stand it just the same as I can't stand it in a loud pub.
Never use to happen before 2020. Or it did and I wasn't nearly as sensitive to it as I am now.
In fact, it happens when people are on their phones in otherwise silent places too. If I can hear you with almost perfect clarity when you should otherwise be out of earshot, then it is too loud.
I don't know if this is useful for you, but getting my MTHFR and COMT genes sequenced has been incredibly helpful for managing my own mental health. Since getting these results, I've been able to understand my own neurology better.
I'm sorry to hear about your issues with sleep - and can relate to them. In particular, my slow COMT means that my baseline cortisol is higher than most. Taking phosphatidyl serine before bed helps me a lot, and lets me sleep through the night.
Get heavy duty ear protection from home Depot like they wear on construction sites to protect workers from the noise of heavy machinery, and wear airpods/in-ear wireless headphones under them.
ymmv, but they saved me.
Everything after (and including) "When I get home I am beyond exhausted" is me. Although, I don't think I'm on a spectrum. Could that just be the insomnia, independently?
Insomnia def makes it worse, but I still have it in periods I sleep pretty well. I did not have it in the past, at least to that extent. Not sure if it is an aging thing, a medical condition, or just having to do too much work and deal with too many people there, together with difficulties to put boundaries.
The part about the headphones crackling even when the sound is technically fine really resonated; it's such a vivid way to describe sensory overwhelm that most people might never even think about
Anti-anxiety medication can help, there are plenty of people online that will tell you it's terrible or does nothing, but think about talking to your doctor about it.
based on my experience im going to assume you don’t keep the strict 8 hours maximum and also work at home.
you need more boundaries, that helped me a bit
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
Why do both eating a proper breakfast and skipping breakfast affect your masking negatively? No one is around, what difference does it make?
This is a really interesting aspect of masking. The thing is, it's often not the direct presence of external scrutiny that drives the feeling of needing to mask, it's a lifetime of having normal behaviour expectations reinforced to a point where they truly internalised that there's something wrong with not doing the "normal" thing. So they will even be masking in private and have to go to great lengths to even discover where they are doing that and proactively "undoing" their private masking in order to allow them to restore energy during their own private time.
All this is often referred to under the notion of "internalised ableism".
Okay, but isn't this just what all people do? Everyone has a lifetime of normal behavior expectations reinforced to a point where they are truly internalized that there's something wrong with not doing the "normal" thing.
That's called enculturation.
I find a lot very confusing about the idea of masking. Everyone masks, even people who are more neurotypical than autists. Getting along with social life means not showing every emotion, it means being uncomfortable, doing things that you personally dislike or find uncomfortable, feigning more comfort in social situations than you actually feel, regulating your behavior to fit in, etc. And then going home to detox and restore your energy with private time.
I'm not saying that masking is autism is not a thing. But most of what I hear described is just ... normal life for most people ... except perhaps to the degree it is felt or needed.
Most of the challenges of autism are also present in neurotypical just to a lesser degree. No one likes annoying loud sounds but to someone with autism the limit is going to be much lower. No one likes sudden changes but someone with autism won’t be able to handle them as easily. And so on.
I'm sure most people mask, but the difference between neurotypical and neurodivergent people is how much they mask, and when.
For instance, like many people on the spectrum, I feel discomfort making any form of direct eye contact. When I don't have a lot of mental energy, this discomfort can become quite intense, to the point that maintaining normal eye contact takes up so much mental effort that I can't listen to what someone is saying anymore.
I don't exactly have the "normal" experience to compare with, but I don't believe most people experience that. I've learned the hard way that people don't really appreciate it when you stare at the floor during the entire conversation, so forcing myself to make eye contact has become more automatic over the years, but it adds just a little bit of extra effort on top of what everyone else is feeling.
Sometimes, it's also other tiny issues. Deviations from how things "should be" can trigger an irrational feeling of upsetting. As a kid I remember crying about a door being painted, or the class using a different set of stairs to the normal route because deep down it felt extremely wrong. Even in my teens, having fries on a Tuesday was something I sometimes needed to recover from. I've learned to dismiss/ignore/crop up those irrational feelings, but sometimes they can sneak up on you and become quite taxing. The worst part, in my opinion, is how the mental impact remains despite knowing how absolutely bonkers those feelings are.
I believe I'm not affected as strongly by my autism as some other unfortunate souls are, because people seem somewhat surprised when they learn about stuff like that. I can only imagine how stressful their daily lives must be.
> normal life for most people ... except perhaps to the degree it is felt or needed
Well, yes, precisely. Almost everyone can relate to experiencing mild or moderate back pain for a couple of days when they sleep in a weird position, but some people have chronic back pain that makes life unbearable without prescription pain killers.
While talking to people about my ADHD in real life I noticed that many of them speak like they understand ADHD. Even when I try to explain in more detail they come really close to "getting it" by superficially relating to some of the ADHD symptoms, but unfortunately almost all of them end up taking the logical leap to say that "everyone deals with this" and start recommending "solutions".
Most people will never understand ADHD just like I don't truly understand what life is like for people with chronic pain, and that's fine.
People seem to at least conceptually understand that chronic pain = pain like they know it + much worse + never-ending, which they recognize as being awful. The thing that bothers me is that when it comes to ADHD (and autism) the calculation suddenly becomes ADHD = concentration problems they experienced + exaggeration + lack of discipline.
ADHD is relentless, it follows you everywhere, you can take many months off from work for stress relief and it will still be there (I tried). You can make sure to sleep well, eat well, exercise, avoid all stressors, focus on hobbies that make you happy and it'll still be there.
People juggle sleep deprivation, stressful job and/or kids, socializing, chores, appointments on a daily basis and say that concentration problems are normal, and yes, of course they are if you're overloading yourself like that. But many people with ADHD experience those (and much more) at our baseline and if I tried to achieve half of what other people achieve on a daily basis, I would burn myself out in under a month.
Some people might read this and think that this I'm an outlier but I think I'm pretty average as far as ADHD severity goes, I managed to finish university before struggling to keep up outside of highly structured environments, and ultimately getting diagnosed with ADHD as an adult.
I'm currently on Elvanse and it's a far cry from being a fix or a cure, but it makes things more manageable. My concentration on work that I find stimulating has always been alright so that hasn't changed much, I'm slightly less distractible during boring work, but it's been most helpful in other areas of executive functioning like task initiation.
For example at home I usually knew which chores needed to be done, and I desperately wanted to do them but I could never get started because I didn't have enough willpower. I would procrastinate for weeks or even months while constantly beating myself up over it.
I still don't enjoy chores, nobody does, but with medication I have noticeably more willpower to get started on things that need to be done. The thought of folding laundry, a task which I always knew would take me no longer than 5 minutes, no longer overwhelms me with dread and I end up doing it in a "reasonable" amount of time (reasonable for me, plenty of people would find it unreasonable if we lived together).
it's absolutely what all people do. The missing piece is you need to (a) multiply the severity/effort required by an order of magnitude and (b) add in a whole host of co-occuring factors like anxiety, OCD etc. that often come along for the ride
yeah i don't disagree about breakfast specifically if it's completely standalone. However it's worth recognising that autistic people in burnout lose a LOT of executive function. Something seemingly simple like making breakfast can actually be challenging if they enter that state. It's really hard for someone who hasn't experienced it to even conceive.
There is a difference between grabbing salty string cheese, a handful of cherry tomatoes and cashew nuts and literally eating them while standing in front of the fridge vs. actually making a breakfast and sitting down with it like a "human".
That doesn’t explain why both eating or skipping breakfast affect masking. Everyday, everyone either eats breakfast or they don’t, they can’t both be abnormal.
They could be if your options are “skip breakfast or eat something insane for breakfast because your brain and body crave it and it’s all you can manage to get yourself to eat if you are gong to eat.”
Think about how you might react if you were talking with someone about what they had for breakfast today and they answered “a bag of cotton candy and a beer”. That’s really weird right? Like you might be concerned about them for making that choice right? And what if on other days you notice that they’re a bit grumpier or more tired and they admit to not eating breakfast on those days. Now imagine over a few months you come to realize that your co-worker is either always skipping breakfast despite how it affects them, or they’re eating a bag of cotton candy and a beer. You’d probably be really concerned for them. You might even in an attempt to be helpful and supportive try and help them have better breakfasts, maybe even bring in some bagels (even though they always decline). This is an extreme example of course but for some autistic people, they will go through phases were if they eat they can only eat very specific things and those things aren’t going to be “normal”. During that time, the decision to eat or not to eat and the decision for what to eat are extremely fraught things because very well meaning and well intentioned people find the decisions being made odd and feel like they need to “help”. But if you don’t want the help (or worse if you know you should be doing something different but your mind will make you physically ill if you do) all that “help” is really just another stressor on top of everything else.
This is because autistism advocacy groups misuse the word mask. It is supposed to refer to extra work you have to do playing a specific persona. E.g. at a party pretending to be a character from a movie or a book. And especially trying to force yourself to become that persona to fit in.
A lot of people in the advocacy space use it to mean basic things like being well behaved or being nice to people. Everybody has to be well-behaved at work. Everybody has to consider the feelings of others etc.
The idea of "wearing a mask" in the sense of being polite is older than the notion of masking in autism. For example, P. G. Wodehouse used it a few times in the 1920s to refer to the social expectations made on aristocratic families. E.g. from 1922:
> I didn’t like the chap, but we Woosters can wear the mask. I beamed a bit.
In this sense everyone masks. In fact they mask almost all the time from the time they get up until maybe the time they go to bad. Masking in autism originally referred to something different that was specific to autism.
The way it's used now it essentially just means "it's harder for me to fit in." Which is true but doesn't tell you anything about autism from a psychological point of view beyond the obvious fact that it's harder for us to fit in.
> people in the advocacy space use it to mean basic things like being well behaved or being nice to people
Thank you for this comment. As a family member of a young AuDHD person I am continually battered by a combination of their behavior (which directly and un-ignorably degrades the experience of everyone around) and by various 'advocacy' ideas that use phrasing like that to not-so-subtly imply that it's actually our bad for daring to expect to "not be hit," or to not be forced to constantly base our whole lives on one person's preferences, etc.
It's tough sometimes to figure out what's real, what's a fair expectation, what's something that can be learned/unlearned, and what's just inevitable.
Some kids are just really wild by temperament and it shows up in their first year or two on the Earth.
Short of breaking their spirit there's not much the parents can do to make them less wild. Parents have to try to find a way to let the kid be wild and feel good about being a temperamentally wild kid while also recognizing that there are limits and boundaries. A similar experience is perhaps owning a dog that needs to run around outside every day.
But nothing in the autism or ADHD diagnoses says you can't learn social skills or that they shouldn't. Nor does it require anyone to endure abuse or physical attacks.
Assuming you're not the parent (since you say the more generic "family member"), probably the best thing you can do is try to befriend this kid and learn a bit about what's like to be them. And try to find traits in yourself that help you see why they act one way or another.
Another thing to keep in mind is that things you take for granted may be very distressing to this person. They may be able to hear noises or smell smells or taste flavors that you can't. The parents have a tough job because nobody wants their kid's preferences to dictate everything, but nobody wants to knowingly make their kid distressed when they can help it. That becomes a tough tradeoff when you have someone who is easily distressed by a world that isn't really designed with their brains in mind. This is where things like earplugs and sunglasses can help. It's a bit like being hungover all the time. If you reduce the sensory input everyone becomes less irritable and more even keel.
Having had personal experience with this problem, there is actually a simple but difficult solution to your problem:
Focus in the effect if the person's action on you, and set hard boundaries for yourself.
Note that boundaries are in this specific form:
"If you do X in Y situation, I will do Z"
The consequence to the instigating person (the Z part) is important. The person you described likely has a deficit in empathy, so feedback on actions has to happen to modify behavior.
Note that I'm not saying to hit back. Consequences are generally best when withdrawing something of value than adding something of negative value.
For example: "If we're watching a movie and you are physically rowdy, you will have to leave the living room and entertain yourself in your room".
Focua on how things affect you, and what actions you can take in response to boundary breaking behavior. Then be ruthlessly firm and consistent about it.
> The person you described likely has a deficit in empathy
Sorry, but I have to correct this because it's a common misunderstanding. It's actually a name collision.
People on the autism spectrum struggle with theory of mind, which is also called "cognitive empathy." We can have difficulty understanding the mental states and emotions of others.
On they other hand, we're often higher than average on what's called "emotional empathy" or "affective empathy." Many autistic people get very distressed when others are unhappy or are suffering. For example, autistic folks are over-represented in the animal rights movements and other movements to reduce suffering.
Somebody who lacks empathy in the everyday use of the word is someone who does not care if others are suffering. That is not a symptom of autism, and never has been going back to the start of research on the topic.
Thank you for your productive addition to this conversation! Hearing from adults who can better put into words what the autistic experience is like is so, so helpful to me.
I don't disagree with you and I agree that the stereotype of autistic people as lacking empathy is harmful and generally untrue.
HOWEVER - the person I was replying to was mentioning them being hurt by the behaviors, and that signals a lack of empathy from the individual doing thise actions.
Even apart from behavioral disorders, there's comorbidities -- autism is comorbid with ADHD and ADHD is highly comorbid with a lot of conduct disorders and personality disorders.
So it could be any of that. But my basic point is that for the person I'm replying to all of this complexity simplifies if you instead focus on the effect of the other person's behaviors on you. That's what you have control over.
To add, newer ish research also posits the Double Empathy Problem [0], which (I think?) boils down to basic miscommunication / misunderstanding. However, it feels like it's often considered the autistic person's job to adjust and fit in.
I've mentioned to relevant people a couple of times in the past that I generally feel like I am "acting" in most social situations. Like I have an idea as to who/how I need to be in that moment and act accordingly. I'm used to it and it's not really something very conscious in the moment, but if the event lasts a long time it gets kind of draining since you have parallel tracks going - reading the room, predicting what reaction someone expects at any time, issuing that reaction, etc. It's not that I don't enjoy the events, but I can "fill up" on interaction quickly and want to go home early to recharge.
Hmm I wouldn't say I feel anxious during this, nor nervous before social situations. People around me would say I'm overall a social and outgoing person. It's more just playing a certain part of yourself that is relevant for the situation. It can be tiring in large doses, but not anxiety-inducing.
I'm glad you posted. When I hear masking described like it is in this simulator:
"To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.",
I always think, "isn't that just life?" If I didn't hide my natural habits I wouldn't be going to work at all. If I didn't hide my feelings I would yell at the person in the office next to me for listening to some webinar through their computer speakers and their door open. If I didn't imitate the social behaviors that coworkers expect I wouldn't wish the person I barely know happy birthday.
I mean, the thing about autism is that your 'natural behaviours and feelings' can be things that others find deeply offputting, like hand-flapping or other strange repetitive movements or sounds, anxious skin-picking, avoiding eye contact etc. But not doing those things requires conscious effort, because they're natural to you.
So it's kind of like going through social interactions with an itch that you're constantly aware of but can't scratch. Or perhaps for a neurotypical person, imagine that you're instead not allowed to make any facial expressions or change in your tone of voice and you have to constantly monitor yourself to make sure you're not doing what is, to you, a normal and unconscious reaction. Of course everyone has to modulate their tone of voice and expression to some degree, but with autistics the gap between how they'd behave 'naturally' and 'what is considered socially acceptable' can be a much bigger one to bridge.
An analogy I’ve heard that I like is that the difference is akin to the difference between the “act” you put on for work, and the “act” you would put on for a high stakes job interview. Both are “just” normal proper business behavior but one is much more exhausting and if you had to do that later every day, all day, that would be a huge drain on you.
It’s a bit different though. If you have autism you might not even want to wish your friend or family member happy birthday. Whereas for neurotypical I think they would normally enjoy doing that.
Or you might not want to say hello or goodbye in the normal situations they are used. Or small talk. These are all things many neurotypical enjoy.
Yeah I like to think of it as active roleplaying instead of having to put in an effort. Most people have to put in some effort in social situations, heck I catch myself saying unproductive things to my partner if I slip completely into passive mode.
If you feel like this, you may be on the spectrum (not an insult btw).
Masking for neuro typical people is very easy, even if emotionally draining. My wife is the perfect example - her personality is to be nice to everyone and to connect with people. A lot of times this leads to prolonged conversations with people, which then she complains about, but its basically like saying you are tired after going on a long bike ride - there is some enjoyment in the activity.
Whereas for neuro-spicy people, masking is the equivalent of spilling seeds on the floor and having to pick up each one with tweezers to put them back. Its both exhausting and not enjoyable.
No, parent is right: everybody "masks" at work. Call it putting on a persona, playing a role, whatever - but as you said, it's less effortful for some than others.
I wouldn't even say its less effort. Its a whole different kind of effort. A social neurotypical person willingly engages in interactions and "masks". A person on the spectrum only engages because they have to.
For me masking at work is more boring than it is effort. Most coworkers i've encountered are so plain that the moment you start discussing something personal that isn't the most sanitised hobby ever they get funny. Tell them you spent the weekend at an illegal rave or getting drunk at a furry convention and they start to freak out. It's no effort to not talk about this but it also means there's basically nothing to discuss.
Life's too short for bullshitting. Why not just speak your mind and avoid the people who react that way? I've found that if I sanitize my words I get sanitized responses, and vice versa. Nobody is as boring as they seem.
Everybody has a social battery, but while some are working with a USB PD 240W monster you can't take on an airplane, others have to get by with an iPhone Air (and they can't disable background refresh).
It's true that different people require different amounts of effort to do and approach it with different tactics, but fundamentally almost nobody streams their inner monologue straight out of their lips, and I think when it does happen is actually much more associated with TBI and inhibition disregulation than ASD. (Which is not to say that it doesn't require a different approach or more effort for those with ASD.)
Yeah this is a thing that gets me. Everyone has to mask because otherwise there'd be a more conflict over shit that doesn't matter then there likely already is during meetings and stuff.
Some of the messaging too is just... off-putting/patronizing. "Brave the grocery store"? I know social situations can be tough on people but it's not you're being asked to kill the chicken and process it or grow the veggies. Is resiliency so low that it's a battle to go pick up necessities?
Maybe I was blessed to grow up in a poor, not exactly stable household at least for a while.
_Thank_ you. I'm seeing a LOT of people in this thread who do not understand autism at _all_ and yet claim it's really not much different than neurotypical people's experience.
"Why should x situation be like y difficulty? I don't understand."
"No, you _don't_ understand, because you're not autistic. Which isn't really an insult but it is the case. So why you gotta brush off our struggles like you do get it."
Being autistic is exhausting on a _whole different level_. It is NOT comparable to neurotypicals' experiences except superficially.
For anyone who feels this way about the grocery store, I'd highly recommend curbside pickup or online ordering. Some stores are getting rid of it, but plenty still offer it. If you live in a large enough city, grocery delivery can also pretty competitive in pricing if you're willing to negotiate on brands.
And if you have the luxury of time / a flexible schedule, figure out when it's quietest. Some shops in the UK are (or used to be) open 24/7, small hours shopping is where it's at.
Not in socially acceptable ways - people look at you strangely when you have sunglasses on indoors, and when I'm wearing headphones people usually gesture for me to take them off when they want to talk. It's even worse to have the loud noise suddenly crashing in while I have to talk to the cashier - better to have gotten used to it before.
> Shouldn't a list be a positive here?
In some ways yes, but it also brings new problems. What if a specific product isn't in stock? It's also pressure to really get everything - I sometimes can't get everything on my list because it stresses me out enough that I'd rather order some stuff.
> What's bad about "packing bags and paying", with "paying" being separate from human interaction?
Packing bags isn't an issue for me, but paying takes enough concentration that I often stumble over my words, e.g. by combining two colloquial responses. It's always embarrassing and makes the next times I go shopping even more stressful.
This feels like anxiety more so than anything. I literally walk around everywhere with sunglasses and headphones. I'm not ASD just sound and light sensitive do to physical damage. Not a single person has bothered me about this even during conversation. I chat with big ass cans on my ears. I go to stores at times where people aren't there and favor pick up if I can't do that. It's not that I can't interact. I just get really irritated by crowds and why do that to myself if I don't have to? I do self check out when possible because it is just faster and I always get irritated by how they pack things.
Stumbling over your words? Oh well. Who cares. It's a cashier. I did this all summer in a foreign country. Toddler talked my way through it and honestly with everyone. It's not exactly the same, but the pressure is. It's incorrect speech with a person you'll never see again or who won't remember you. Who cares?
Like this all feels like anxiety and lack of problem solving. And I'm not sure I even forgive it because my kid has autism and anxiety and she has solutions for these problems. She's not perfect, but she seems to be carrying on better than what you're portraying here. I also know several autistic people where what you're talking about is just not a thing. I get if you know an autistic person yoy know that autistic person, but they are coming up with solutions that allow them to be without a higher level of stress than anyone else.
When things are hard and you anticipate that you're going to struggle, it's perfectly natural that you're going to develop an anxiety response to those things. It's possible that you will describe the experience through the lens of anxiety even if there is more going on than merely anxiety.
> I'm not ASD just sound and light sensitive do to physical damage. Not a single person has bothered me about this even during conversation.
I'm glad that you have found a means to manage your difficulties and it does not cause you social issues. Bear in mind that someone who is very ASD is "manually" managing social situations which come automatically to "the rest of us." The same social disapproval you casually dismiss is likely a cause of anxiety for them.
> my kid has autism and anxiety and she has solutions for these problems.
I'm glad that she appears to be high functioning. Even those who are might want to avoid the shop because it's just a challenge they would rather avoid today. But for others I can imagine it being all too much.
Anxiety is not a rational thing, in the same way a friend of the family who had OCD would lambast me about the "particles" my outside shoes and the hems of my pants could bring inside all the while ignoring the giant stack of molding dishes in the sink.
It's a feeling in the body, a sense of alarm. That sinking pit of adrenaline.
I don't think I have autism but I do get ptsd type stuff occasionally.
I'm not sure I disagree that anxiety isn't rational. Anxiety about certain topics may be less rational, but being too anxious to sleep alone in the dark in the jungle likely has some evolutionary benefits. Similar with the anxiety at seeing large predatory animals or the lack of food leading into winter. It becomes a dysfunction when the anxiety is caused by everyday innocuous things to the general public.
Interesting observation in the last bit, research indicates links between PTSD and symptons often associated with autism: https://neurodivergentinsights.com/ptsd-and-autism/. That said, PTSD is treatable to a point, if you can verbalise what situations or what experiences cause your ptsd type stuff, treatments like EMDR may help for you.
I am grateful for grocery and food delivery services so that I do not have to brave the grocery store.
It gets worse. I haven't left my apartment in a few weeks. The last time I went out into the world is because I had to appear in court for jury duty. (Yes, it sucked. No, I didn't want to ask for a hardship.)
People experience things in a wide variety of ways. Things that most people believe are trivial can be an anxiety trigger for others.
And for what it's worth, I am not put off or patronized by "Brave the grocery store." That's an accurate description of what I feel every time I have to go to the pharmacy.
You kinda sound like a macho asshole. None of those has anything to do with "toughening up" or growing up in an unstable household. It's like you didn't read the article or any comments here and felt the need to blast your insecurities out into open?
"Why do people need the wheelchair ramp? Is resiliency so low nowa days? Are people lazy?" Lol
Calling this an issue of resiliency is completely missing the point about autism. I recommend you do some more reading because it has nothing to do with resiliency. People on the spectrum can have incredible resiliency in certain activities that neurotypical people couldn't (for example, hyper focus on a very complex cognitive task or dedicate hours of "boring" repetitive practice in a physical activity).
I think lots of people on the spectrum would gladly grow vegetables or kill chickens over having to go to the grocery store. Tolerance levels on activities placing you in highly social situations with overwhelming stimuli can be significantly lower for people on the spectrum.
Someone above this said the boxes in a grocery store are "shouting" at them with their bright colors. I know autism has varying levels but like, I sincerely worry about their ability to live if looking a box is causing a truly remarkable level of distress.
> hyper focus on a very complex cognitive task or dedicate hours of "boring" repetitive practice in a physical activity
That's awesome, take that win for sure that it's easier for them to do that and if one would rather go farm than take place in society then I think that's a fantastic goal to work toward.
> I sincerely worry about their ability to live if looking a box is causing a truly remarkable level of distress.
It’s sort of built into the definition of a disorder that otherwise normal stressors or negative pressures have an outsized and excessive impact on the person with the disorder relative to what it would be if they didn’t have the disorder.
Think of it like this, if I punch you as hard as I can in your leg, that might hurt quite a bit and make you favor your leg for a few hours. But if you have a broken leg and I do the same thing it’s going to be much worse for you and you won’t recover nearly is quickly. The input hasn’t changed, only the underlying condition that amplifies the results of that input.
And if you had a broken leg and I did punch you as hard as I could, no one would really be “worried for your ability to live” if you complained that my doing that ruined your ability to function today and tomorrow. Because of course it did, you have a broken leg.
Same idea here. Autism makes the inputs excessively intense. The only difference is se expect your broken leg to eventually heal, and we generally don’t go around punching people in their legs. But autism doesn’t heal and we do live in a word of intense advertising and flash in an attempt to grab your attention.
That is an excellent point. As an autistic person I would happily kill and clean chickens every meal . If it meant not feeling like a panic attack every trip to the store .
Yep... If I didn't mask while at work and home, I'd probably be annoying my family and coworkers with state and local land use politics issues all the time.
Is it that common to upset people at work and have absolutely no clue why or how or what you’ve done?
And not from a lack of trying, and definitely not because you don’t care?
Because to me, that’s what masking means: constantly checking yourself because you do care, and you do like people, and the last thing you ever want to do is hurt or upset someone, and yet sometimes you do, and that sucks, and you learn from it, file it away in your mind for next time, and wake up the next day with the same happy-go-lucky optimism you do every day until the world beats it out of you.
Skipping breakfast reduces the caloric energy you have. Eating a full breakfast is basically going against your instinct. Optimal thing for autistic people would be a energy bar that is both healthy, has good texture, and makes you feel full.
The game puts the "masking" definition right in the start page, no need to deduce. I also dislike how any form of self care reduces your masking even if you're alone.
It's designed to make you lose in a couple of days, which would imply you're not a highly functional autist, and hence I wonder how the heck did you get a job without others noticing your autism?
For example, self care with video games would be different. I think the author was just trying to demonstrate that self care in the normal sense isn't the same to spectrum folks
I don't enjoy having a full breakfast before work, but I usually still do, otherwise I'd be hungry before lunchtime. It's one of the thousands of little compromises we all make every day, I'm not really sure how this constitutes masking, or I'm not understanding the term correctly.
Basically its forcing yourself to do normal things.
The idea behind the game is to illustrate that adhering to norms is energy draining, while also letting yourself be yourself results in negative outcomes.
I don't consider myself autistic, but the simulation seemed to me like the typical experience of a working adult. Most of us force ourselves through routines we need to adhere to but don't enjoy, or even hate. Most of us aren't really ourselves with work colleagues.
I still don't understand why having breakfast or changing the radio station decreases your masking, though.
I was surprised to find that skipping my medication which causes drowsiness instantly caused my energy to crash to zero and lose the game. I think this is well intentioned but weirdly designed.
If I don't eat in the morning, I have extremely low energy and am very cranky.
That makes it harder to mask, because the decisions I would make with low energy and crankiness are not the same ones I would make if I had eaten. It impacts my ability to converse with others in an effective way.
This just seems like "burnout" simulator. What makes it unique to having autism vs being overworked in a job you hate in an alienating urban environment not congenial to human thriving?
Everyone would rather be cozy on the couch under a warm blanket than wake up at 6:30AM every day before commuting to type meaningless stuff at a computer desk, be exposed to a sensory environment that is far from ideal, and converse with people they would never associate with if they didn't have to. The experience of the wage worker is a universally reviled existence that is far from a unique plight afflicting those with high-functioning autism.
Is the implication that someone without autism could deal with all these stressors effortlessly with no need to think or put any effort in?
I answered this as somebody with 20+ years in this industry. I burned out instantly.
I had my wife do it, as a stay at home wife. She still burned out and has no reason too. She made it 6 questions. She said she wouldn't have chosen half of the optional questions.
Everyone's different. Some people genuinely thrive under the conditions you're describing, others don't like it but are able to put up with it no problem, and others can't stand it but are forced to.
The perspective I've found most useful is this. There is a constellation of correlated "autistic traits", which everyone has to a degree, but which like most traits become disabling if turned up too much. "Autism" is a term describing that state. So, it is much less a particular switch that can be turned on or off, not even a slider between "not autistic" and "very autistic", but more a blurry region at the outskirts of the multidimensional bell curve of the human experience.
People on the furthermost reaches of this space are seriously, unambiguously disabled, by any definition. They're what people traditionally imagine as "autistic". But the movement in psychiatry has been to loosen diagnostic criteria to better capture the grey areas. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is a social question, not a scientific one, in my opinion. Most of us want to live in a society that supports disabled people, but how many resources to allocate to that is a difficult question where our human instincts seem to clash with the reality of living in a modern society.
On your last paragraph: I think this is a serious problem with the discourse around neuroatypicality today. My opinion is that the important thing is that we become more accepting and aware of the diversity of the human experience, and that this is a necessary social force to balance the constant regression to the mean imposed by modernity. If that's the case, then drawing a border around any category of person, staking a territorial claim to a pattern of difficulty the group experiences, and refusing to accept that the pattern exists beyond it: it's just unfair, it's giving into defensiveness.
> They're what people traditionally imagine as "autistic". But the movement in psychiatry has been to loosen diagnostic criteria to better capture the grey areas.
There has also been a change that reclassified what we would previously have termed Asperger’s Syndrome as Autism. To be clear, AS was always considered to be a form of or closely related to Autism, but that change in language does mean we’ve had a big shift in what is Autism medically and what the public pictures when they think Autism
The key difference here is magnitude and mechanism. For autistic people, even "normal" sensory inputs or social interactions can cause physical discomfort, confusion
If the expectation of the job is to "type meaningless stuff at a computer desk", doesn't this point to a problem with the expectations of the role? I would submit that if the work is truly meaningless, and it often is in my experience, it doesn't need to be done. Of course anyone would choose a pleasurable activity over meaningless, mundane busy work - regardless of their unique expression of the autism spectrum.
I also think that there are many wage workers who do not revile that existence. My intuition says it is more common in "office jobs".
I think the implication is that someone without autism can recover from these stressors more easily. And they tend to be able to absorb these stressors with less of an impact on their mood. People without autism have more control over when their brain is engaged with something, and have to expend less effort when exerting that control. It's not just about physical energy.
The brain of a person dealing with these types of symptoms is kind of like an engine running near red-line 99% of the time. When someone is masking, for every thought they express, there were likely dozens you didn't hear or see expressed over the course of a short social interaction.
Other times, they are caught in mental loops. Reading the same line of text over and over, or replaying someone else's comment over and over, and not comprehending because of an auditory stimulus that is monopolizing the comprehension processes within the brain. When this happens, it's easy for them to miss important context or body language when working with others. That requires even more masking to cover up because it's a social faux pas to admit you missed something important. So then your brain goes into overdrive trying to derive the missed information from followup conversation.
Using sustained, intense thinking to overcome challenges that others don't encounter as often can become the default coping mechanism for this kind of thing. It's not something that is easily noticed, because it's part of masking, but it tends to be more draining than many people realize.
I tried this -- I am undiagnosed, but my kids are diagnosed. On one hand I thought parts over-dramatized, on the other hand I thought parts were watered down.
Misophonia for me does not give me any choice. Either the noise stops or I am leaving. If necessary I will explain later. If the noise stops I am possibly leaving anyway in case it starts again. Fortunately in my case the trigger is pretty obscure, like nails on a chalkboard type of rarity -- people don't actually do that so often.
The explanations I thought were dramatized. One of the challenges I think people with autism have is trying to explain their reactions and coming up with things that neurotypical people cannot relate to. It is more like reflexes. I'd be slack-jawed if my co-worker asked me to explain why my leg moved when the doctor hits my knee, "it just does that when you hit it that way", "probably something to do with ligaments, or tendons? IDK". Could you make an "undiagnosed" mode where your scores just go up and down?
And the options -- when the people team came through at $bigcorp and announced tiny hotdesking, I filed all the necessary paperwork, gave constructive feedback, worked with my manager etc, but started looking for new work immediately and noped out at the first opportunity. The people team was happy to close the file which was growing fat with demerits like not hanging my coat the right way, but my peers and reports were upset. well done people team! This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
> This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
It's easy to mouth slogans, and modern companies employ teams of specialists in that department. You can't trust their words, which should be assumed to be lies, only their actions (especially their actions when they're under some pressure).
Here's an absurdly clear example: I recently listened to these podcasts about Saudi Arabia's Neom project. It is hyper-dysfunctional and was run by a guy who literally bragged about treating his subordinates as slaves trying to work them to death. But all the responses from the project are pitch-perfect corporate "we value our employees," "we follow best practices," etc.
If a company professes to be supportive of neurodivergence, it means either (1) they're supportive of neurodivergence; or (2) they are hostile to neurodivergence and have gotten into trouble for it, so have strong motivation to claim that they are supportive. There will probably be written policies and strongly-worded emails that are supportive of neurodivergence, which enable them to continue being hostile to neurodivergence.
I would guess there's far more of (2) going around than (1).
This is an overly polarized view -- what does "supportive" even mean? What forms are actually deemed permissible? -- but it's probably more right than wrong.
It's like the schools with posters everywhere declaring "Zero tolerance for bullying" or "Bully free zone". Except that there is no (1) at those places. Those signs mean they have a problem with bullying and haven't come up with any solutions.
I am not autistic in any way afaik, but "tiny hotdesking" sounds like a torture come up in the seventh circle of hell.
> This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
No company is supportive of neurodivergence, if it actually causes a difference. They are supportive if your issue is you need to wear noise cancelling headphones, and they can put your photo on the careers page about how they support neurodivergence.
Something I am not quite able to compute is why they are so rigid. I paid for a house with enough rooms that I turned one into a generous office. My peers tell me my hobby productivity is off the charts. There is / was no price at which I could solve for an acceptable office environment at this company. At any company I have worked with or heard of.
I get that there is back biting and intensive score-keeping, resentment etc, but the act of putting everything on a synchronized linear scale (with sub linear progression) seems cruel. Some people like tchotchkies, some people don't like those esoteric office snacks, some people like mouthwash and shoe polish and fancy towels in the restroom. Why gatekeep it all and shove the same exact bundle of goods down everyone's throats?
If they were really minimaxing your next unit of work, this is not an optimal strategy. It's just lazy, a children's tale of how an office might be.
Because for most people, someone reacting with disinterest for the thing they care about is a rare and upsetting event, not their entire life's experience. That's what it means to be "normal", you align better with your peers. Most people don't need what you need. Most people can work with what you can not. You are choosing to be the exception. You chose to be like this, so unchoose it and stop being a problem.
Of course... That's the quiet part. The out loud part is just dismissing everything you say and passing you over for promotion.
The objections you have raised, the things you have said. I really understand what you mean. There's evidence all around that the aspects of our experience isn't alien at all. Why can't others see that? At this point I think that not seeing it is necessary mental infrastructure for some people. It's a bridge over an abyss that for us broke.
I think the solace I get is that this line of work tends to funnel people of our disposition into it. So we find ourselves less alone than we normally would.
One problem is you can have 2+ neurodivergents or autistic people with conflicting needs or ideal environments. You can only do so much past a certain point in light of that condition. One needs a bright environment to stay awake, another is sensitive to light. Hyposensitive and hyper sensitive. One needs the volume low and the other high in the same meeting. One gets easily distracted by another stimming that they need to stay focused. It gets frustrating fast.
Autistic people can get sick of other autistic people's shit. Pathological demand avoidance can just make it near impossible to work with them in a normal context and on and on it goes.
Draw straws and one person dials in from their desk or a phone closet. Take advantage of multiple locations, which are frequently if not always part of the landscape. I had a similar experience, there was a lady on the same floor who was sensitive to light, versus I had a plant that was dying, so I bought a timer and a desk lamp and set it directly under the lamp to run after hours, and we kept the lights dim during the day.
At some point the rigidity is just another type of enshittification, there to subtract. Ingrained in their culture and part of their prerogative. Denying them the privilege is an insult that earns greater retribution. Pour encourager les autres.
It would literally cost them nothing to be flexible. Solzhenitsyn level material.
Suggests a new unit of measure, the Solz, which characterizes how occult and byzantine the rules are and how vindictive and arbitrary the application. Bonus points for tail-eating and Lysenkoist aspects. Stalin era normalized to 1.
I had "exceeds" ratings the whole time at this job, btw. I am told my contributions live on 10 years later, I can't say that about most of my work experience.
I’ve realised in recent years that I’m quite far on the spectrum. Very obvious when I was young but am exceptionally good at masking now so most people don’t realise.
Nowadays I experience misophonia in “attacks” that just come on. Recently I was on public transport and the noise was suddenly so unbearable that I had to get the hell out of there, hadn’t really felt like that since I was a kid. Fight or flight feeling. When I was a kid I had a lot of hearing tests as a result, ASD was not on anyone’s radar.
I also thought I was exceptionally good at masking. Turns out I was exceptionally good at showing a differently weird version of myself that was still quite clearly weird.
This is a question out of genuine curiosity and not intended to minimize misophonia in any way:
I do not see any examples of a "naturally occurring" sound there. Is the sound supposed to be human generated in some way? That would feel a bit incongruent with my understanding of it as a pure stimulus response situation.
Yes, natural sounds do trigger it (for me). The difference is that if it is a natural sound, it becomes a problem to be solved - intermittent dripping from taps, the noise of the wheel in my daughters hamster enclosure, or something tapping a window are specific cases I can cite. Those incidents resulted in a) me learning how to replace a leaking faucet assembly (the taps and faucet were one unit) , b) upgrading to a better, quieter hamster wheel, and c) trimming a tree.
When people are the cause it becomes more challenging. People feel attacked when you tell them they are chewing loudly, or they think you are weird when you complain about the sound of the specific pen they are using makes when they are writing on the paper bothers you. Couple misophonia reactions with ADHD justice sensitivity and the emotional reaction can overload my rational comprehension that it is quite normal to make, tolerate, and ignore those sounds to make the stupid fucking meat between my ears feel like I am being targeted by whoever is making the noise. 95% of time I can manage it, but when it gets overwhelming my reactions can be suboptimal (like, wildly inappropriate when I was a kid, but as an adult pulling an Irish goodbye and just leaving, which can be a career limiting move when you are in the workplace).
Not sure whether you'd consider it natural, but I first noticed this with the sound of running taps. The bathroom was next door to my bedroom and I'd often get up and turn the taps off if someone left the bath running... not sure if anyone ever noticed!
Not sure if it's the same for everyone, but for me it's caused by an over-focus on the sound. Once I've noticed it, it's like the sound gets louder and louder...
[edit] I'm fairly sure my Dad was on the spectrum, and the sounds young kids make would make him very distressed, shouting or banging etc. so I don't think it's synthetic vs natural sounds.
interesting observation your sibling also made. its commonly described as making the sufferer IRATE at the person causing of the sound which matches your comment
anyone who experiences willing to shed light? id guess if the sufferer expects we all dislike certain sounds, causing them intentionally is especially hateful?
Another observation is that they're either idle sounds (pen clicking, finger tapping) or necessary secondary sounds made during some activity. It's literally impossible to unwrap a piece of candy without making some noise, and damn near impossible to stir a liquid without the stirrer hitting the container once.
>id guess if the sufferer expects we all dislike certain sounds, causing them intentionally is especially hateful?
I think it's pointless to attempt to look at it rationally, given the reactions I've heard seem entirely irrational and disproportionate.
I remember one time I was at work and a coworker on the opposite end of the room was using what I thought was the exact same model of mechanical keyboard I was using, with blue switches. I had never realized just how loud those things were until then. I kept glancing at him and could feel myself getting unreasonably annoyed, but I really had no grounds to say anything under any circumstance, given I had been using those very same switches in that same office very recently. What really struck me was how the same noise would sound pleasing when I made it and annoying when someone else made it, and I wondered if I had bothered someone with my typing, or if it was just me. I don't know if I'll use my own keyboard with clicky switches if I share an office with someone again.
I wanted to repair a HyperX mouse, but the switches I needed weren't available. I bought ones on a gamble because they were cheap, but they didn't fit, so I gave them away to a friend, and he used them to mod a cheapo mouse. It felt wrong to me for the clicks to make so little noise. He seemed happy with it, though.
Right, there is definitely a short learning curve where you have to get used to the fact that your mouse button is not making any noise. It almost feels like it must be faulty, but it's not, it's just silent.
This was an interesting piece on misophonia. It seems like it goes beyond just the sounds alone and it may depend on a perception of intentionality behind the sound.
My SO has misphonia, and strongly reacts to many sounds I make like smacking while eating or tapping my foot while thinking. She can also react strongly to noises outside the home, like if a car idles loudly outside.
She works in a kindergarten, and so I asked how she tolerates all those kids making noises while eating and such, given how adverse she is towards the sounds I make.
She said it didn't bother her the slightest as she knew the kids couldn't help it, and the reason my smacking annoyed her for example was because she knew it could be avoided if I just were more careful.
great share. the authors so introspective it almost seems like a straw man vehicle. i mean that in a good way, i think? not used to people writing about their shortcomings matter-of-factly like this
Does everyone have this to some extent? Or is it really only a thing neurospicy folks experience? I have to run away from my wife when she's chewing loudly sometimes, the rage is real.
I carry silicone putty ear plugs with me pretty much all the time.
They are very squishy and I can place then in my ear and depending on how thick I make them, they have varying levels of blocking out sound. Super useful if I want extra blocking or just a little light blocking so I can still hear things around me, but dampened.
They have been a life changer for me. The best kind I've found are Mack's. Maybe they would help you too.
Oh wow, I was just feeling grateful that I don't have misophonia, but then you had to mention chewing noises. I had that for decades. It wasn't all the time, but it didn't have to be loud or open-mouth or anything. It would just switch on and I couldn't hear or think about anything else. I daydreamed doing violent things to make the person stop, even when I logically knew it wasn't even slightly loud or unusual or ill-intentioned.
It almost never happens anymore, thankfully. Once every other month or so.
(Note that I am not autistic, or at least undiagnosed and my guess is that I wouldn't be. I just have some fairly mild autistic tendencies. I have a toe on the spectrum, or something. Those tendencies have a pretty dramatic impact on my life, but I think in a mostly neurotypical way -- we boring people can have similar problems too!)
I have to feel that most people find this unpleasant to some level since "eat with your mouth closed" is such universal manors that gets drummed in to you as a child. But I guess the difference is if you find it gross vs if it sends you in to a fuming rage at the smallest exposure.
I love it, I have been meaning to put together a similar simulation to demonstrate the effects of interruptions and context switches on developers.
Something like the following:
- a game or puzzle which requires working memory, like matching pairs or some puzzles that need a lot of working memory and/or flipping between screens
- this gets interrupted by fullscreen interruptions of someone's face, and text asking questions, or announcing something, and you have to pick an answer or a reaction (multiple choice)
- it could start with questions like 'hi, are you busy?' or 'can I ask you a question?'
- answers which tries to end the conversation quickly could lead to even more demanding reactions or questions
- interruptions stating there is an emergency can lead to a lot of questions and answers which then leads you to discover than it is in fact not an emergency
- once one of these engagements finish you can return to the game and try to complete it
- you'll get multiple interruptions like this
- other interruptions can also flash up, like a notification that a meeting is due in x minutes
- it could then have a short simulated meeting, perhaps just a line by line scroll of dialogue between others, where you need to say nothing
- however, at some point someone will ask you directly about one of the items discussed, and you will be given a set of fairly ambiguous multiple choice answers which you will have to try out until you get to the 'correct' one
- at the end of the meeting you return to the working memory task/game
- this gets interrupted by someone then asking you about the action points in the meeting
- return to the game
- get notifications about the end of your work day coming up
Have two people sit next to each other, each with a blank piece of paper and a pen.
Have them both simultaneously write down the numbers from 1 to 1: one time in decimal, one time in roman numbers and one time as letters of the alphabet (a=1, b=2...)
One person goes about it system by system (first decimal, then Roman... ). The other goes about it number by number (1,I,A,2,II,B...)
So interesting to me how many comments here, which are intended to be critques of the game, unknowingly end up giving insights into the autistic experience. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but there's some elegance in how that's played out.
- I don't like the choices given
- Why did both options, make my x score drop?
- I don't understand how this game is scored
- I don't agree with how this game is scored
- That's not what masking is/everybody has to do that
In my experience at least, these are the responses to the real world that are at the centre of autism - especially for those undiagnosed / late-diagnosed. Why don't I understand this thing that everyone else seems to, and nobody understands this thing that I've clearly explained 3 times now? Why is x that is so easy for everyone else so hard for me? I don't understand what I did wrong.
Games like this are never going to be perfect simulations of even a single person's experience, but are great for demonstrating that others might not experience the world in the same way as you. And the more people understand that, the more empathy and less conflict there will be in the world.
I think the point of the game is that it is almost impossible (the character is already at the end of the rope in the beginning, surprisingly realistic, since I been there), showing how hostile and random the corporate office jobs are - for anybody, but especially if you have any type of disabling factor.
But instead people complain ”But it is not a fun game :cry:”. Sigh.
I think it is reasonable to expect that a game that is called ”Autism Simulator” is likely neither going to a) be easy b) very enjoyable c) make much sense. You could also complain similarly about the game called ”Paying Hospital Bills Without Money” being unfair or that ”Terminal Cancer Ward” -game is impossible to beat. Hell, why not complain that Josef K in Kafka’s trial is quite unfairly treated? I think it is fairly reasonable to expect the player to manage their expectations and consider the game more as an art piece. Otherwise you miss the point completely.
I think it's very reasonable to expect it to make sense. For an autism simulator in particular, I expect my stats to make more sense than in the average simulator.
That doesn't mean it has to be easy or even winnable, but I should be able to figure out how my choices directly affect me.
And those other games you theorize put the difficulty in the title. "Autism simulator" does not, and it says at the start that this is supposed to be a "typical work week".
Perfect. So if I'm understanding you correctly, I can throw together a game with arbitrary/irritating rules that many people won't like, and I'll just call it an autism simulator.
Is it supposed to work. I am in the spectrum and I feel like while energy may go to zero, there is in reality a separate resilience masking, where you actually keep up for the rest of the day. Also cannot relate to medication. I don’t think that’s a necessary part of the experience.
Almost certainly not ADHD. "Massively increased appetite" is not a typical side effect of ADHD meds, which are typically stimulants which have the opposite effect (and mine give me nausea on top of that). And "drowsiness and brain fog" are what they're trying to combat.
From the complaints I've heard from friends, those sound like pretty typical side effects for SSRIs. (Bupropion OTOH is both a stimulant and an antidepressant, and may be more effective for people with comorbidity ADHD and depression; the POV character should talk to their psychiatrist)
Buproprion is an anti-depressent with some stimulant properties, but it isn't a stimulant. It generally takes several weeks of treatment before it has any therapeutic effects on ADHD. Stimulants work immediately.
Neurological medicines are extremely complex - while massively increased appetite isn't a usual side effect of meds like Methylphenidate it can cause eating disorders in the other direction due to an inability to perceive fullness and I have a close friend who suffered through this.
Having had other close experiences for the med balancing for someone with bpd and a complex host of other disorders - most of the times neurological med families are just trialed until one sticks and the specific efficacy and side effects of each can vary wildly from person to person. Brains are really complex and we don't really have an understanding of the method of action (specifically - why the med works - what it is changing in brain chemistry and why that has the impact we observe) of most neurological meds.
We even still struggle to comprehend specific biological markers linked to certain disorders - probably in part due to the fact that we're categorizing those disorders by wide swathes of symptoms.
The only medication I know about that some people on the spectrum take are antipsychotics and that's for specific situations, but maybe if you're in that situation life seems even more like a dystopian text based adventure game.
I'll be honest, it feels a bit whiney. Many of us in tech are somewhere on the spectrum, but owning your problems is the first step to handling them and this doesn't feel like that, it feels more like blaming the diagnosis.
What do you mean? That makes me think about how people react to others having depression symptoms, saying that they should "just" get better... The best course of action is to ask for help.
When you have a condition that alters behavior I think it's pretty fair to blame that condition for said behavior changes/differences. People are so weird about mental disorders in a way they would never be about physical disorders.
Own your chronic fatigue and deal with it, quit blaming it for your tiredness!
Here's my genuine and honest question: What does "owning your chronic fatigue" look like in practice?
Having the knowledge about how your own mind and body work is essential when it comes to dealing with the challenges you are presented with. Having a diagnosis of some kind doesn't let you off the hook. But it is comforting to know that it isn't your fault. You aren't a lesser person because of it - you are just going through the game of life on a different level of difficulty than you expected, and a different level of difficulty than someone without that same challenge.
It would be exactly the same thing people expect from people with mental disorders. You must manage your disorder in such a manner that to the outside world it appears as though you don't have it. Which is totally not an unreasonable ask and definitely not exhausting and untenable to have to fight against your own body for 16 hours a day.
You can't blame your disorder so no turning down plans because you don't have the energy today—better take another dose of stimulants and power through! And don't you dare ask for or expect any kind of accommodation because that's just using your diagnosis as an excuse to be lazy.
This is one of the most under-discussed hardships about the reality of living with nearly invisible disabilities. The expectation that it remain invisible at all times is hard to live with.
If you care about people who have disabilities, give them grace when the facade slips.
I guess the main point I took away was that the expectation of masking creates a lot of pressure on everyone. Maybe the optimal solution is us all dropping the pretense and being chill with it.
Lol. They made a game, and shared it publicly. How much more can they own it?
I am guessing your definition of “owning” involves not talking about your problems ever. I don’t think that’s healthy, but you can find out for yourself.
"blaming external factors for your situation inherently diminishes your sense of your own power, even when external factors are actually to blame" - some redditor
i wonder how a slave would react to the idea of autistic burnout ... isn't 'masking' just a way of shifting blame by juvenilizing impulse control ?
I cannot understand this sentence: " isn't 'masking' just a way of shifting blame by juvenilizing impulse control ?"
shifting the blame of what? what is being juvenilized? Impulse control? How does masking make or keep young or youthful; or arrest the development of Impulse control?
The whole point of masking is to try to hide things that others would find socially uncomfortable or inappropriate for the context. Masking is the continuous effort you pour in to maintaining decorum and professionalism. And I have worked for many bosses, managers, and clients who have utterly failed at both on several occasions, but nobody would call their behavior some sort of failure in impulse control. That would only happen for people with less authority and influence.
I guess I don't really understand "masking". I made all of the decisions I would make if I was feeling overstimulated. I scheduled the coffee date for later. I put on headphones to block out the noise. I turned down going to the charity thing. But then I lost because I was "masking too hard"?
In my mind these decisions were literally the opposite - I was being honest about what the character wanted and was making space for myself.
Is masking about faking interactions with other people? But nearly everything that I get dinged for about masking doesn't even involve others. Is it about hiding symptoms from others? Or from hiding things you don't like from yourself?
Replied a bit more on another comment, tl;dr this is a quite silly simulator that is not representative of autism and you’ve found the biggest tell (almost everything is masking by the scoring algorithm).
You could replace it with an HP bar or Foobar bar and it’d have just as much meaning. I grew up taking care of my autistic sister and have a couple diagnoses of my own, I found it almost offensive that this claims to be representative of autism because of how generic and distanced it is (ex. “Masking” is collapsed down to being the same as “spoon” discourse with depression)
I think a thing a lot of people are missing in the comments - which OP even mentions in the description above - is that this simulates their experience, not every experience. It's like the oft-repeated mantra "if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person". For one person, maybe both eating and skipping breakfast aren't great choices - sometimes there aren't any good choices. You're either dealing with a caloric defecit and you're going to risk doing something that'll make you stand out - ie: unmasking - or you're doing something that doesn't feel good at the time, and will sap your immediate energy. It might be as simple as 'eating breakfast gives me time which I'll unwisely use for circular thinking or stressing'.
For me, even though I didn't personally relate to a lot of the situations and experiences - not a software dev, working for a small company that knows and supports my neurodiversity - the overall feel had just enough familiarity for me to go "yep", and it actually got me thinking about my own choices and self-care, on a day where I'd been beating myself up about things outside my control.
It's a valid frustation... sadly the social bits are often useful.
E.g. communication tends to work best if you have A: trust and B: a mental model for the other person. A is a buffer against friction. B is essentially API documentation about this specific person
I develop A and B by working with people and paying close attention to them. I learn what they’re good at and what they’re not, how they like to communicate, how they like to work, what they don’t like to work on. I do this by paying attention during work. For me, the work is the social bit. I don’t need to play “escape from a room” with someone to do that.
Now, if other people do need corporate staged social games in order to build that up for themselves, then that’s ok for them, but why is that considered the norm? Why are they required? Why is it up to the neurodivergent person to exhaust themselves for them? Why is it considered normal for someone in a “People team” to ignore the needs of some of the people? I don’t see why other people’s needs are inherently more important than mine.
I think the norm often becomes the norm because of frequency. If most people like some social stuff (and the rest pretend to, to blend in), it's the norm
I don't know it has to be that way at all. There's probably lots of room for compromise. The "people team" would need to both know about the need and care enough to try to take it into account
Yes, they're useful. But B: doesn't occur naturally for some of those with Autism. Sometimes names with faces is near impossible, at a baseline. Masking with those individuals, or feigning interest can be exhausting. Dancing around not wanting to discuss outside-of-work life can make one stand out, etc.
There's no polite way to tell such individuals to f- off, of course, and it's often expected.
Sadly for those neurodivergent who do not see the social bits as 'useful'. Social bits are, ultimately, useful, even for those with Autism, even if masking et. al. is exhausting.
Humans are social creatures. We can't live in a vacuum nor on our own without support from other humans (i.e., food production).
Had a "people" guy at a previous employer. At every corporate social thing, he'd run around with his huge DSLR camera and take pictures to post on the company social media, to show how this is a great place to work.
He was an irritating person even without his camera. I hate having my picture taken, and I don't consent to having my face posted on social media. Later, when the company realised that setting money on fire isn't a solid business strategy, he was thankfully fired.
I had an over-enthousiastic guy at work. I don't know what pills he was on, but I'd love some. Once during lunch I was sitting with my coworkers, having a completely shitty day. Suddenly he showed up "oooh, you all look so lovely, let me take a photo" and pulled out his phone. I subconsciously responded with death stare full of hatred. Would love to see the photo someday.
I agree, which is why it drives me crazy to be on HN and see people be like "if you want to work as a programmer you must live breathe eat sleep code and have a resume of Github commits three miles long."
My biggest insight on my (self diagnosed, high functioning) Autism.
For most people, the golden rule works. Treat other people as you want to be treated, and modulo rare interactions with asshole people, you get along well.
For autistic people interacting with most non-autistic people, you've got to use the diamond rule. Treat other people as they want to be treated.
I love when people just straight up tell me directly that I am wrong because of X and Y. Give me Crocker's rules. This works very poorly in most situations, however. My superpower is offending people by telling them my (readily correctible) perception of the truth.
True, as someone whose country of origin just this year had debates about registries for mentally ill people, i feel like i should've added that point as well, thanks
I think this is nice as it underlines how certain seemingly small things can feel incredibly disturbing to another individual (non-autistic one as well!)
It seems like one of those games that I'm going to recall in various situations in the future.
ADHD is nothing like this. After returning from dayjob, you spend until past midnight on your pet project. For months. And then simply abandon it without a second thought.
It made me laugh as an ADHDer. Totally what it's like sometimes!
Though it took me a second because the page was St Anthony IIRC. I'm Eastern Orthodox so for a second I was like "how did my ADHD-self open this here, wtf?!". Then I laughed once I got it.
So, bigger and more important question here. How do I help neuro-divergent folks in a work environment? There's no one size fits all here, everyone is different, and not just on a spectrum sliding scale. How do I glean what is important for neuro-spicy individuals beyond "just ask?"
Welcome thoughts on what has worked and what has not worked.
Pay attention to people and try to be empathetic. Do this to everyone, not just those you suspect of being autistic. That's all anyone can ask of you, and it works. Autistic people aren't aliens - if you engage empathetically they will respond positively, like any other person.
This is the answer. I’m autistic and I don’t want anything for myself that I don’t also want for everyone else. All I want is to be treated like the individual human being that I am. I have specific things I’m good at and other things that are difficult or impossible for me. Other people have different abilities and challenges. Stop acting like there’s some “normal” that we all need to aspire to. No individual is normal.
Create an environment where people feel safe requesting adjustments. (This is a general disability thing, not just a neurodivergence thing.) Nobody can tell you how to do that, because any public description of a reliable signal will be diluted by bad actors. (See also: signalling theory, euphemism treadmill.)
This is generalisations and doesn't work as all autistic people are different, but I'll give some tips anyway. Let them do what they are good at and gives them motivation. Ask for their opinion, and you will likely get a straight answer. If it's a highly ambitious and motivated person you need to protect them from over-working. Protect them from internal politics and bullying. Also be a good example for social interactions and culture because they will do like you do, so better be nice and smile.
I find it amazing how some people here lack the empathy to understand this is the author's personal experience and that they feel entitled to cosplay the confused person thinking all of this is absurd and makes no sense from their point of view.
“You can’t tell people anything” I read this on a blog article a long time ago and I’m constantly reminded of it. This gives me that same feeling where someone is attempting to give some insight into their POV (precisely /because/ it’s alien to so many) and the responses (well, some of them) miss this point entirely.
While everyone deals with some version of these issues, what you’re missing is the scale and quantity of these issues for autistic people. Would you want to work in an office that smelled like rotting garbage, loud distracting music was constantly playing, and strobe lights randomly flashed in your eyes? This might get you close to what it’s like for me to work in an open office.
I can often smell the people around me. Generally, they don’t smell good. I can often hear conversations that are on the other side of the office. (Have you ever tried to add up numbers while someone else says other random numbers at you? It’s like that.) When people walk past my field of vision, I can’t focus on my screen. When I try to tune out all of these distractions, it consumes a lot of energy. Doing it hour after hour, day after day would leave me depleted, exhausted, unable to focus. I’d be unable to do the work that I was hired to do. How is that reasonable?
> I can often smell the people around me. Generally, they don’t smell good. I can often hear conversations that are on the other side of the office. (Have you ever tried to add up numbers while someone else says other random numbers at you? It’s like that.) When people walk past my field of vision, I can’t focus on my screen. When I try to tune out all of these distractions, it consumes a lot of energy. Doing it hour after hour, day after day would leave me depleted, exhausted, unable to focus.
I always just thought putting up with this was what I got paid for. Like isn't this why working on-site sucks?
That's why open office plans suck. The fact that software developers (assuming you are one, apologies if you are not) are idiots in not engaging in collective bargaining association (don't call it a union, lol). The "technology" exists to create private offices for everyone (and sufficient conference rooms while we're at it) so that working on site isn't terrible because you have your own private office with a door that keeps people and sound out when you're trying to get deep work done, regardless of your autism or adhd or other mental illness status.
That’s a sad way to see things. Aren’t you paid to solve problems? To create value somehow?
And apparently there are people who find these environments energizing. It seems like those people are the ones who make these cruel policies. But 20-30% of all humans are highly sensitive and they generally find situations like this draining. Most autistic people are highly sensitive. My guess is that many of us would be on the high end of the HSP spectrum. When I take HSP assessments I max out every measure. I often feel like a bundle of exposed nerve endings.
And I need to point out that this is not inherently disabling. When I’m out in nature or experiencing great art or music, it’s clear that I’m having a better, more intense experience than most other people. Music moves me to tears often, sometimes several times a week. It’s wonderful to experience the world this way. But the only way for me to tolerate an open office would be to drug myself. This, to me, is dystopian.
This high sensitivity is why I’m able to solve problems that many others can’t. If I can focus that high sensitivity on the problem space, and I’m given a few days to process all the information, then I’m often able to untangle messes and solve problems that many others find intractable.
But corporations expect that we all conform to some standard of what’s expected of a “normal” human. By doing this, we’re not getting the best out of the human race. We’re actively disabling people that could be doing valuable work. It’s absurd.
Getting "old internet" vibes from this one. Good job.
I'm not at all familiar with Autism, and I have no idea what "Masking" means at all, but every option I choose seems to lower that stat, to the point where I never make it to day 2. Is there a cheat sheet that lists the "correct" selections at each step?
> Getting "old internet" vibes from this one. Good job.
Thank you. Neovim has radicalized my design sensibilities and I really miss the internet I used in the 90s as a kid.
> I'm not at all familiar with Autism, and I have no idea what "Masking" means at all, but every option I choose seems to lower that stat, to the point where I never make it to day 2. Is there a cheat sheet that lists the "correct" selections at each step?
Wow, thanks for the link, this and the other replies have been helpful.
I approached the game as a non-neurodivergent person making whatever the natural decision I personally would have made in each situation, and ended up dying to the "masking" every time! It kind of gives me an appreciation that what comes naturally to me, at no cost, imposes a tremendous cost to others. I suppose that might have been the whole point of the site. Well done.
Masking is just acting in a way that you normally wouldn't, but have to. Think of a spy blending in avoiding to get caught, it's a conscious effort not to screw up and it takes more energy/willpower from you than not having to pretend to be someone else. I guess it gets harder the more different from yourself you have to act, like having an itch you can't scratch or will get "punished" somehow, damn.
Masking is someone suppressing their natural autistic behaviors. It's not even necessarily conscious but it takes a large toll on mental energy. Besides the energy required for the masking itself there's the compounding effect of setting unrealistic expectations in others. The better someone is at masking the more is expected of them which creates an even larger drain on mental energy.
>Masking is someone suppressing their natural autistic behaviors.
Well, masking is done by everybody, not just autists, but in this game it's used to refer to that specifically. Arguably autists have to do it more, or feel the exhaustion from it more strongly.
This is also fascinating from the perspective of me, someone who is autistic and open about it at work. My work collaboration profile comes out and says "I'm autistic", and sets out a few things to know.
When I hit the workspace rearrangement event I felt it in my bones, since my employer did that. However because I have a doctor's note about my noise and light sensitivity, they were able to accommodate me with a dedicated desk in a quieter area.
It isn't the quietest, and I still get shuffled around, but I get to preview the new location and pick the best spot for my sensitivities each time I've moved. So in my case, being open with my management (and reports) about my autism has been a very helpful thing.
I wonder why in my 30 years of lived experience (in India), I never met or heard of anyone being autistic or needing meds for mental health, even amongst the software engineers. But this seems to be fairly prevalent in the US.
It might be under diagnosis but medical services and pharma are extremely cheap and fairly competent, at least for the engineers.
May be they don't openly talk about it due to stigma.
I can't imagine what they would go through here, it's a extremely social culture where you are socially forced into group festivals, gatherings and frequent visits from relatives.
It changes with age too. Like the first question I was presented with was 1. Take time for self-care, 2. Get straight to breakfast and work prep.
Yeah in my 20s, and early 30s, I could eat breakfast while logging onto the computer and starting to work.
But now in my 40s I take some time for self-care, not sure if it counts, but it's difficult to answer a question like that with either or.
Decades on the computer has forced me to do Yoga every morning too. So it's not like I want to do it, I just realized that I have to.
I lost when I went to a work outing instead of staying home, but I had RSVP'd to the outing. This is what the game doesn't cover, I never RSVP unless I can keep my word. Never commit!
On sounds - as a non autistic person but as someone with a good "audio memory", music and sounds especially in an office can absolutely get on my nerves. It's mostly the repetitiveness.
Being able to hear songs in your head sounds great until you have the same one on repeat for days.
This morning it's "the things we do for love". Not sure where that one came from.
Also high pitched sounds (seagull deterers) or electricity buzzing. I learnt at a physics class at high school that I could hear higher pitches than other kids as well, although now that I'm older I've probably lost some of that.
The side-effects are vaguely evocative of antipsychotics or some sort of antidepressant.
There's no specific autism medication that I'm aware of, but psychiatric diseases often have plenty of comorbidity. There's some ADHD popup in the game that distracts you with Wikipedia, there's misophonia, it sounds like the character has a whole mix of different things.
Had I paid more attention to that, I probably would have skipped them instead of saying I’d take the normal dose.
Some questionable doctor prescribed me something like that a couple months ago as a precursor to dealing with ADHD. He said it would take a few weeks to build up in my system with once daily pills. I took a single pill and didn’t sleep for 3 days, and felt “off” for a good week or three. Never again.
My doctor tries to put me on antidepressants but I'm scared of side effects. My main complaint is that my energy levels are virtually zero despite relatively healthy lifestyle.
My doctor was asking me about taking a sleep study to see if I have sleep apnea. Many people in my family had it, but I’ve been told I don’t snore, and while I don’t have energy, I don’t fall asleep at the drop of a hat like they all did before getting a cpap.
I really don’t want to do a sleep study, as it sounds like nightmare fuel, so I got an Apple Watch which is supposed to be able to signal if there is a possible issue over the course of a month. I’ve had a couple days in normal range, but most days show elevated breathing interruptions. If it signals me after the end of the 30 days, I guess I’ll feel forced to get a sleep study. While I hate the idea of needing a cpap, being tired all the time isn’t fun either.
How old are you? There's like a zillion health factors. I've struggled with this because if IBS and getting older.
Taking Ubiqunol now, red light therapy for mitochondrial health - there's a bunch of other related supplements. Started exercising. Energy is better now.
A bunch of medications are commonly used to help manage it, though. And it's so often co-morbid with other diagnoses (these are all just classifications we made up anyway, so that they're two "different" things is basically just semantics, it's all happening in one brain, like we could easily and no-less-reasonably halve or double the number of labels we apply to these same situations and the underlying reality would be unaffected) that it's common to be diagnosed autistic but also taking ADHD meds or mood stabilizers or antidepressants or what have you, under other diagnoses.
Damn, it's way past the time for me to take my SSRIs, because I forgot to take Adderall earlier in the day and zoned out on HN instead when I should've been finishing that API.
Narrator: the actual task didn't call for an API redesign, but if we're doing things, we're doing them The Right Way™ or we don't do them at all, right?
A lot of times they take an SSRI to be able to manage their emotions better and not be triggered by daily life. That’s what I remember when I was trying to help an autistic friend deal with having autistic children that were having a lot of issues.
Edit: Just asked her and the final cocktail they have settled on is aripriprazole (Abilify, an atypical antipsychotic) and hydroxyzine (first-generation antihistamine with anxiolytic and sedative properties).
I sent her the game and she said it was hard haha. I asked if that was what autism feels like and she said this-
“Not for me but I have ASD. For my son, it would be similar but different since he can't tell me what is going on in his head. I can only guess with him, poor lamb.”
This. I have no medication as I built up immense resiliency and masking mechanisms over the course of my life. Others may take a cocktail of meds just to make it to lunch.
It’s a condition that exists on a spectrum, as does its treatments or coping mechanisms. That said, I’m the “take my assigned medication” type, so I always took the full dose in the game.
Yeah, I wish there was a bit more clarity on the medication prompt.
IE, medication can be hit-or-miss. Did I (as the person in the game) go to a pill pusher and thus the medication causes more problems then it helps? Or, is the medication something where the benefits outweigh the consequences?
As many other people in this thread point out, there is no "medication for autism," so I assumed that it was a case of poorly prescribed medication from a pill pusher and didn't take it the first time I played.
I'm pretty strongly in the difference camp. It giveth and taketh away. I can't get through a full meal hearing people chew food without some background noise going but I also completed my PhD before I was 30 so it feels wrong to call it a pathology ya know?
What I was getting at in my question is,
in response to the question about medication,
is the intent to "fix" a perceived "problem",
or should any medication taken be tuned to provide support for coping with a world that can be actively hostile to neurodivergent people.
Any psychological disorder is treatment-worthy iff the patient suffers from it. So not just "you were diagnosed", but "you were diagnosed, have problems caused by it, suffer from those problems, and want relief". So yes to both, treatment can be intended to fix a problem that a patient suffers from that is just related to his perception of things. But it can also be intended to support your interactions with a hostile environment that you suffer from.
It's redundant. "disorder" and "iff the patient suffers from it" are basically the same thing in this context. So you can remove the word disorder and that comment means the same thing.
FWIW (and I do have relevant personal experience) "fixing" is not in the option set. One can only cope. SSRIs, VPA, amphetamines or whatever (including alcohol, THC, DMT and opiates), they just shift the person's perception/consciousness a bit so it might become more copeable in the current society. That is all.
This is one of those things where I think autism has become a tag for the shared experiences of things like awkwardness, feeling out of place, or running out of the desire to socialize. Everyone wants an answer for why they have unpleasant experiences that aren't, "That's just life".
There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect.
These labels are useful insofar as grouping experiences together that tend to co-occur makes it easy to talk about certain categories of aggregate experiences or strategies for navigating life, but I think too many people relegate too much importance to these arbitrary labels, like "autism", derive too much of their identity from them, and too often use them as excuses to not deal with life's challenges and complexities head on.
Look into the history of autism research and you'll find a history of fraud. People like Bruno Bettelheim simply lied their way to prominence and now we are on a road of ever-expanding diagnostic criteria and an ever-growing autism industry to the point where it is now trendy to self-diagnose on social media.
Recall that psychology has had a gigantic replication crisis, and that the founders of the field like Freud and Jung were charlatans, and that there is no agreed-upon mechanistic explanation for autism, and that a primary diagnostic tool is a literal questionnaire, and that psychology and psychiatry have been abused for political reasons by every totalitarian government of the 20th century.
Given all this, we should have some humility about this topic. Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
And maybe we can normalize the idea that employees have special emotional needs that can be accounted for on an individual basis without medical permission slips or any need for wielding constructed identities.
When I was in grad school, I worked in a lab that performed research on children with Asperger's syndrome (AS), mainly through fMRI and DTI brain imaging techniques. AS was merged into Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but at the time was considered a high-functioning form of autism. I met dozens of children with AS; they were typically between 9-13 years old. All the children I met were clearly autistic. I'm not going to attempt to describe what that means here, but the nature of their disorder was evident, compared to other disorders and compared to the age-matched controls [1]. Back then I'd confidently tell you I could easily pick out the kids in a classroom with an AS diagnosis. These days, I have no confidence I could do so (mostly due to false negatives).
[1] anecdote: at the end of explaining the fMRI procedure to the participant children and their parents, I'd ask if the child had any questions. Neurotypical children would usually ask about any reward $ for completing the task. AS kids would usually ask something poignant about the experiment.
I agree that there is a "there" there. But I'm not confident in the ability of our culture to define it in a mature way, or use the knowledge responsibly. I don't want to see therapy culture continually creeping into the mainstream. I don't want people to start medicalizing the traits of those in their families and social circles.
And since every phenotype exists along a normal distribution, there will always be resemblances and fuzziness, and no clear lines demarcating order from disorder.
But it is also obvious that nonverbal people who are stimming most of the day and can barely tie their own shoelaces exist, and these people need to be cared for and studied by responsible professionals in mature and private settings with their loved ones.
I still remember my psychology class in high school pretty well. It was memorable cause we’d spend a week learning about some theories Freud came up with, and then there would be a very short footnote of “turns out it was all totally made up and never scientifically verified in any way”. I was like what? So psychology isn’t science??
Recently a friend explained to me that Freud really wasn’t a scientist, but he was so influential in getting western cultures to think about the mind in new ways that we still learn about him. Like nobody cared about psychology until he get famous
The 19th century was a wild time. Everything was a science back then. That's why communists speak of the "immortal science of Marxist-Leninism." Marx literally said he was performing science, but that wasn't seen as an absurdity because that is how everyone spoke.
It wasn't until the mid-20th century when people started to get more serious about defining science. Philosophers started critiquing it in the early 20th century like the Vienna Circle and Popper, and eventually the definition of what constitutes science was narrowed down to one that was defined as a particular sort of empiricism.
I don't think it's any less science, inasmuch as science seeks to explain the natural world. It's just at a higher level of complexity and a different point in the learning curve than more externally observable levels of science.
Would we say that Copernicus was a charlatan or not a scientist because the heliocentric model turned out to be wrong? As you acknowledge, Freud pushed the collective understanding further.
Then how do we know that Freud was "wrong" or "inaccurate" or "just made up" or "a fraud"?
It's definitely a lot more murky and there are massive gaps in our understanding between biology and neuroscience and psychology, and fundamental differences and limits on methodology that we may never surpass, but his work still has its place on the timeline of progress does it not?
What about something like phrenology? It's easy to laugh at it now and consider its proponents charlatans or lunatics but at a time it was considered a worthy avenue of exploration, that turned out to be a dead end, but that's part of science.
Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
I agree that a healthy dose of skepticism and acknowledgement of our rudimentary understanding is warranted, but it does start to sound a little anti-science. I don't think there's anything wrong with continuing to explore and attempting to explain or put words to these things even though they are near the highest level of complexity in nature and the hardest to empirically evaluate.
Are NSAIDs considered to be medicalizing large swathes of the human condition (or caffeine, or alcohol for that matter)? Where is the line between a universally accepted and ubiquitous pharmaceutical and an overmedicalized one? I think we should be moving more towards the question of "do you feel like this medication benefits you or would benefit you?" than "do you check these boxes in the DSM and officially receive this diagnosis".
Objectively, I understand what you're saying here, and agree that it's almost certainly happening.
Subjectively... I see people around me casually doing things that I simply cannot do. I'm 41 years old, and not once do I recall performing any action without actively forcing myself to do it. That includes things as small and trivial as getting up from my desk to use the restroom.
I can't relate at all to the concept of a "habit". Combing my hair requires an explicit decision to do so. I usually have to find my brush, since there's no consistent place I put it. When I'm done, I'll forget that I wanted to put it back where it belongs while actively being frustrated with myself for not doing so the previous day.
It's glaringly obvious to me that other people don't struggle with the things I struggle with; at the very least, they don't struggle to the same degree. It's exhausting.
Oh, and I've never even been diagnosed with autism. I have ADHD. What I described above is classic "executive dysfunction".
I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum. Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
Psychiatry is in its infancy. To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
It's tradition to warn first-year psychiatry students about over-diagnosing themselves and everyone around them. There is a well known phenomenon where as soon as students start reading about conditions and symptoms they start seeing it in everyone at rates far too high to be accurate. Fortunately for them, their professors are there to warn them about this effect. They also realize how foolish it was to diagnose everyone with everything based on generic symptoms when they get into practice and see what these conditions look like in real patients.
Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone.
> I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum.
Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible.
> Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
You are grossly over-diagnosing.
When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.
A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.
Autistic individuals have systemic changes in their mind and body which let them see life from a different perspective.
People with executive function disorder have issues with rapid thinking, focusing, and other things that can work in their favor often enough to be passed on.
> A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.
Speaking in cryptic aphorisms doesn't help anything.
Psychiatry isn't a field where everyone has a single perspective. There is a lot of debate within psychiatry and much research exploring different perspectives.
However, I don't think it's appropriate for a non-psychiatrist to start diagnosing half of the population with a disorder or 1 in 8 people they meet with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
An untrained perspective is not on the same level as the professionals and researchers.
I trust trained professionals with years of experience across thousands of patients to be better equipped to diagnose people with mental health conditions than someone online who diagnoses literally half of the people they meet with disorders, yes.
Repeating “psychiatry is in its infancy” over and over again does not elevate your opinion to the same level of trained professionals and academic research.
You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population. People connect with similar people, form relationships in similar envioronemnts, so your social group is vastly more specialised than it might seem.
Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher
> You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population.
I'm not assuming anything. I literally explained that the only way it's possible is for someone to avoid the general population and only socialize in environments with extreme bias.
The more important point is that diagnosing autism is not something you can do by simply meeting people in social situations. It's something that takes training and experience by professionals, not an untrained person who sizes people up as they meet them in a social capacity.
Again, psychiatry is in its infancy. Many professionals use outdated models or stereotypes in practice. Living as an autistic individual can make it easier to clock other autistic people, because it's rare to meet someone who functions or thinks the same way you do and sticks out like a sore thumb. For example, "thinking in pictures" is not a universal autistic trait, but it's a pretty well known one.
> To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
Almost all of my social circle is somewhere on the spectrum, and quite a few are diagnosed.
So I can say with some authority that there are absolutely some people who use it as an excuse, which is made even more apparent than the people that aren't using it as one. TikTok and other high-information-low-veracity social media is only making this trend worse. It's not bigotry to acknowledge that.
(Most of said individuals ended up getting cut out of said social circle, after the people actually making an effort got tired of them constantly using their disability as an excuse not to even try to modify bad behavior)
That said, I'm not against diagnosis, or even self-diagnosis. Improved diagnosis is a good thing! But mostly because it makes it easier to understand how you can structure things to adapt to it. Or to quote a coworker's email signature:
> “Undiagnosed neurodivergence is like being handed a video game that has been set to hard mode, but having people tell you over and over "it's on easy, why do you keep dying? " Diagnosis is learning the game is on hard mode. It doesn't make it easier, but you can strategize.”
I agree completely with this comment, though most often I see it for ADHD. It's a level of nuance that people don't seem to be able to handle, though. People want to be on either the "just suck it up, losers" side or the "the duty of society is to make sure nothing is ever hard for anybody" side. It pisses me off to see people take advantage of the accommodations that are needed by some, and saddens me when people who legitimately need accommodation for some things end up depending on it for everything.
It would be nice if there were objective tests that said exactly where someone is, but those are both impossible and would be subverted even if they were possible.
There will always be humans who take advantage of a system. Why do you, like the parent commenter, think that is in question here? No one here is espousing the extreme position you put in quotes.
Because I am seeing how this is playing out in classrooms. Tons of kids are requesting accommodations. Some need those accommodations, some don't, and the ones who do often don't need all of the accommodations they're getting. Anyone who pushes back -- eg, a teacher calling out a BS requirement -- is demonized and seen as ableist. Among the kids, anyone who doesn't request an accommodation that they don't need but could get, is seen a foolish. And access to those accommodations produces a lot of kids who don't even try to improve their executive functioning to what it could be. And people know it, so a stigma is developing where people who need it have to prove that they're not taking advantage of the situation.
Parents are doing the best they can, but in the end they're still making decisions for other human beings who are not them, and those human beings are going through a time of life that is undeniably hard and requires growing to be able to do all kinds of things they couldn't formerly do. How can the kids know what is reasonable difficulty and what is excessive due to their neural makeup?
It's a tricky and nuanced situation, and so I really do see people falling into the opposing extreme camps. I agree that humans will take advantage of any system. That doesn't really have any bearing on how things are going, and whether people are seeing the nuance clearly or not. My personal experience is witnessing kids who are taking advantage of accommodations and failing to grow as a result, and how the system cannot distinguish which of those accommodations are appropriate and which aren't. It's also witnessing kids who need accommodation but won't ask for it, because they or their parents believe that muscling through is necessary, or that their problems aren't real. How are those not examples of extreme positions?
My point is that in order to get better at this, we need to be doing the hard work of figuring out what's real and what's not, or even how real it is, and what interventions do and don't work. Surely it's not controversial to say that giving a procrastinator twice as much time to finish their tests is not always the right thing? It can hurt as easily as it can help. And yet, it is the right thing for some people, for some situations. If it takes me 10 minutes to solve a quadratic that takes you 5, getting a failing grade is not going to help me learn, nor does it mean I'm incompetent at mathematics.
If you don't think people are saying "just suck it up", you're not looking very hard. Same if you don't think people are saying that we should offer any and all accommodations to anyone who requests.
I never said autism was an excuse not to deal with life.
I did say that it is common for people to see themselves in the descriptions of many psychiatric disorders, because many of the symptoms are experiences that most people can relate to, in some form or another, and then use that as a vehicle to avoid enduring some of life's necessary suffering.
The audio stuff, the concentration stuff, the always coming late and so aren't difficult to categorize in terms of "normal" and "not normal", when they're basically constant and have been since a very young age. It's simply being in the long tail of the frequency distribution or not, wherever you set that line.
> There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect.
A lot of people are in the short head of the distributions when it comes to nearly all of these markers. Some people are in the long tails for a large number of them. Those are the ones we label. Being in the short head doesn't mean one is never awkward or never late or annoyed by certain noises, it means that they're so at a frequency that's common.
Then there's actually people who live their entire existence and every waking moment on the spectrum, and compensating for it - which is what the topic of discussion is. You minimizing it or thinking it isn't real isn't entirely helpful to discussion and frankly is pretty insulting.
> If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere.
No, because the endpoints of the spectrum are not defined as 0% autistic and 100% autistic.
The spectrum definitionally only includes people diagnosed with autism.
Your approach is like saying "there is a 'how bad is the cancer' spectrum" where 0 is "no cancer" as opposed to something like "cancer but easily curable." No reasonable definition of "cancer suffering spectrum" would include "doesn't even have cancer."
Autism is called a spectrum disorder not because it ranges on a smooth continuum from "no autism" to "lots of autism".
It's because there a handful of associated symptoms for autism and different people have a different mixture of them. You don't need an equally large amount of all symptoms in order to be autistic.
Think of it more like a light spectrum where there are different mixtures of hues for the symptoms, but autism still implies some amount of significant overall intensity. In short, it's a spectrum, not a continuum.
If you experience some or all of the symptoms associated with autism but at a level that doesn't significantly impair your overall functioning, then that's not a diagnosis of autism. Just like everyone who gets sad isn't depressed and everyone who worries doesn't have generalized anxiety. That's just normal human variability and life challenges.
I have encountered this definition of "spectrum", as a vector of numbers that go 0 to 100, rather than a single number that goes from 0 to 100 (which you call "continuum" IIUC).
But... I mean, if you asked 100 people what they think a spectrum means in this context, how many of them would think it meant "vector" rather than "real number"? I would guess fewer than 10. I consider myself a fairly well-informed nerd, but I think I had encountered many usages of "spectrum" describing a single trait for many years, and I think this is the second time I've ever encountered someone using the "vector" definition (the first one was also using it to describe autism). Has this linguistic battle already been lost? Does it improve clarity to call it a "spectrum" and insist on using the "vector" definition?
(I've personally been using the phrase "collection of imperfectly correlated traits")
I think the word "spectrum" is reasonable, as it implies a broad range. Or it's analogous to the rainbow with a variety of colours.
But what people consistently misunderstand is that there is a fundamental dichotomy at the diagnostic level. Speaking from the perspective of the DSM, which I prefer because it's at least concrete and has medical relevance in North America, you meet the criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder ("on the spectrum") or you do not ("not on the spectrum").
In other words, the diagnostic criteria themselves do not constitute a spectrum, especially not a linear one. Maybe people are confusing this with the DSM's three levels of support needs.
I agree, the terminology is confusing. It is extra confusing because the intent is to capture both:
1. Different autistic people may vary in which symptoms are most severe while all still being autistic.
2. Different autistic people may vary in the overall severity of all symptoms and how much it impacts their quality of life. (At the same time, there is still a distinct cut off where you are not considered to have autism if it doesn't manifest significantly in your life.)
The latter point is why "Asperger's" is now simply lumped in with ASD. But that tends to obscure the former point which is also important.
Perhaps "cluster" would have been better, but here we are.
No, you're just heavily implying it and minimizing it. I'm telling you it's extremely insulting. You can take that for what it is or don't, I don't really care.
he's saying that the label Autism includes different traits that various people have or don't have. He's falsely using that semantic manipulation to imply that people use it as an excuse not to deal with the conplexities of life.
saying "that's insulting" doesn't impact his assertion. you have to meet their logic where it is to disagree. lucky this case was so easy.
No, I'm not using any tricks (or implications) to argue that people often use psychological diagnosis (self or otherwise) as an excuse not to deal with the complexities of life.
I'm arguing that directly and asserting that web sites like the one posted are exactly the kind of things that make it easy for people to do that because they are relatable to basically everybody.
Not disagreeing with the content of what you said. However, sometimes telling people they sound insulting (unintentionally) has its own value, outside of the logical debate-making about the content of what was said.
I can't speak for everyone, but for myself the scenarios in this simulator basically don't affect my life at all. Annoying radio ad, "That's annoying". People team requests my participation at some event, "No thanks". Don't want to go to work, "oh well". If someone suggested we get coffee I'd be excited. I've never even considered not taking meds I've been prescribed. Other things seem normal to me. I put on ANC headphones at my office job all the time.
While going through the simulator, I was shocked with the response to some choices and situations. I was not aware that these things were so disruptive to some people.
I don't consider myself autistic, but a lot of the situations in the game are familiar. That's an extreme version of me on a bad day. On a good day (enough food, sleep, etc) I can handle it, sometimes explicitly thinking about it, sometimes no action required.
> While going through the simulator, I was shocked with the response to some choices and situations. I was not aware that these things were so disruptive to some people.
Well, I guess the simulator did a good job spreading awareness that it is like that for some?
I have ADHD and while I'm medicated I cannot fathom some of the struggles or decisions that unmedicated me makes... like I struggle to have empathy for unmedicated me.
I imagine without such deep personal experience it would be much harder or impossible to understand or empathize.
The normal simulator is the negative space in this game. The people on the party committee. The networking event. Your mom who has called three times. Just imagine those activities boosting all of your stats.
> The people on the party committee. The networking event. Your mom who has called three times. Just imagine those activities boosting all of your stats.
It’s a problem when our definition of “normal” is the blended combination of every more outgoing and more successful person we see combined into one composite super-person.
Most people don’t do anything like a party committee. Most people don’t go to networking events and of those who do, many don’t network or socialize much. Most parents don’t call three times per day.
Yet it’s easy to see (or imagine) all of these behaviors and mentally blend them up into a composite idea of what “normal” means in a way that is far from average.
I see this a lot in students self-diagnosing with ADHD right now: Their mental model of “normal” is actually more like a 99th percentile studying and self-discipline machine, not a typical student. The way they describe “normal” or neurotypical people is more like superheroes with super abilities who have infinite motivation to study for 8 hours per day after cleaning their house to spotless precision and never touching their phone for a break. They have mentally erased the average person from their minds and replaced it with a hypothetical super person who doesn’t exist.
There are plenty of people who would not consider some or even all of those activities (depending on circumstances) enjoyable, most of them probably don't consider themselves autistic.
I don't think that extreme is normal. Yes, there are people who take an energy boost and are never worried by situations you mention, but they are rare.
No. Joining party planning committees, socializing at networking events, and calling people multiple times are not things that the average person seeks out.
I don’t think it would be possible, as a lot of what ASD people process consciously is processed subconsciously by neurotypical people (which contributes greatly to ASD burnout).
Something I’ve thought might be a helpful AI app, for a product like smart glasses or earbuds with integrated cameras, if it were possible, is a live nonverbal communication translator, to help with the cognitive load of ASD people, as cognitive empathy is often a performance issue socially.
I’ve seen a lot of criticism that using AI as a cognitive crutch is unhealthy, but the same argument could be made about mechanical advantages, beasts of burden, or machines, reducing humanity’s physical fitness. AI’s potential to be a cognitive force multiplier is its killer app.
Imagine having basically infinite social energy and no situation where you'd tend to react super negatively to socialization itself. But most things extra are very boring and you only live for things not related to your work.
What's 'normal' for me is pretty much the same thing, but without the intense reactions to the light and sound stimuli. And the rest generally toned down.
I played it a couple times and found that a lot of scenarios just didn't have an option for what I would actually want to do in real life. A few examples:
- One scenario had a team unboxing an espresso machine and making too much noice by using it, clinking cups and laughing. The options were to put on noise canceling headphones, find a different desk away from the noise, or just endure it. Personally I'd take a break and go join them, and I don't even like coffee.
- The scenario where the user is in a room with a PM and a couple other people debating the tone of copy on a website, and the conversation is meandering without clear turns (iirc): there were only options to essentially hurry the conversation along or not participate at all, but IRL I'd join in with the other three debating the tone and just generally be bullshitting/sidetracking/meandering the conversation because I like to talk to people.
- The scenario where somebody comes up and asks for a new feature without clear acceptance criteria: the options were to turn to the computer and type out acceptance criteria in front of the person (which feels passive aggressive to me); tell them you'll do it; or ask them to schedule time with you to hammer out the criteria. I would've just chatted with them right there about the feature they wanted, let them know that XYZ is what I think the acceptance criteria is at the end of the conversation, and if that's wrong they'd correct me.
Most of what you'd do is the last thing I'd want to do (I have autism). You don't say if you have autism or not, but going by what you just said I would guess not.
Count yourself lucky. It's no fun on the autism train.
Everyone has there issues, and I can only comment on my own experience, but it's thus far not been great.
I'm not autistic and social interactions are incredibly energy draining for me. Granted I'm quite an introverted person, but not having autism doesn't mean you get pumped up from being around people.
"Since you've decided to not disclose your autism at work, you'll be raw dogging it today and every other day. This seems marginally better than the alternative of being potentially passed over for promtotions or raises."
I was passed over without disclosure. When I did disclose, they tried to fire me. It would be great if they add a feature where you're told for a decade by peers, leads, and managers that you're at the next level, but never actually get there. Then they try firing you while the internal interviews give feedback about how you're likely overqualified for roles at your level. How's your mental health doing after that? The game should add a part about wanting to get hit by a bus during your commute so you cana avoid the torture.
It's extra fun when you manage to get positive feedback from colleagues and hit all your concrete performance expectations, but then at review time you still get poor marks because it's a stack ranking system, so, as far as your manager is concerned, there was never a realistic option to give one of the limited supply of good scores to you instead of one of the people who have enough spoons left at the end of the work day to permit some enthusiasm for the quarterly optional-but-actually-mandatory after-hours team Whirlyball outing.
@giantg2 dude I feel you. I've never disclosed but I've heard about people being retaliated against for doing so over the years.
I wish I could have added this story knot. I'll open source it soon and you'll see how crufty dealing with inkle is https://www.inklestudios.com/ in JS. Credit to the folks working on inkle but something like this is pushing the tech beyond what it says on the tin.
Non-autistic people also get this. It's in your salarypayer's best interest to keep you thinking you're on the precipice of getting a raise (so you work harder), but without actually giving you one (so they don't have to pay up). This is just ordinary capitalist paperclip-maximization, and we need way more people to realize their employers are not their friends, and it's a simple exchange of money for work where at least one party employs people whose entire job is to shift the exchange rate in their favour while convincing you they aren't.
wanna say you are right. maybe the impact is different on neurodivergent, thats hard to have hard data on. HRs job is litterally to use a certain budget to fit all the ppl in, thats why they never give a raise if you dont ask, unless they need to give it to cover other risks (retention).
best lesson for me was an HR manager explaining it to me, after finally after 3 years i asked pretty please to give a lil raise, i was still trainee after all that time.
he smiled and said he thought id never ask. made me senior on the department matching my input. and told me this exact fact. He said, why should i give you a raise if you seem happy where ur at? never complain, never ask, never get.
its harsh but its good to understand certain hashness. Then you can work around it, step over that bridge, and be more active in tracking your input, their expectations, and showing them the mismatch deservant of a raise or promotion.
its often peoples shyness or false expectations that get them in such a situation where they feel very under valued. they are because they under value themselves or dont know how to translate/express their value to another persons perspective. another harsh truth. Especially if you are neurodivergent, the way you see things and another is further apart, so your words need to do more to reconcile that difference to generate mutual understanding.
in an ideal world this would not happen or be needed, ofcourse. but we dont live in an ideal world, and there is no switch to flip to make it an ideal world.
It might be experienced by non-disabled people, but I would say it disproportionately affects people with autism. Promotions are political and most people on the spectrum are at a disadvantage in the political realm due to the way ASD tends to affect social behavior etc. I've seen everyone other dev that joined around my time is at least 1-2 levels further than me. We can see these impacts in data for things like disability pay gap research.
That's a Manichean perspective that probably applies in a lot of workplaces, but definitely doesn't uniformly apply to competitive software jobs. In a competitive software shop, your employer is probably motivated more by retention, churn, and motivation concerns than they are over whether they can hold on to the extra comp money it would cost to raise your level. Losing a performing developer is very expensive.
I don't doubt at all that a lot of software developers have had the experience you describe, but when you describe it as intrinsic to the economics of commercial software development, I think you're bound to end up in some weird places.
But practically every "competitive" software job uses stack ranking that's mostly centered on an individual team or a few teams where 20% of the people have to be given a bad rating regardless of objective performance.
I think stack ranking sucks ass and I agree that it's prevalent but even stack ranking isn't well-modeled by an executive team looking to squeeze every penny out of each employee. Some of the most notorious stack rankers also have some of the most notoriously generous comp packages.
I'm not seeing TC having gone up over the last 7-8 years with those "notoriously generous comp packages" places. Your typical senior eng at FAANG is still getting $350-450k/yr TC. Yet, inflation has changed a lot and the stocks at these companies have skyrocketed. They're only raising the bar in terms of competition for employees to stick with the company and not with their compensation.
my personal experience is this is usually something i see well meaning religious people caught up in. when ive met autistic people in similar situations they have been vocally agitated and frustrated by it, which i would say is the first step in learning to work around it
Blue collar workers have understood this for a long time, and even occasionally took up arms against their employers. It's the white collar folks who are just starting to figure this out.
This is an "all lives matter" flavor of comment. Discussing difficulties that autistic folks often have, which are usually exacerbated by autistic traits and struggles but not caused by autism, does not mean nobody else has those troubles.
But it's common and extremely frustrating for anyone neurodivergent to be told "but everyone feels that way" whenever they discuss any of their issues.
> This is just ordinary capitalist paperclip-maximization, and we need way more people to realize their employers are not their friends
But I've repeatedly told over the years by clever libertarian software engineers that I don't need a union because it's better to just go to the boss with your concerns, instead of making things so adversarial.
Nice game, but indeed simplified. Did not make it to day 2. Autism is a huge spectrum. I have a family member who needs constant care in a facility because he will try and destroy everything he does not like, but also another one who has light Asperger’s syndrome and functions like society would like him to be as long as you respect his social capabilities. As with most mental things, because people can’t see or sense it, they don’t understand and it gets very very difficult to even acknowledge or respect it.
I think this clip of Man of Steel did a very good job of showing how Autistic people get bombarded with sensory information. There are comments under the video claiming that this mirrors their experience.
Zack Snyder described perfectly the ADHD/ Autistic experience growing up in one single scene. Intentionally or not. This movie made me feel less alone in this world. Superman helped me realize that wasn't a freak. I just perceived the world differently. Thank you Zack. I will forever be grateful for Man of Steel for many years to come
> As with most mental things, because people can’t see or sense it, they don’t understand and it gets very very difficult to even acknowledge or respect it.
Compounding this issue is the fact that people often refuse to accept that a mental thing is actually a physiological thing, albeit harder to fix because it’s currently poorly understood. People’s mental models of brain-related conditions often create a separation of the person from their physical self, either due to some subconscious or conscious belief in a metaphysical representation of the condition.
It's not clear how distinctive a lot of mental health conditions are. For the most part we're just making up labels for groups of signs and symptoms, after all. To the extent the labels are "real" things mostly rests in their utility—I mean, that's sort of true of all labels for everything (what's a chair?) but these are far more fluid than most.
It could be that autism really is, exactly as we describe it and conceive of it, in some meaningful way defined by actual reality, a thing.
It could be that it's ten different things that aren't actually connected at all, but happen to look kinda similar. Some of which either are a variant of ADHD (or vice-versa, doesn't much matter) or just happen to include similar symptoms and behaviors that respond well to the same drugs and therapies we use to tread ADHD.
(now, to some degree we do have real tests we can do to pick up e.g. genetic markers of certain disorders, but these largely remain just another clue, not exactly solid proof, with some exceptions)
To illustrate: imagine we couldn't ever see the inside of a human body and just had to guess at what was going on when something went wrong. We'd probably have something we just called "bad kidney" that was actually several different problems, and we'd just throw drugs and other therapies at it until (often, but not always) some set of those relieved the symptoms. Meanwhile, sometimes it's a kidney stone, sometimes it's cancer, et c. And maybe we even have a whole step that's trying to figure out if it's "bad kidney" or "bad bladder" and sometimes we'd get that right, but sometimes wrong, but also some of the same medicines work for either (depending on the actual cause) so we might incorrectly diagnose "bad kidney" then accidentally correctly treat "bad bladder", and think we were right all along.
> how big could a potential overlap be between ADHD and autism?
The lack of executive function is overlapping, but this particular post might be more of an ADHD simulator.
The very first "Follow the morning routine" or not is where this veers off my experience of the spectrum.
"Changing plans because of situations internal or external" is hard.
The option should've been "Spend 20 minutes making eggs again, because the yolks weren't the right kind of runny", miss the train, take a cab to work, but tell the driver that you've now got a system for eggs which you didn't have today (yeah, fun fact, the recipe was off because they don't refrigerate them over in France).
There seems to be a prevalent pop psych view that a bunch of these conditions (Autism, ADHD, Anxiety-Depression, OCD) are sort of clustered together and people who manifest one will often manifest symptoms of others. It gets muddier because a lot of these conditions are understood as spectrums and different people who identify with them may manifest them in vastly different ways. I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.
These are just labels we apply to buckets of symptoms. The underlying problems and biological differences that can cause these buckets of symptoms probably will be found, and then we can re-categorize things quite a bit. My bet is we do this within the next couple decades.
What causes difficulty is that actual symptoms of one of these buckets can cause behaviors and coping strategies that look like other ones.
Another issue is that these symptoms are not specific. What one neurodivergent person means by "I have sensory issues" is vastly different from another neurodivergent person, and your psych health provider will dig into those specifics and try and tease out which label fits the best, or whether it's even an example of that symptom. How those symptoms affect you is the entire point.
>I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.
And you have that same feeling towards "blind" or "deaf" right? Since a lot of blind people struggle to lead "normal" lives but there are accomplished blind software devs right here on HN
Consider how many people live life with some sort of mild delusion and yet are perfectly functional 99% of the time. The brain is complicated and cannot ever be reduced to single dimensions like that, and it is weirdly good at still functioning when part of it is broken in some way, like with Broca's area or Phineas Gage.
Yes, "syndrome" and "disorder" are vague labels that don't have hard cutoffs or any test you can objectively run. That's the point of those words. When you have a hard test you can run, it becomes a "disease".
I also wonder if we kinda screwed ourselves by expanding pre-existing labels for disorders that appeared similar, instead of using a mixin pattern of describing the spectrum. So you could have a Photosensitivity and Social Inertness "Disorder" instead of people constantly debating whether your combination of symptoms is "bad enough" to be called Autism.
With Autism, as noted elsewhere in this thread, a general social understanding of it is required to help normalize environments that don't exclude autistic people. Having specific labels could, on the one hand, help bring focus towards the specific needs of those people. On the other hand, it's harder to convince people of a 100 different neurodiverse profiles than one...
Honestly it's difficult to expect people to communicate all the things in the bucket that might apply to them. Naming the bucket is easier for a lot of purposes.
I get that. On the other hand, by making the buckets smaller, you're forced to specify the corresponding phenomena a lot more. Which might actually help people understand what applies and what doesn't, better. Understanding something is pretty much a prerequisite to communicating it.
EDIT: I misread your comment earlier, ignore the above paragraph. I definitely get how exhausting it might be to list off everything. I suppose I feel the Autism label is too big at the moment to communicate effectively though. See the following, I think it still applies.
It also helps people on the other end. If someone says they have "Misophonia, Aural sensitivity, and Rejection Sensitivity" I would understand a lot more about their situation than if they simply said they're mildly Autistic.
The diagnostic criteria and symptoms have substantial overlap, ultimately everything in the DSM is a descriptive diagnosis not based on a mechanistic understanding of neurobiology so it's VERY likely that our categories don't map 1:1 to the underlying causes.
One is impulsive, the other requires structure. The two are not mutually exclusive though, because both conditions are pretty diverse. AuDHD is a term used to describe people with both.
This is a massive oversimplification of both autism and ADHD which approaches uselessness. Impulsivity is one possible symptom of ADHD, but doesn't even begin to describe the experience, and by itself paints an incorrect picture of the experience. Same for autism and structure. I know plenty of people with autism who absolutely do not deal in structure.
I know it feels nice to be able to craft a simple narrative, but this narrative feels more harmful and misconstrued than useful.
I have autism and have a lot of trouble with routine and rigid timelines. But I also have ADHD, so I suspect there is some internal struggle there. I want to have routine for a lot of things, I just can’t seem to make it happen.
Significant enough that the DSM-iV recognized ADHD symptoms as symptoms of autism and didn't allow a comorbid diagnosis of both conditions because of this. (The DSM-V does recognize both as possibly occurring together.)
> Energy Burnout: You collapse at your desk [...] HR schedules a 'wellness check' but the writing is on the wall. You're fired. Congratulations! You've successfully burned out in record time. The HR department will be in touch about your "performance improvement plan."
To be fair, this doesn't scream autism, it screams abusive employer. Given the workday that was described, I'd have been out of energy too.
If anything, if you've disclosed autism as a disability, it would be harder for them to fire you, especially if they failed to provide "reasonable adjustments".
Reminds me of the the old quote: "before you diagnose yourself with depression, make sure you're not in fact surrounded by assholes".
If there isn't a way to get pass more than a few days, regardless of any choices made, the one lesson simulator is giving is "there's no way an autistic developer can last a few days without burning out". Or from a coworker's perspective: "my coworker is struggling, but there's nothing I can do to prevent burn out in my coworker".
Perhaps tune the choices, and the effects to have a net neutral bonus and penalties to have a longer gameplay loop. Having random weights to the actions might work as well.
not autistic but i also mask like crazy at work. my experience is its the default mode in consulting
the first 2 years i had a sense that i needed to read between the lines in many conversations and asking for clarity on topics of budget, clients, and contracts was not done. to be clear: asking for details on requirements is completely normal and encouraged
ive become competent at compartmentalizing after 5 years. ive offered unsolicited advice to my less socially aware coworkers which only lead to more confusion as they had not noticed things said "between the lines" and have almost no interest in clients
i cant imagine having to mask through day-to-day life and a job which demands masking by people without disability. no wonder i didnt make it to dinner in the sim
Choosing autism speaks as a place for support and advocacy is an interested and, in my opinion, a short-sighted choice. They don't hold a strong track record or convey an image of trust towards the ND community. Even when they tried to improve their brand image, their funding mostly going into advertisement and their current choices such as comparing Autism to Cancer and stating that it is a hopeless condition (At least changing away from the autism is curable stance they had) are less than ideal.
Maybe I'm not supposed to get it, since I'm not autistic, but why does turning off the radio with an annoying sound reduce energy? From my perspective, I can't find any logical correlation between the choices made and the outcomes.
Seems like turning off the annoying sound would be a good thing. This, unfortunately, just makes autism seem inscrutable and something I will just never understand.
It is mental effort to have to recognize what is triggering you and to take positive action to fix it. The radio is more symbolic of having to do it 40 times a day across all the things you find triggering, or having to find ways to live your life outside common neurotypical ways that take more energy. For example, finding dishes clinking to be really triggering means I have to use ear protection to unload the dishwasher, and if I can’t find ear protection that I have to spend time looking around for it, and now dishes have taken me 3 minutes longer than it would someone else. Over a dozen instances a day of something like this adds up
Game just _assumes_ you drink coffee. That's a big decision, and I'd say coffee wears you down at least as much as everything else on the long run. Sure, short-term effects can be good, same as alcohol.
Moderate consumption of coffee is fine. I'm not aware of any severe damage from drinking a cup a day. I don't think the comparison with alcohol is apt.
Not for everybody on the spectrum. I certainly see the difference if I go a week with coffee and no coffee -- the weardown and overwhelming effects slowly accumulate with coffee.
If the author feels overwhelmed, I'd say coffee should be tried first. It's not easy (caffeine addiction is real, especially for the spectrum), but it gets easier and easier with time.
I like the bit about the rattling hvac or whatever. Years ago before I knew I was on the spectrum, the A/C system in the office I worked at was noisy (to me), and barely worked in the summer. Nobody seemed to notice or care.
The noise was distracting to me so to complained, after a long while they eventually got someone in... but they just put in a really noisy fan in the office close'ish to our desk.
They didn't fix it the extra fan did nothing, it couldn't pull more air then it was given.. obv.. so then I had even more noise and the A/C system still didn't work.
I gave up trying to get it improved, and worked with headphones most of the time.
No one else finds it an issue.
At the end of the day when staying late and the A/C systems turns off, I can feel a huge load lifted of my shoulders, and I can think much clearer.
Also the lights are horrible, if I'm working alone in the weekend I'll leave them off, it's so much nicer, less harsh. But again I seem the only one who noticed and is affected by it.
I eventually got so burnt out, crashed and quit... have been unemployed for... many many years now. Hard to say why I couldn't another job. I think maybe PTSD of my (first) and last experience, along with intense anxiety to just start. (interviewing is a painful experience, not only do I have to answer and ask questions, but need to fake eye contact, make small talk etc, all to get a job I'll probably have to bail out of.
I've tried to do some self-employed stuff, but nothing has given much income. (living with parents, I feel terrible about it, but no idea how to escape my living hell)
It's easy to get Energy or Masking to 0, but no matter what I tried I can't have the game end by getting Competence or Relationships to 0. Is it possible at all? I'm just curious what the ending texts will be for those...
Even when clicking responses that seem like they should make relationship go down and energy up, like giving a minimal response, instead it makes energy go down a lot and relationships go up.
Love the aesthetics of this. Very cool. Love that its a game for web and just a really interesting choose your own adventure deal.
As for the game itself, it seems a bit punishing / too pessimistic? I don't want to be insensitive but I don't think my choices would lead my character, who was maintaining a full time job for this long, to collapse at their desk midday and be fired.
HN’s response: “As someone neurotypical, I think this is completely wrong”
Honestly I appreciated the one comment from someone with autism and everyone else complaining just seems like they think they know everything. One commenter even called it whiney!
This was awesome, mainly because the paths I could choose were real things I might do. So relevant to my life. And I’m not taking the stats too seriously as it seems so many others are, which is almost comical given the topic. Thank you!
I chose to skip breakfast. I am never hungry in the morning. I almost never have breakfast. I eat "late" the night before, like around 8-10 pm. Maybe that's bad? IDK.
While the topic is eating, I hate lunch around noon on a workday because it disables my higher brain functions for a couple of hours. It is almost mandatory however because what else am I supposed to use that mandatory break for? Just vegging out? That's pointless. I'm not working construction, I don't need to rest my body, I'm doing screen work. What I need is them not riding my back about how I'm not always laser focused on the BS they have us do. My brain decides when I need to put work aside and think about things that aren't such tedium.
"Energy Burnout: You collapse at your desk, your body desperately trying to atone for days of fragmented sleep. As the waves of deep, restorative, dreamless sleep wash over you, you're roused by a gentle shake. It's 2AM and security has found you asleep at your desk. HR schedules a 'wellness check' but the writing is on the wall. You're fired.
Congratulations! You've successfully burned out in record time. The HR department will be in touch about your "performance improvement plan."
I survived one day. Feels accurate. I don't get why there are so many serious comments around this game. Its not rocket science. We often make fun of autism in the team, its just a nice way to chew the fat in the modern workplace.
This was great and a really unique idea. In thinking about sharing it with people who don't have a dev background, changing some of the situational descriptions could be helpful: "vendor kickoff", "standup", etc
This is actually a huge part of "getting better" as an autistic. A large amount of this masking is a trauma response from childhood when authority figures were a threat and not understandable so you pretend and "mask" and appease.
But once you are older and able to sieze your own power and set your own boundaries? The healthiest high functioning autist I know share this "don't give a fuck " attitude.
Very sad for the hell lower functioning ones must live in... Almost like the horror stories of locked in comas.
Sad that autism has become such a trend. I have a niece on the spectrum and it was obvious at a very young age luckily she is more high functioning now via years of therapy.
No one wants to hear it but there is a vast difference between those on the spectrum and those not. I am in tech and i have never met anyone autistic. This is because the sad reality is that autism makes it that hard to hold down a job even if high functioning.
It is grossly over exaggerated by many and used as an excuse. This is not saying anyone here does that but in media it is extremely common. This only makes it harder for those who do suffer from it. The majority of autism stereotypes are almost all on the high functioning side. Closer to the low functioning side, it is very sad.
People are tired of being forced to do bullshit meaningless or net negative stuff, obey people they don't respect on a deeper level etc. People live in a way like captive animals in a zoo. Everything is urgent, the sky is falling, but all behind a glass screen.
But the only vocabulary they have to express all this is therapy speak and mental health. So everyone has ADHD, autism, PTSD, anxiety, depression, bipolar and more. When it's often actually a lack of purpose, a lack of enduring value, being a standardized cog in a machine, ripped of context and roots, atomized, etc. But this is not valid vocabulary, we are modern people, we have chemical imbalances and not nonsense medieval concepts. Medical labels still have power even in a lifeless bureaucratic corporate HR hellscape. Medical diagnoses and credible claims of unsafe work environments. Anything else, they sleep. These two and they listen.
> we have chemical imbalances and not nonsense medieval concepts
That is not how the brain works. The whole chemical imbalances thing is a gross over-simplification. Honestly how it is used in pop science is often very analogues to the medieval theory of Humorism.
> When it's often actually a lack of purpose, a lack of enduring value, being a standardized cog in a machine
If you are subjected to an toxic environment it is a very healthy and good reaction to be unhappy about this.
Yes, psychologist mostly focus on the individual. That is their job. They can't fix unemployment, alienation of labor and so on. Those are societal issues that need political solutions.
However, this does not mean ADHD, autism, PTSD and so on are not real issues.
If I lived in a perfect utopia, I would still have ADHD. If ADHD were made up, why do my genetic children also have a 40% chance of having ADHD? Why would that not be true if I adopted someone?
These are real and disabling things that need specific treatment.
I agree with most of this. Though it gets really conceptually murky what a mental illness is and the DSM diagnosis checklists are quite different from how diagnoses work in "body"-medicine. The psychiatrist blogger Scott Alexander has written a lot about this.
For the common person, psychology and therapy are a new skin on spiritual guidance, shamanism, or rituals like Catholic confession.
> That is not how the brain works. The whole chemical imbalances thing is a gross over-simplification
I know and I was implying disagreement by the placement of that sentence in the context. I was trying to present what the common notion is. If it's a chemical imbalance, it can't be your fault. We trust science, we are physicalists. It has to be imagined as some miswiring or chemical problem for it to be respectable and taken seriously.
> If I lived in a perfect utopia, I would still have ADHD. If ADHD were made up, why do my genetic children also have a 40% chance of having ADHD? Why would that not be true if I adopted someone?
Personality and temperament differences exist yes. What we decide to label as a disease diagnosis is an entirely orthogonal question. ADHD is often diagnosed in rigid school environments that look nothing like homo sapiens' evolved natural habitat. It's not necessarily a disease not to flourish there. Yes I understand that given the environment, it makes sense to try to help as best as we can, and we can't single-handedly change society with a magic wand. Of course.
Ok, I slightly misunderstood and I see now better where you are coming from.
Yes, you are not wrong but as a ADHD person it comes off as super invalidating.
It is kind of like discussions where gender radical people tell to trans people that gender is just a social construct. Like it is but that doesn't exactly help trans people.
I mean I am sure you recognize this as you wrote.
> Yes I understand that given the environment, it makes sense to try to help as best as we can, and we can't single-handedly change society with a magic wand. Of course.
Still, I do believe that you massively overstate socially constructed aspect of having ADHD and underestimate the physical reality of it.
Yes, my environment makes a huge huge difference. But, as someone who was diagnosed very late in life, it was always with me. Even when I was alone. Even when I thrived. It is a fundamental part of who I am.
Not having a diagnosis earlier set up for constant spirals of failure, for internalized self hate. It did not allow me to find strategies to cope effectively.
I couldn't find or build the environment I needed because I didn't know my needs. This is why the diagnosis must come first.
ADHD is a disability and it is a real as being deaf or not being able to walk.
Once this is on the table, it's hard answer in a way that doesn't come across as being the asshole. But that's kind of my point. People tie identities and emotions to labels. It reframes how people react. Since it's real, you're given support. If it were fake, you'd get scolded. The shift in view that I got from Scott Alexander is that the arrow points the other way around. Since we see people who can benefit from some support, and we generally don't want to be assholes and want the support to be paid by insurance etc, we have to declare the thing as a Disease(TM). But this categorization is in good part necessary due to the bureaucratic system we live in. There are many ways that societies have conceptualized such things. All the way to demon possession. In comparison blindness is much easier to understand mechanistically.
No. Knowing that I have ADHD is something that would benefit me even if I spend the rest of my life on a remote island with no human contact. Yes it is as real as blindness.
> But the only vocabulary they have to express all this is therapy speak
What? I deal with all of that and more at work, and I just roll my eyes (to myself) and think "it's a paycheck."
If you're lucky you might find a sense of purpose and value at work but it's not really normal from what I've experienced. Even if you like the people you work with, the job itself is probably mostly bullshit. The only jobs I've had that weren't were the jobs that had very standardized tasks: making burgers, framing walls, painting, cutting grass. There's not much bullshit in those jobs because it's very clear what you are there to do. And you can turn around at the end of the day and look at the wall you built. That doesn't mean you might not feel like a cog in a machine.
IMO most people should find purpose and value outside of work. Work is just how you pay for those things.
I swear I went home from work but then got fired from my job for falling asleep at my desk. I don't understand what happened. (And even if I did fall asleep at my desk, who fires an employee for falling asleep once?)
Bummer - this has been the hardest code I've ever had to write test coverage for. I'm using https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ for the story routing with inkjs so I'm not surprised that there are some lingering weird-paths.
I don't have an official diagnosis, but I have markers for ADHD and Autism as suggested by a professional. It's quite expensive to pursue these as an adult, so I haven't done it yet.
That being said, I found several of these situations triggering. I am definitely a high masking ND, so I can deal with much more than what this game allows.
40 y/o. Often skips breakfast. Puts in AirPods on noise-cancellation mode with nothing playing. Wakes up at 2am with a song repeating in my head making it so I can't sleep.
There are point diffs on your stats each turn. The positive diffs are always the same for the same choices regardless of day.
The negative choices have an additional 25% added to them each day, so -10 the first day for a choice would be -12 (floor) the second day, -15 the third day, etc.
Staying in home office is not possible? Then you should really switch your employer, especially if you think your on the spectrum. It is not 201x anymore.
Yeah the modern workplace is a nightmare for me with all the get togethers and reasons to be forcefully happy about everything. I functioned reasonably well in places without all those shenanigans and the ability to work quietly. Or where they just happen once a year or something. Remote was a true game changer but it's not the same.
Also I wonder about the meds part, I haven't been prescribed any despite getting a diagnosis
But generally a cool idea, I like the graphics and how the energy inevitably goes down. I think it's more of a US office experience though
ok, I went through it as a relatively normal software engineer (though i certainly can empathize with a lot of on-the-spectrum behavior in kind if not in intensity) - I have 3 takeaways.
1. Things that I brush off or bounce back from have a cumulative effect that leaves some autistic people 'in the red'. It affects them and sticks with them more than it does to me.
2. Options that are not at all realistic or sensible to me like 'not taking meds' - i would never consider skipping a prescription. several cases offered responding with formal processes and complaints that are wildly inappropriate for the offense. Are you showing that to an autistic person these terrible choices somehow seem to be viable?
3. This sample environment is over-the-top with caricatures of the worst sort of job activities populated by judgemental and sneering villains. Are you trying to show that to an autistic person they only see a day full of the very worst things - that they fixate on these problems and don't put them in context with the rest of the experience?
An uncharitable person could take away that autistic people are fragile, make poor choices, and only see the worst in the people around them.
Maybe this was more meant as a comic rant that autistic people could enjoy as a parody of their shared experiences? I'm not actually sure this is accomplishing what you want.
Question: are there any good resources out there for leading those that are neurodivergent? I haven't led anyone that's neurodiverent yet but it's something I think alot about.
I’ve learned so much, and it took only a few minutes. What a treat.
I had no idea about masking, even though I’ve been doing it for as long as I remember being alive. Aaaah, it’s so draining. When I was younger (in my 20s) I used to think there’d come a time when I’d finally come out of my shell. I’m pushing 40 now, but the shell is only thicker, the cave deeper, the walls taller. Instead of dreaming that one day I’ll be “like everyone else”, I’m contemplating the day I’ll cease to exist. Funny.
Please talk to someone about it. Living with autism doesn't have to be horrible. Even if you can't change everything to fit right now you can always take small steps in the right direction. Eventually those steps add up to a better life.
This is a fun way to try and experience for just a second what it is like to be on the spectrum. I think a lot more people are (including myself) than people even realize. It can really effect our sense of normal and how we go about our day. thanks for making this!
Eh, this just feels like "software engineering simulator." I don't have autism but a good bit of this feels familiar (am I on the spectrum?) I'm an introvert and have struggled to cope with corporate work for a while.
What helps:
- Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful. If masking is a recipe for burnout, then it actually seems like it's a strategy that will lower your chance for success. How much of the need here is self-imposed?
- Owning your calendar and timing for meetings to better suit your energy.
- Regular therapy and reflection, honestly.
- Regular exercise, doesn't matter who you are or what form, this is essential.
I can respect that this "simulation" fosters empathy, but worry that it also awfulizes/catastrophizes solvable problems. Figuring out functional routines and managing burnout is just as big a part of the job as writing code. It's very much a personal responsibility, maybe not in the job description, maybe harder for some than others, but it is our responsibility.
Heck, this isn’t even specific to software engineering. It’s basically just a “getting through the workday” simulator. I think there are a great many people who find working in an office exhausting. Personally, I was so much happier once I switched to remote work.
> Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful... How much of the need here is self-imposed?
Autistic people don't come into the world as fully formed adults with irrational ideas about the need to mask. They start off as children and attempt to socialize with other children. The autistic child in a neurotypical world just "being themselves" finds themselves repeatedly kicked out of friend groups and rejected by everyone sometimes including by their parents. This is deeply traumatic to a young child's psyche. Unloved and rejected, a solution appears! I'll just pretend to be like the other kids, even though they're stupid and wrong. They may actually objectively be stupid, but apparently they don't like being told that to their face. Pile on another decade or two of this, and hey, this child, now older and wiser, has autistic masking tendencies that cause them to burn out. Blame the now-adult person with autism all you want to absolve yourself of a need to concern yourself with other people's problems, but that's not actually helpful for those people suffering from autistic burnout.
I mask as a coping mechanism for ADHD and Social Anxiety. This masking causes me harm. I learned it in the way you describe.
The most helpful learning I've gotten through years of therapy has been to: (1) recognize what I'm doing (2) not beat myself up about it (3) try small steps to change my behavior so that I can feel good about it.
I'm the only person who can unlearn this for myself. I don't blame anyone who masks, and have nothing but empathy for the experience, but I'm proposing they can find a different way.
We'd need to have a rigorous definition on what it means to mask, and to agree on which behaviors should be considered masking, and which are simply being socialized, and what's necessary to exist in a society and what's not, before we could have a detailed productive conversation.
Therapy absolutely helps. Unlearning maladaptive behaviors rooted in childhood trauma is part of being a well-adjusted adult.
It takes energy to not do every impulsive thing that comes to mind. Fine, don't call it masking to not give into them. Whatever you want to call it though, it's exhausting.
> Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful. If masking is a recipe for burnout, then it actually seems like it's a strategy that will lower your chance for success. How much of the need here is self-imposed?
Masking is not always conscious, in fact it's largely unconscious. So many autistic people will go through their day around neurotypical people and feel burnt out by lunch and have no idea why. They don't necessarily realize they're burning tons of mental effort just talking to people or dealing with stimuli.
Autistic people learn to mask just to get by day to day. It's not like they got issued a "How to be Autistic: Masking for Success" guide book when they were born.
I still think it's important to (1) notice what's causing the problem, bring it into consciousness (2) understand the behavior (in this case: masking) and reckon with it if if's causing a bad outcome (burnout.)
Easier said than done. For me, therapy has been life-changing for helping me notice and understand unintentional behaviors.
Isn't that just being introverted? Also, if it's unconscious then a "simulator" shouldn't present an option. The PC should simply react automatically to the detriment of some stat. It sounds like for something to qualify as "masking" it must be a conscious choice, otherwise it's some other thing.
> It's very much a personal responsibility, maybe not in the job description, maybe harder for some than others, but it is our responsibility.
You might as well be telling a wheelchair-bound person that it's their responsibility to find a way up a flight of stairs or maneuver a cramped bathroom stall.
Eh. No not really. There is a threshold to even be considered on the spectrum.
Most people have 2 legs and 2 arms. Some people don't (birth defects, injuries, accidents, disease, etc). There is a spectrum of missing appendages, but to say everyone is missing at least part of an appendage is not correct.
Ok, I'll bite. What's that threshold to be considered "on the spectrum"? Is there a threshold on the other end? If so, what is that? My point is that everybody exhibits some of the symptoms typically associated with autism or Asberger's. For example: getting exhausted from being around people; sensory overload; pattern-finding in everything. It differs for each person. I frequently look for visual patterns around me, and it's satisfying to find one. Does that put me "on the spectrum"? Some sounds make me cringe. What about that? How many do there have to be? The whole reason it's called a "spectrum" is that there is no one thing that can define it.
DSM-5 is the current standard for diagnosing and classifying mental health conditions. I don't have the direct quote from the book handy, but I believe this guide from Stanford is accurate: https://med.stanford.edu/content/dam/sm/neonatology/document...
Essentially, there's a collection of behaviors you need to exhibit to be considered autistic. Then, the "spectrum" part is the severity of those behaviors.
"Visible light" is just a moniker assigned to a subset of the electromagnetic spectrum. Gamma waves are on the spectrum, orange is on the spectrum, infrared is on the spectrum.
The definition of autism has changed to pull in masses more people over the years, so if you're an older software engineer you may be autistic using the up-to-date definition.
With the DSM-5 and it's removal of Asperger's as a separate diagnosis the diagnosis criteria has been made stricter. People that would have formerly been diagnosed as Asperger could theoretically not be anymore under ASD.
The percentage of people with autism in a population is very stable and we know there is a huge genetic component to it.
People are getting diagnosed more but the amount of people with autism has likely stayed stable.
Which is really, really good thing. A diagnosis is live changing. The earlier you get diagnosed and the more supportive your network is, the better the outcome.
That desk thing hits a nerve as someone on the other side of it.
It is not about "hot desk" but just not being able to see that some time you will need to reorganize how you sit. And not everyone will get the perfect spot.
Is it really a thing for some people that you need to sit on the same place always? I was never sure how much it offended some people or if they were just being comfortable.
Sorry, thought someone else would chime in.
But I've known people who need to sit in the same place. Doesn't need to be the "best" spot, just the same spot.
Not all autistic people are like that.
From my personal experience most can be flexible, they may have a preference (stronger than "normal" people) to xyz spot, but will sit elsewhere if it's already taken.
Very nice game. Barely made it to getting to the office and receiving orders from a manager. I could completely relate to the "hot desk" experience, that's something that would irritate me. I do not claim to be in the spectrum, nor have any diagnosis to claim or reject it. Again, congratulations for the game and the feeling.
Kudos, this was a lot of fun to experience my own autism from an outside perspective for once, haha
Made it to day two without issues, then crashed on energy. Didn't crash on masking like a lot of others, guess i'm too used to doing that.
I love the idea of a tool to help people build empathy and better understand the experience of someone with autism. I wonder what this simulator would be like from the perspective of a young child going through school. Is that something that sounds interesting to you that you would consider creating? Thanks for sharing.
If you're from a well off family, you can be oblivious to everything and still have what you need to live so in my experience things were a lot easier. For me once I became self-aware, it turned into a tradeoff of outgrowing sensory issues (i.e. fire drills being pure hell) and weird speech issues and learning social skills, with worse executive functioning and anxiety and energy and still not being socially proficient enough to not be some level of offputting, and now the social skills matter much more so it's a bigger obstacle even though I'm a lot better at them.
Not sure about this. I am high functioning autistic. It ended my game because I called my mom and that was somehow overly taxing. I call my parents and sibling sometimes when I feel drained emotionally. Not everyone hates communicating with their family.
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
Isn't that just part of everyday life as a grown-up?
Some people find this process intuitive to the point they don't realize they're doing it, and others have to be actively thinking about it or it doesn't happen at all. Those with autism are more likely to tend towards the latter.
For some people it comes easier than for others. I personally don't feel like I mask all the time, only sometimes when I want to tell my colleague that he's a moron, but I don't.
This seems in the same direction as "doesn't everyone get sad?" for folks with depression. It's not a matter of this not being an experience for others, as much as it is how much energy it takes to get through it.
"Energy" in this case as a stand-in for willpower, for emotional regulation, for actual physical energy.
Yes, but it's more intense for people who find eye contact distracting or outright unpleasant on a visceral level, or who are suppresssing stimming urges that a 'normal' person doesn't experience in the first place.
> Isn't that just part of everyday life as a grown-up?
Yes it is.
The question isn't if you mask, it's what you are masking and to what extent.
There is a big difference between having sense enough not to wear your favorite gimp suit to work and not knowing how to make small talk and have to do it as performance everyday when you are at work.
I hope tools like this help normalize conversations around neurodiversity. If nothing else, it reminds me to be slower to judge and quicker to offer flexibility where I can
Generally speaking, a lot of firms follow best practice where "issues"/"tasks"/"stories" are written (by a Product Manager, or PM) to include both a prescriptive request as well as a list of acceptance criteria that can be checked off to act as a mutually understood list of requirements for that issue to be considered complete.
The "given/when/then" model is basically, "given this circumstance, when the following occurs, the following behavior is observed" as a framing device for building ACs, though not everyone uses that.
Would you consider making a version/mode with resulting effects disclosed before the choice? I feel like that would make the whole experience smoother and more illustrative.
Hmm...I recognize the opening description well as someone who has ADHD. But honestly I don't know anyone who is neurotypical for whom the description wouldn't apply as well.
You should allow people to pick more options to resolve the issues. If energy is low, enable a nap, or food, or some other way to replenish, instead of “watching tv”.
I don't like the premise of this game. If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
You'll annoy the hell out of some people, and thats fine. They can find other people to spend time with.
You can probably find a good community where you are, and if not just move to SF which is something like the autism homeland. Being autistic there is valorized and even imitated in sort of amusing ways.
Masking is a kind of hell, living someone else's life. Unmasking and living as yourself feels scary at first but the people who will love you that way can only find you if you live that way.
> If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
No thank you. I very much prefer to remain employed.
I get enough accommodations as it is; society is built on give-and-take and I’ve found a stable medium. My masking is part of that compromise. Without it I would just be entitled.
Masking doesn't (only) mean presenting as 100% neurotypical with the goal of others not even realizing you're autistic. It's also what you call any amount emotional labor you go through, trying to decrease the amount of emotional labor that other people have to expend on dealing with the ways you would, if not masking, approach interactions/tasks/etc differently.
If you imagine neurotypical and autistic as two "languages", then masking is when an autistic person is going to the effort to speak the neurotypical language, so as to remove the burden from neurotypical people of having to parse the autistic language. Most of the time, unless the interaction is very short and one-shot, the autistic person will still come off as speaking the neurotypical language "as a second language" rather than speaking it "fluently"; but it is the lived experience of many autistic people that this is still less disruptive in mixed company than just letting go and going full native autistic and expecting neurotypical people to be the ones to adapt. (Even in SF, a randomly-selected group of people often contains a few people visiting from elsewhere, who have never interacted with [non-masking] autistic people before, and so have never learned to "speak" autistic.)
Which is not to say that it isn't nice to find other autistic people to hang out with, where you can just let your hair down and "speak your native language" together! But it's not like this is something people avoid doing, if they get the chance. It's just that in most places in the world, you're rather unlikely to stumble into groups consisting solely of autistic people. (Except maybe in engineering-led tech companies!)
> If you imagine neurotypical and autistic as two "languages"
This analogy is very analogous. Damian Milton introduced it to academia as the "double empathy problem", and there are a trickle of studies confirming the obvious corollaries of the analogy (e.g. doi:10.1177/1362361320919286 "Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective") which are considered surprising by academia because autism (like most psychological conditions) is defined badly:
> Autism is defined clinically by deficits in social communication. It may therefore be expected that autistic people find it difficult to share information with other people.
The other factor to consider: no two autistic people are alike - one doesn't necessarily have the SAME native language as another - they're just both different from neurotypical. (I have a daughter on the spectrum)
Imagine visiting a new planet where every household has it's OWN unique language, most of them at least somewhat different from all the others, but they can mostly all speak passable english - is it easier for you to learn each of their languages, or for them to "mask" and speak to you in english?
For clarity, I am not autistic (as far as I am aware) but I do have personality traits and quirks that absolutely have made my life challenging. As I have gotten older I have learned to mask those traits and it has led to far more success in life. While I still have trouble maintaining relationships, I at least can curate a professional reputation that has granted me benefits.
I am not saying this to claim that those with autism should mask, but I think the advice in this comment could be misinterpreted. While we should all be able to live as authentic selves, the reality is that this comes with trade-offs. We should evaluate those trade-offs independently and determine which of our personality traits are worth masking and which are not.
I'm audhd in real life and I've been unable to get to day 3 in this game after 5 tries. I don't know what that says about me, the spectrum, this way, or the way I live my life, but I think I also don't like the premise much either.
"No matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter who your audience is: 30 percent will love it, 30 percent will hate it, and 30 percent won't care."
IDK if it says something about me, but my first couple tries at the game I misunderstood what masking was.
I thought when my Masking score went down, it meant I was showing my true colors too much and exposing myself as autistic (to the detriment of my career). Took me a minute to realize it was the opposite.
I strongly agree. Masking is a maladaptive strategy and it's described that way in the literature.
But you do have to figure out who you are and what matters to you. A lot of autistic people spend much of their youth trying to be other people and only really figuring out what they like when they're in their 30s, 40s, or older.
Yikes. I suppose "Just stop masking" is great advice if you're in a highly privilege position where you don't have to worry about losing your job. But that does track with suggesting autistic people "just move to San Francisco," where my crippling disorder is "imitated" in "amusing" ways.
Screw that. There’s nothing inherently good about authenticity. Be yourself when it’s good to be yourself. Don’t when it’s not. Try to change “yourself” when it’s beneficial to do so.
I first learned that it was possible to intentionally act "normal" when I was 12 (I'm now 47). So I spent a lot of years studying people to figure out how to do those things they did automatically but I had to do manually.
Later I learned it's called masking and a lot of people like yourself think of it as bad.
But it made my life immeasurably better.
I hated how I acted and how people reacted to me when I was young.
I wouldn't even know how to turn off the "masking behavior" now and I never would have become who I am without it.
Maybe it's because I was young and didn't know any other people like me but I don't think labelling this survival technique as hell is right for everybody.
That's an interesting take. Most humans have a viscerally negative reaction to unmasked autistic behaviours, in the same way they might react to a strange spider. A mix of fear and disgust. You quite literally cannot build a life for yourself without masking unless you're already financially independent. Once you have enough power and F-U money, sure, go for it. In the meantime it's not really a realistic solution.
In the context of this game world, that circumstance manifests as the player getting fired from their job. Perhaps a person would like to keep their job and so does things they otherwise wouldn't like to do.
> If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
What does “masking” mean to you? Because when I search for autistic masking I get a really wide range of behaviors from suppressing physical rocking to attempting to learn social skills.
Some masking might be counterproductive or even harmful. Some of the stuff I’m finding listed as masking is just basic being an adult stuff, though. If “don’t mask” means “don’t try to improve yourself” then it’s terrible advice.
I have aspergers (not sure the term is even used anymore) and eye contact is very uncomfortable, but I try to do it (or fake, it as I have to wear glasses and can take them off) because in day to day life not having eye contact when having a conversation is seen as rude and the last thing I want is for everyone that I have a one time conversation with to think I'm rude.
Extremely disappointed about the amount of ableism in the comments. Yes, some kids these days pick the autism label when they probably shouldn't, but that does NOT mean you get to shit on actually disabled people
Plenty of autistic people experience actual disability. And masking isn't just "what everyone does at work". Masking is a trauma response. Autistic people in genral have been abused for their 'abnormal' behavior to the point of being so traumatized that masking is not even a choice. They must hide for fear of further abuse and harassment.
Abuse such as "everyone's a little autistic" and "that's not a disability" or "you just want attention"
Making passing judgements on someone's disability that you clearly don't understand makes you a bigoted asshole. Stop it.
Yes, some kids these days pick the autism label when they probably shouldn't, but that does NOT mean you get to shit on actually disabled people
You shouldn't shit on anyone, but you do raise a good point: how do you know who the actually disabled people are?
If some people who claim autism offer as evidence experiences that almost all neurotypical folks can relate to, people are going to be skeptical. You can call them bigoted assholes, but you're unlikely to shame anyone into suspending their skepticism.
This is sort of silly. Everyone has to "mask" at work. I do not care if the HR lady tells you to "bring your whole self". Unless your whole self happens to be precisely what they want, it is a lie. And nobody is that conflict avoidant, fake-happy, and deeply committed to shareholder value while upholding the strongest standards of ethics and work ethic.
This is a grind for pretty much everyone. To give you the other side, to someone extroverted and socially attuned, the fake nonsense is more grating and insulting than it is to you, I'd guess. Life is hard and everyone has his cross to bear.
try vagus nerve stimulation yoga. kegel with diaphragmatic breathing whenever you get anxious. and limit cortisol inducing food/drink. coffee/tea/meat. sweets are okay if they make your cortisol lower but moderation is key. also eat all meals of the day. and listen to gamma waves music at work. and sleep in a room with open shades so you wake up at sunlight.
these steps will ensure your body actively tries to be in the parasympathetic instead of sympathetic.
side effects.. bladder and bowel might become a little bit overactive but that is okay as you r strengthening the pelvic floor.
On a more meta level I found the game quite satisfying to play because it captures the essence well and went into the comments expecting to see a little empathy for different modes of thinking. Very much for a change. Instead it's long threads of neurotypical people insisting to "just fix it" with "this one tip" or aggressively misunderstanding everything and saying it's nonsense.
It's hilarious in the sense that this too is part of a daily experience and alienation, but it's really depressing and tiring to see that even when hands are held people are still shitheads about it. Why is this the case? I genuinely don't understand why everyone can't take a deep breath and figure out that the obvious has been tried, doesn't work and therefore isn't useful? That maybe people deserve a little patience and understanding, instead of yet more pushy bad attitude?
Thanks for playing and agreed! I have a disclaimer in the [About] modal
Autism is an extremely diverse and complex phenomenon. No two autistic people experience the world in the same way. This simulation is based on the experiences of a single autistic individual and is not representative of all autistic people, although, I suspect many autistic people will recognize some aspects of their own experience in this simulation.
Thats a bit uncalled for. This is a game made by someone shaped by their perspective on the world. It can be appreciated as such without applying your own additional intent.
I think masking is pretty general across the board. Even severe Autism. My daughter acts completely different in different contexts. Some could say we all do but you'll know it when you see it esp when the mask is gone.
Based on this simulator, I have concluded that most of "autism" is just a pathologization of normal human personality characteristics which are simply not well aligned with the expectations of the culture which presently dominates.
For example, sensitivity to background noise is an extremely normal thing which is strongly correlated with intelligence.
Similarly, the tendency to get caught up in learning about interesting things instead of paying attention to boring things. This is just another sign of intelligence.
Another example: I also have to "mask" in social situations, and I find it exhausting. But it is only exhausting in the presence of alien people who expect alien behavior. If I am around my own people, or if I have enough power to simply defy expectations and behave normally, then there is no exhaustion. If people like me were in control, then "normal" people would have to mask, and they would find it exhausting.
So, there is no "disorder" here. You are just an intelligent person who lives in enemy territory, and who struggles to conform to their expectations, which are completely alien to your nature.
Conclusion. If you are struggling with "autism", the solution is to band together and seek power.
Scrolling through the comments and noticed that they are a pretty good autism simulator for working in tech with autism. The entire cast of typical characters is represented.
- guy that thinks everyone has the tism and the spectrum is everyone
- this guy has more trouble reading the room than anyone. but it is the lack of empathy and not autism
- guy that thinks everything is a microaggression towards his autism and ironically makes it harder for other autists
- guy with probable schizoid personality disorder that thinks struggling with people and social issues is just life because everyone is stupid and annoying
- guy who read Bad Therapy once and now thinks autism is a tiktok trend
- insufferable fedora guy that thinks psych is unscientific
- probably secretly has severe depression and is making it everyone else's problem by being a jerk. whenever called out 4 being jerk blames the autism he probably doesn't actually have
- guy who thinks the solution is just be yourself
- guy with trauma from being themselves landing them on a PIP
A primary problem in tech is how everyone is seriously lacking in social skills and empathy. This is exhausting for autists and everyone. The real autism simulator is just existing in tech.
The comments in the threads are interesting. A surprising amount of people are saying they don’t get it.
I can shed light into the food thing (I don’t think of myself as autistic but the people around me do, my kid is diagnosed - I was the last one to clue in “that’s just being a kid” I would say); so food, making yourself a proper breakfast is self-care, and self care takes energy. Making yourself breakfast is a lot of work, so you do it and it eats your energy, or you don’t do it and you feel shittier later because you didn’t eat.
It’s a shitty catch-22.
And some days you’re tired from the day before; I love that the sim carried over the energy levels from the day before because sleep does help but there’s no real reset, the day before carries into the next day so you’ll be like “I know I should make myself food, but I’m exhausted” so you avoid it and it turns out worse, or you do it and now you’re tired for the next task.
Have any HN autists here had any luck with Folinic acid as an adult relieving some of the aspects of the condition?
Leucovorin, a prescription/medical form of Folinic acid, was mentioned recently by RFK Jr./HHS as an effective treatment for some forms of childhood autism.
Politics aside, I recently saw some anecdotal cases of marked immediate improvement in young children.
Has anyone tried the over-the-counter version as an adult? The over-the-counter version which seems to be basically the same compound as Leucovorin, just not produced in a medical setting and exacting medical standards.
PS, please don't just downvote, reply to the comment instead with your objection or correction to what I wrote (if you have one)
Solid slice of the more extreme side of the autism spectrum for those who can still function within “normal” society, albeit with some assistance and tolerance.
I’m lucky enough to be on the lower/moderate side of things, but man all of this stuff hit home in its own way. Annoying noises (for me it’s the whine of cheap electronics or the chaotic bass of some music genres/upstairs neighbors), the forceful imposition of others in my space (“cameras on!”, scented cleaners, voluntold activities), and the daily task micromanagement to get by (do I call a friend/family member since they’ve texted me three times today about a trivial matter, or do I watch comfort shows and work on a personal project?).
This shit is hard, and adding in the requirement to engage in political maneuvering to succeed and thrive makes it exponentially worse.
I just want to do a good job and go home to live the best life I can. I suspect most autists are the same.
It's been long enough(about 7 years) since I worked in an environment like this that I've been seriously considering going back to it lately. I played one round of your game, and that was enough to make it completely obvious to me what a fucking terrible idea that is.
Thank you for making this, I think you just saved me from flushing two years of personal progress down the toilet in the name of... What? Fucking business logic? I'll pass on that, I think, and keep improving my life on my own terms.
And maybe address the question why, again and again, I keep finding ways to convince myself that this is what I want my life to be. No matter how many times it leads me to crash and burn and have to spend years picking up the pieces.
Seriously, thank you. If I ever meet you, I will buy you a beverage to your liking, to go, so you can go home and enjoy it in peace.
It's not perfect, but considering all the bullshit and misinformation out there about autism spectrum disorder, it's a step in the right direction. I'm sure all of the other autistic people will tell you why it sucks, why it's not good, and nitpick and criticize, but it's fun, it looks cool, and it's decent media representation for a marginalized community that has almost no real representation in media. I don't really like how the goal is to just be a productive worker and exist in society that works against you in every way?
There should be more than 4 meters under "Stats", and one of them is just labeled "???" and goes to 0 for no reason.
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
It's things like having a grating monotone, and having to pause before speaking and willing yourself to adopting the right tone for your state of mind and the effect you want to have on your audience. Every. Time. You. Speak.
It's like being an actor, except the whole world is your stage, and you have to be conscious of your character, lines, and motivation, the entire time you're awake.
"Story mode" thinkers should be considered atypical, detached from reality, IMO. Coworkers convinced the political prison of job culture is just and honorific, for example.
I can't shake the feeling that the whole ontology here is subtly-yet-totally wrong. Sure: all of the symptoms and conditions here are real; the characterization of the conditions is true; the categorization of people into "those who have this condition" and "those who don't" (or as a gradation) is true. Even the "essentialization" of it, the idea that these people can't change the way they are, that's mostly true also. And yet... it's all wrong somehow. Something about this model misses the entire nature of what's going on, and thinking in this way makes it impossible to fix it, and this sort of logic is making everything worse in some fundamental way.
One reason I believe this is that my own experience is that I go into and out of this state. When I'm unhappy and unfulfilled, I find that I can't adapt to new information, and noises stress me out, and getting through the day is draining, and being around other people requires masking. When life is going better, everything seems more manageable, when I'm able to relax... all the symptoms subside again. But the state where the symptoms are real can last for months or years, because it's so hard to find the path out. It is like the feeling of being in a relationship that's not going well but not so badly that you've found a justification for breaking up. Your whole mind shuts down and you can't put your finger on why... but then later, after a breakup, or maybe some time later, you wake up and realize that that wasn't actually you; you were sick somehow, starved of something essential to being yourself and unable to perceive what was going on.
The world feeling "hopeless" induces this in me, and I think everyone around me also. More political polarization; more people seeming disconnected or unempathetic; urban ennui and disenchantment and corporatization---these all make it worse. It feels impossible for some people to grow and change in a world that feels rigid instead of fluid; that expects them to already "be there" and judge them or react with confusion to them if they're not. Whereas a dynamic environment, where people are curious about each other, where they show compassion and empathy to new people or any one who is struggling... that seems to allow them to open up and change and grow.
"Essentializing" this condition is harmful: you are not essentially broken; you are broken vis-á-vis the world around you, but it can be due to problems with the world instead of you. Actually there is something very very wrong with how the world works. People and institutions and norms are supposed to set up an environment in which nobody feels like this, but they don't, so everyone is "sick". I like to call this "The Virus". The Virus is a condition that almost everyone has---it's the virus of being closed off, nervous, and unable to open up with strangers in a way that makes them feel comfortable and able to grow. When everyone in a community has the Virus, other people around them don't get the ability to change and heal and grow the way they need to, so they get the Virus too, and spread it on. It's a condition of omission: it is only really possible to be healthy in an environment where the majority of people around you are also healthy, and when 90% of people are unhealthy, the last 10% follow inevitably. Hence the Virus is contagious, even though it's not a "physical" condition.
The trap of it is that everyone is masking, and at different skill levels. The people who mask well seem "fine", although they are not, which makes the people who mask less well feel like something is horribly wrong with them. Since nobody is able to conceptualize what is happening, they search desperately for explanations, and "autistic and/or ADHD" is the most agreeable model they find. It's wrong, but in the setting where nobody has a better model, it's the best you can do--at least it explains and justifies their immediate needs.
"Something is wrong with me, and you can't understand it because our minds work differently, but I need you to accomodate it." True, entirely, yes, but not the best model. "Something is wrong with all of us and we need to blow this paradigm up and change it to a new one so that everyone can flourish" would be a better model that would actually have a hope of succeeding.
I believe that the above characterization is true, and I believe that it's important to believe it's true, because "essentializing" the condition locks you out of the inductions that actually have a chance to do something about it. If you believe it's in your head, then you can cope by trying to adapt, but you're doomed to mostly fail because it's not actually in your head. Whereas if you believe it's a problem in the world, then the natural conclusions are things like "How do I start to change the world around me? How do I protest the way it is? How do I get people on board with changing it also?" And that's going to be more productive, long-term. Revolt, damnit. The thing to be talking about is how to do something about it. Coping is just coping.
in short, please join my revolution, stop calling yourself autistic, call the world around you fucked up. I am so sure that many of the people who call themselves autistic would thrive if the people and institutions around them weren't so devoid of human warmth and connection and dignity. Probably you've even experienced that -- in school or in some other setting in your life. Probably the reason you feel so broken now is that you vaguely remember what it felt like to flourish and you're floundering at figuring out why it's so hard to find again. It's because the world is broken as shit! It's the Virus! Everyone has it! You would be fine if they didn't; if the world wasn't broken! You've been fine before! That's not a lie; you're not broken; you're suffering because you're not getting anything like oxygen for your soul and you're suffocating in that feeling but nobody around you is even able to acknowledge it.
(a controversial opinion I hold which relates to this: one of the reason everyone else is masking so well, and therefore why everything seems so confusing, is that they're on drugs. Either psychiatric drugs, like SSRIs, or recreational drugs, like marijuana and alcohol (you might also include video games or social media addiction or gambling here). Which is not to cast any moral shade on them; it's just an observation that I wish I could test. Probably many of those drugs are "actually" needed, but probably many of them are also needed because they're helping them cope with the Virus. I wonder what would happen if lots of people weaned off their drugs at the same time. Would they all start to relate differently? Would they feel like their daily interactions are more human? Would they realize that they can't actually handle how upset they are about their life, but now that lots of other people feel the same way, they're able to organize and do something about it? I don't know, but I'd like to see what happens in that scenario.)
In my opinion the entire structure of scrum and sprints is structured to help people with autism and adhd. Most workplaces that produce creative output are much more focused on soft power, networking, and hard deadlines—things that really don’t work for the “au-dhd” crowd.
It’s easy to remove the locus of control by saying “this environment wasn’t built for me” but do appreciate how much it actually /is/ created for you.
My experience has been 100% the opposite. Daily public status check-ins, top-down decisions, every work interaction mediated through artificial structure? The points are made up, the deadlines are obviously fake, but everyone acts as if they are real? Except when they're not?
That, on its own, would make it clear the environment wasn't built for me.
The fact that the environment was very obviously built for management—for information to flow up so that decisions can flow down—but also that nobody is willing to acknowledge that? That just makes it even clearer.
I've worked in an environment that did feel like it was built for me, and it was pretty much the opposite of scrum/agile/etc. I had real trust with a clearly defined area of ownership. I was responsible for managing the interfaces and interaction points around my area and, occasionally, for real deadlines (with real context!), not a slog of fake short-term deadlines that exist just to create pressure. I didn't have to break down or justify my work in terms of bite-sized tasks that could roll up into somebody's spreadsheet.
And the best part? We got more done, faster, than conventionally managed teams.
If the culture hadn't been totally ruined by a reorg, I'd still be there. I'm still sad I haven't been able to find anything similar since. But, having experience that, I am only more confident that scrum et al are absolutely not built for me.
Of course the environment was built for management. But if you have ever been in management you know that getting useful updates on progress is like suqeezing blood from a stone.
I didn’t say that anyone liked the process, but I assure you that the average autistic engineer would actually do worse in a more feeeform environment. They would like it more though.
It is sometimes difficult to get progress reports because it's difficult for the people who are doing the work to figure out where they are in the process. For example, imagine that you have some tickets; "Add create method, "Add delete method", "Add list method". You take the first ticket, and decide to add the RPC server, and the authentication infrastructure, and the test harness, and the CLI wrapper. What do you say on the progress update? "You've been working on this for a week, why isn't at least one of those done?" The answer is because the tickets are pieces of value that the business wants to ship (you can ship without delete, I guess), but it's not actually how the software is assembled. What happens is that someday, you say "I'm done with create" and then 2 hours later say "I'm done with delete and list". That makes execs feel like they're being misled, but it's true.
Of course, if you actually enumerate the "how" and not just the "what" in your ticketing system, you can get a much more realistic view. "Add foobar RPC server", "Hook auth into the foobar RPC server", "Add foobar subcommand to CLI", ...
I think everyone does better with a clear set of expectations, autism or not. That's why we do design docs, design reviews, and try to put a realistic set of work into the ticket tracker. I would say personally, though, 99% of the time I don't really need to do that to get a good result out of myself. I can just say "by next Tuesday I will have this subsystem done". Typically this is done with heroics rather than good planning (Monday becomes a longer-than-average workday), so I try to avoid it, but I definitely understand why people want a more freeform environment.
And some management type will say when you're halfway through 'add' that they'll cut 'delete', but it's impossible to automate anything without a delete option, so you implement it anyway during your testing and then they get mad.
I've been my own manager more than once and on teams from a few folks to a couple dozen in size. Rigid schedules and expectations absolutely make me less productive. My last 2 startups were chock full of fast paced, high quality work that got us off the ground and up to hundreds of thousands of users with me as the single engineer building apps for web, iOS and Android by myself. That is, until we hired engineering managers who tried too hard to get a glimpse inside my head, after which productivity dropped off a cliff. My current startup now has around 10 app devs and it feels like we deliver fewer features over longer timelines at a lower bar for quality than ever.
I've also worked on some relatively senior/high-trust teams using roughly scrum-style processes, and the experience was decidedly worse. Even with the best setup and intentions in the world, the process still makes focusing on small, individual tasks the path of least resistance, which leads to less collaborative, more short-term focused work with less flexibility and ownership.
A sufficiently strong team can make even a bad process work out okay, but that just means they're strong enough to compensate for the process, not that the process had any latent merit.
Scrum is pretty bad for au-dhd crowd. It misses proper checks on business interference, which makes things even worse. It is constant pushing the worthless points (why not a time unit), kpi is about scoring points or useless improvements which have to happen anyway (merciless refactoring, yeah!). Devs could simply atomize every task and win this stupid game, but then you lose oversight and we get to lie number whatever. Everyone should be responsible, most people ain't generalists. They are specialists often.
Kanban gives more flexibility. Scrum seems to fall apart like that eventually leaving a power vacuum for tasks out bound of scrum. Active products have constant support questions.
Then you have SAFE, which is even worse. Waterfall but then even worse. Coordination seems to be very complex, the diagram is close to unreadable. Looks like a badly designed production street for its purpose.
The story points people won the battle against time units, claiming that "complexity" can be measured and quantified better than "hours" could, but in every place I've worked, people just treat them as though they're actually some unit of time. Product managers and my bosses always believe you can do arithmetic with that (multiply engineers assigned to project by 2 to cut time in half right? Sum up 25 points and be confident 5 engineers can complete them all in a week right?)
Then we occasionally have to pretend to really care why our "velocity" isn't arbitrarily higher or why it's less than it once was, when all of the tasks have estimates from 1-5 with at least a 1-point margin of error. There's so much noise that no amount of smoothing yields useful data that you can use to achieve "certainty" -- such as that X project will be done in Y number of sprints, which is what senior management craves most, but can never safely be promised unless you have a death wish.
Basically I'm convinced at minimum like half of teams that "do agile" or "do scrum" are just cargo-culting and derive no particular benefit from it. I don't think I'd even do estimation of any kind if I ran a software team as I saw fit.
Thinking about complexity as entropy, the friction, so they try to estimate "useless work" in their eyes. Heat transfer is velocity then. Firing up the next cycle. Detectable Delectable malicious, makes me hot really. Fiery.
It is just engine design really;) How bad can that be?
We don't even get real time, just pretend time. But I have to say, I admire this idea. All the time wasting around it, retro's with stupid humiliations. They run on naming and shaming. Sticks and carrots.
Works well :D Until people stop participating in the retro's. There is nothing to say, nobody says anything. They start atomizing the tasks infinitely or always inflate the estimate by 2. The standup nobody speaks, but they work like silent ghosts.
Scrum is literally a scam though. It was invented by some guy not even worth remembering who sold it to both sides (buyers and sellers of software). On the buyer side, the incentive was to encourage the seller to use scrum to communicate progress. On the seller side, they are encouraged to use scrum because the buyer wants it, and it "proven" to be an effective management tool.
There are too many unknowns to deal with to actually make use of it, and managing the unknowns is a whole other aspect of management outside scrum. This is why most scrums essentially devolve into ad hoc work per sprint with very loose planning.
Just rank by date needed order on a kanban board and work your way through everything in order. If it's constant fight to meet deadlines it will be clear enough that things are backed up.
Its not so much as estimation as a whole work style, but
Make it work -> Make it right -> Make it fast
is arguably the best way to go about things, then structure your work around that.
Ive done this with greenfield projects when I used to work for Amazon (while still ironically operating under scrum), and was able to get SD2-SD3 promo within 2 years (entering an an SD2).
In terms of planning work, you basically allocate people as necessary. The first part deals with a lot of unknowns, so estimation is pointless - basically everyone is on board in terms of getting software up and running and talking to other software.
Once you have that, making it right is a lot easier to estimate because you can do a lot more fine grained planning (like for example, a certain team member that worked on a feature can add all the correctness and unit testing way faster than someone who has not)
Then making it fast is basically just optimizations, which can be done by a subset of team members while the rest work on adding features (and adding features needs to be done in the same way - make the feature just work, make it correct for all use cases, and then make it optimal)
I think higher management likes to believe that those things (sprints, scrum, Jira and standups) provide a safety net against lazy employees not working hard enough, so they cling to them. Of course, they actually do little and are pretty easy to game. Their failure to magically make all software work predictable and deterministic and all developer time fungible actually means that you still need a manager involved and close to the work to identify people who BS their way through everything and take way longer than they should.
I'd rather be in an environment where you are given access to simple tools like kanban to prioritize and track work, and for people who don't deliver, the manager just fires them (maybe with one warning).
I've been in the software business since 2007, which was also when I first met Jira and Scrum (at least something with 14 days sprints).
My first encounter with Scrum (or whatever it was) was good. It felt good to work in cycles and reprioritize twice a month.
Since then I have seen various versions of working systems and various versions of broken systems.
The two last projects have been extremely agile, the current project has exactly 5 mandatory meetings in an average week:
- 3 x stand ups that typically take <10 minutes and never more than 15.
- 1 stand up plus planning (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 20 minutes)
- 1 stand up plus voluntary demo + retro (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 30 minutes)
The previous project had a lot more structure but also worked well.
Common themes:
- Communication is 2 way
- Both teams are friendly and competent
- Customer care about results and leave programming to us
- Clear communication about what they hope, but without stress. Especially the first project were the stakes were serious: if we manage to hit the deadline we knew we would save the organization millions, but if not, nobody was in trouble. It was an actual challenge, not a scary thing.
Have I seen dysfunctional Scrum and Agile as well? Yes!
Some examples:
- endless estimation meetings which not only eats programmer hours but also mean that everyone feel they have to match the estimates
- one way communication (in a loop from customer - ux - programmer - tester - customer). Doesn't help if there are 14 days sprints when every sprint is a mini waterfall
- taking time of the project to do agile workshop after agile workshop while continuing to be absolutely rigid
- "release" after "release" but no actual customer
- "finish one thing" taken to mean that styling has to be perfect even on placeholder pages
I wonder how much of this is company- or team-dependent. I don't mind sprints, but I also choose what to put on them myself with very rare (like twice-yearly, tops) requests from my manager.
This, it is costly, certain personal walks away. Proper roles seem to emerge anyway.
The cost of control and the costly overhead has everything to do with atomizing the work load. Just like in a distributed system. The synchronization mechanisms get more complicate.
The more layers, the less trustable the organization, since every manager under their manger, is a potentially corruptable.
This makes the communication lines unclear and makes people over promise. Also distributing the workload has diminishing returns.
It’s built to make upper management happy with the facade of productivity, middle management employed, while they squeeze the most out of the workforce and keep up the constant pressure (endless sprints).
It’s not built for the product team (devs, designers, QA).
In some cases, coincidentally, it might be good for some neurodivergent folks, I guess…
…as long as they don’t mind the constant bugging for updates, interruptions, and constant pressure… I’m sure it’s an environment where people with ADHD etc shine.
As someone with ADHD, I am orders of magnitude more productive when I do freelancing than in an SCRUM based corporate environment and much happier. And I mean orders of magnitude, I am not being dramatic. (Though that only works if I work on something I am interested in otherwise my lows are even lower.)
Task switching is a typical issue for both ADHD as autism people and SCRUM has so much. Just the damn dailies are complete murder for my mental health and productivity.
The problem with SCRUM is that it focuses on everyone being a cog in the machine. Everyone replaceable. At best it allows teams to self-organize (in theory, seldom in practice) but does not acknowledge individual needs of team members.
I don't like this - there are things that really bother me. It is also very much one persons perspective and very specific. With that said here's my opinion:
I have issues including high anxiety and it's very clear that the author is not properly dealing with their anxiety which is driving their decision making process. It is a common comorbidity and this game feels a lot like anxiety - "do I do this or that" never knowing or trusting the answers.
The decision to not take or half take meds is a red flag. I am on meds that will make me feel like dog shit before noon If I don't take them. It's a worse feeling than any discomfort that comes from taking them, brain fog and headaches included. No way should you cold turkey these things. They may be on the wrong medication or an improper dose. Are they being honest with their doctor? Are they comfortable with their doctor and feel they are helping? Anxiety will prevent people from being honest with doctors and even themselves. There is also a lot of mistrust in doctors and some neurodivergent people are outright hostile towards doctors which is a problem they need to overcome. There are good and bad doctors like there are good and bad pizza joints - find a better doctor (or pizza.) Telehealth is a god send - more options to talk to professionals. There are specialists who are tuned into your issues and some even suffer the same! Meds also fuck up your appetite - don't forget to eat which kills your mental state.
Another thing is are you hydrated enough? I get this hyper focus where I WONT move. Like I wont get up for hours until I am or practically pissing or shitting my pants because I cant stop what I am doing. I have found this leads to dehydration and hunger that is ignored which severely degrades my mental state. I have learned to use a few simple methods to break this state and I have gotten better at consciously recognizing this state and take a short break.
Masking sucks. Don't bother cosplaying other people or trying to find normal because I got news for you: no one is really normal. Just be yourself but do be mindful of your interactions. I used to be so anxious around people that I would never look them in the eye or say hello and avoided contact. Now I make an effort to say hello, look them in the eyes, and during conversation focusing on their words while maintaining eye contact as much as possible. I would fidget and make noise to distract myself - even in meetings, likely some stimming thing, which then distracts others pissing them off. I love to doodle so I used that to my advantage and doodle in a notepad I take with me to occupy my fidgety hands so I'm not tapping or banging pens or phones. When I want to sing I keep it low and do it on a quick break, like get up and take a walk around the building while quietly singing a song or talking to myself.
We are animals and we train ourselves in all of the bad habits we have. Anxiety is a great trainer of avoidance which is massively harmful. Anxiety will make you take the path of least resistance every single time which leads to a life where you don't feel in control where every little thing becomes a trigger in this fragile state. It's mentally exhausting and you burn out. If you give in you will wind up a helpless mess. There are a lot of mental exercises that WILL help you but it takes time and effort. I used to think those self affirmations and other mind exercises were bullshit but you know what, they are only bullshit if you tell yourself that over and over (again, training.) I see too many neurodivergent people outright dismiss a lot of help and seek shelter in communities which are echo chambers that reinforce negative behaviors and even stir up anger issues leading to hostile behavior. Bad stuff.
I've learned I am not weak because of my brain chemistry and that I have the power to overcome a lot of my issues. I am not ashamed of who I am because I have no control over that aspect. It's not a perfect life but I aim to try and be as happy as I can. There is no magic pill that will cure all symptoms but some pills can tackle your most debilitating symptoms. You will not go to a therapist/psych and come out a new person in a day, week, month, or year. It is a constant state of being mindful of your mental state and developing skills to deal with these states in a positive and healthy way. You will fail along the way and that is okay - failure is natural and normal. Just get back up and try again. People respect tenacity and honestly, little by little it makes you feel better. Believing in yourself and investing the effort and time becomes rewarding. Even if its just little bits and pieces at first - it adds up. I used to think I was better off dead and that scared me which led me to make changes and seek real help. It takes time. lots of time. But it's well worth it.
I will never wear my brain chemistry as some badge of honor or costume - it's merely a part of what makes me whole. There is so much more to me (and you!) than divergent brain chemistry.
I found the “masking” meter the most interesting—and contentious—design choice. It seems to bundle two different phenomena: the active effort of conforming (costly even alone, via internalized norms) and the risk of social detection. That may explain why self-care choices can still deplete masking in private, which confused many.
Two ideas that might deepen the simulation without adding complexity:
- Make the intent explicit by labeling masking as “conformity effort” (with a short tooltip), and split “detection risk” into a separate, slower-moving gauge that mostly changes in social contexts.
- Offer a couple of selectable “profiles” (e.g., sensory sensitivity high/low, ADHD comorbid/not) so players see how the same day plays out differently.
As you open-source it, a “debug view” showing the per-choice deltas and rationale would also help neurotypical players connect the dots. Would you consider parameterizing those profiles so the community can contribute balanced variants?
A lot of the behaviors this seems to force I don't understand - like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not. I am well aware that for kids with autism frequently there are feeding issues, but what's going on in the "simulation" is very not clear to me.
Similarly, I don't understand the decisions related to the driving environment: it appears to be a personal vehicle, surely you, as the owner, can make the interior environment something that's as close to personally comfortable as possible? Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.
Related, what is or isn't masking seems very confused. To begin with, it's not just code for "hiding or not hiding behaviors that appear socially irregular." But it's also not the case that deciding whether to participate in a non-working-hours event is or isn't masking in of itself.
Presenting behavior in a socialized way when necessary is a skill that's harder (as I understand it) for those on the autism spectrum, but I don't think that makes every application equivalent to masking.
> A lot of the behaviors this seems to force I don't understand - like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not. I am well aware that for kids with autism frequently there are feeding issues, but what's going on in the "simulation" is very not clear to me.
I lost interest after the breakfast question. For someone who’s physically fit (which this person likely is) skipping breakfast shouldn’t cause a noticeable drop in energy. If it does, then there may be more going on than just autism.
Everyone's different.
I lose energy if I do have breakfast. Which results in lack of focus. Therefore I often postpone my breakfast as long as I possibly can, otherwise, with a large probability, my work day is ruined before it even starts.
Agree, breakfast slows me down, so I rarely eat it anymore and typically eat around midday to 1pm after morning work and exercise. I've fasted only once, it lasted 12 days and my energy level was almost overwhelming and electric. Boxing, running, etc. I gave up trying to understand why. And although it was an amazing experience, have not fasted again in the 5 years since.
Why? If it was so good.
For myself, I have low energy if I don't eat breakfast, but there is essentially no hunger signal for me in the morning. Over time I've settled on eating the plainest breakfast I can.
I think this has a lot to do with the 9–5 and my natural sleep cycle being delayed compared to that.
Same. If I have breakfast it seems to kickstart my metabolism or something idk. The result is, if I have breakfast, I’m distracted by hunger all morning. If I skip breakfast I can focus all morning and I don’t get hungry until lunchtime. Bodies are weird.
you also don't fall asleep at your desk as a response to a birthday party in the office early in the morning after a good nights' sleep, but if you play a one-sided game in this that's what happens.
it's not a reality simulator, incredibly few video games are.
the whole thing seems like a conflicted struggle between "I want to make a game" and "I need to get my points across", often to the detriment of the game-part.
It's an interesting concept though.
My lived experience is that high stress situations frequently make me feel like just going to sleep.
This may have multiple causes (past experience/trauma, energy levels, existing depression, sleep troubles, anything on the spectrum of autism, like ADHD...).
As far as energy levels go, if you are already tired, you may lack energy to cope with stressful situations, which leads you to procrastinate or even sleep too just not face it. From personal experience, low (just below the lower limit, so nothing seemingly dramatic) vitamin D levels may affect one's energy levels negatively (always tired, brain fog, everything feels hard...), and having appropriate vitamin D levels may already provide one with a clear mind and remove the hardship of dealing with most of what others consider as seemingly simple situations.
You might be depressed because of low energy levels, instead of the other way around.
So, make sure your energy levels are appropriate and that your mitochondria work fine. (Any LLM will provide you with detailed info about energy levels and mitochondria).
Of course, that's only based on personal experience, and I'm a software engineer, not a Doctor.
Have a nice day.
For me it's low stress / passive situations, like listening to presentations or sitting in a meeting where I'm just observing. And that's with good sleep etc.
Any kind of one sided meeting puts me to sleep. So I either don’t go, leave or work on my computer if it is not relevant. Luckily my company encourages not going to meetings where you feel you don’t have anything useful to add.
Unfortunately I haven’t even been able to make it through one phd presentation of my friends.
Same if it involves a human yelling. If I'm in my bed while it's happening , I might actually sleep briefly. It becomes impossible to stay awake sometimes.
Other high stress situations involving actually solving something motivates me though.
> My lived experience
What are the other types of experience one might have?
It's a nice change of pace around here when people intentionally make themselves the butt of the joke by acting like extremely common phrases are somehow foreign to them. "Lived experience" immediately adds more detail and context to how they obtained their knowledge by explicitly referring to first hand involvement and direct experience rather than potentially from second hand sources or studying, but here you are making a smarmy reply pretending that it was somehow more confusing to the benefit of the rest of us who might take your attempt at quips as humorous. Thanks for the laugh!
No problem friend, happy to help. I still think it's a stupid phrase, you don't have anyone else's experience and you're never not alive to experience anything. All it does is "I'm trying to make my point stronger by making you feel bad about questioning it because I'm going to reply that you can't question what I said"
I guess you could take the idea that someone has an experience that may be different to yours and that you aren't able to dictate as a personal affront rather than a plain fact, but I recommend against it. That doesn't seem interesting or productive, it seems like getting worked up over something beyond your control and of no consequence.
> I guess you could take the idea that someone has an experience that may be different to yours
I do as a default because it is, that's why the sentence is tautological - which was my point. There's also a difference between expressing an opinion and being "worked up".
Other people's? Like, I don't get meltdowns myself but I've seen others that do.
You misunderstand, their sentence is in the first person, you cannot experience anything in third person.
You have experienced other people's lives? How? Are you a discorporated entity that possesses the living?
There's this concept called empathy, and people can share how they experience things. We can also relate our own experiences. So, it might not be a first-hand experience, but we can put ourselves in their shoes. If we see a friend experience something, it becomes a shared experience. When our friends laugh, we laugh too. When they grieve, we grieve with them. Etc
> It's an interesting concept though
Why? It's a multiple choice game with different outcomes. Hardly groundbreaking.
I think the subject matter makes it interesting conceptually, not gameplay.
Execution matters regardless, but not all innovations are in mechanics of gameplay.
I think you're overly inflating the word "interesting" here. It doesn't imply novelty, innovation or anything groundbreaking. It's just of interest, which isn't a high bar.
Can you name another multiple choice game about this subject?
Depression Quest?
not quite the same subject but i think depression quest executed on its subject matter better than this did
I don't even have an autism diagnosis, and I never skip breakfast because of the energy drop. I bike to work, run 5ks, and am not overweight, even by standardized BMI metrics.
I don't even have an autism diagnosis. It never occurred to me that something might be "going on". Breakfast imparts energy. To me, that has been a given.
I can go about a full day before eating without noticing an energy drop. Everyone's different.
I was in my 30’s before I realized that other people really need to eat and can’t just decide to skip a day when work / travel / timezones make it inconvenient. So much natural variation.
This is also something you can train your body to get used to. Anyone who started doing intermittent fasting and struggled at first will know that you eventually adapt to it. Depending on how difficult someone finds it, doing a ketogenic diet might be a nicer way to ease into it.
I find I’m happiest not eating until about 6 pm. Usually one large meal and one small late-night snack. I’m a little surprised there wasn’t much evolutionary pressure to align eating schedules considering how social we are but meh. Maybe everyone being on their own schedule is actually better for survival.
Think that is farmer vs hunter adaption. Hunters eat big meals less often, plant eaters eat small meals often as its more work to digest plants.
So humans doing both have genes for both, but maybe some humans have more of some of those.
part of the challenge with autism is that nearly all it's features are shared partially or individually by ordinary people as pretty routine character traits (eg: socialising is energy draining for "regular" introverts).
It's (a) them being collectively combined and (b) the severity that creates the issue, but it's very hard for autistic people to explain and justify what's happening to them when everybody feels like they already experience these things and manage to just "deal" with it.
Haha yeah I was thinking it just sounds capricious.
Very well put
I haven't ate breakfast in 7+ years and I've never had an energy issue. I've ate OMAD (one meal a day) for over a year while running 5ks Monday to Friday and never had any energy issues either.
A lot of people in here with similar anecdotes. I'm not saying everyone's like me. I'm just saying that some people feel lower energy if they skip breakfast. And it doesn't mean 'there's something else going on'.
The lack of logic in this thread is remarkable.
If 50% of the world is just fine without eating breakfast, that still means 4 Bn people are not.
Posting personal anecdotes as if that proves feeling low on energy without breakfast means something is wrong is a degree of irrationality I can’t believe is showing up on HN.
It’s fine to share personal anecdotes and experiences but so many here are sharing them as if it disproves all other things experiences and responses.
It's even more complicated, because it also depends on what yout eat for breakfast. Some food will sustain you for a longer time, some will give you an immediate sugary boost and then the inevitable fall (which could definitely be a big part of the "I feel lower energy when I eat breakfast" experience.
Typically, my first meal is at 11:45 (a plate of normal food + fruit), and then one at about 19 (the content varies from bread + cold cuts to soup).
When this changes in numbers, size or kind I do not feel any difference in energy.
When I bike to work I am particularly not hungry until 11:45.
Interesting. I am also physically fit and if I don't have something to eat within the first half hour of getting up, I am cranky and definitely won't be doing anything approaching information work.
Seconding this. Additionally, I'm likely to fumble speaking tactfully as a result.
Exercise can push off hunger pangs for quite a while. Your body wants you to know it’s hungry, but if you’re exercising (read:probably hunting according to your brain), the pangs fade because they would simply be distracting.
Thanks. I've never heard it framed this way. I've mentioned my appetite diminishes after aerobic exercise, but a common response is that I'm weird.
Interestingly my appetite sometimes skyrockets after certain activities like bouldering or weight lifting, so the diminished hunger response must be a bit more complex of a phenomenon.
> a plate of normal food + fruit
What is "normal food"? Fruit seems like it would be more universally normal than pretty much anything else.
Sorry, I was not clear. A plate of some meat + some vegetables, or variations of that. The kind of things you expect to eat for lunch in France (and, broadly speaking, in Europe).
What I meant by that is that this is a full starter for the day, not a "late French breakfast"
You don't feel it immediately. Notice the bar doesn't reset the next day. You don't feel breakfast immediately but your workout later in the day and tomorrow will be affected by this.
You're unfairly extrapolating from your own experience here -- everyone's body has different chemistry.
I have to eat breakfast in the morning in order to feel energetic during the day. But specifically, I need a high-protein, high-fiber breakfast. Anything else makes me feel lethargic and tired.
> For someone who’s physically fit (which this person likely is) skipping breakfast shouldn’t cause a noticeable drop in energy.
It definitely does.
Unless autism gives you an eating disorder, making it so you have absolutely no energy reserves cough cough
Being physically fit past your 30s is a series of building habits and making hard choices that obviously is a challenge of its own that many in sedentary jobs have skipped or fallen away from. OP may be fit, but yeah for average office worker (especially in locations that are car-bound on long commutes) I’d bet there is indeed more going on than just autism.
I'm a mid-packer in the triathlons I participate in, so pretty fit. I definitely notice the energy difference between having eaten breakfast or not, in the everyday (non-training) context. It's not a hunger thing (I'd miss breakfast most days if I didn't literally schedule it) and I can do my strength training and short intervals to the same performance fasted as fed. But I am aware of it.
If I don’t eat breakfast I feel afraid I will lose any gym gains and feel very weak. I don’t know anyone that hits the gym daily and skips breakfast.
Since the anabolic window is a lie and you have roughly 72 hours to feed yourself protein after effort you can skip breakfast without any impact if you don’t feel hungry. I don’t think many nocturnal people who wake up regularly at 10:00 really eat breakfast if lunch is 2 hours away, regardless of gym habits.
Skipping breakfast absolutely causes a noticeable drop in energy for most people. Especially if you work an intellectually demanding job. That blood glucose is important.
Also of note given the OP’s subject, several studies show that people with significantly impactful Autism spectrum disorders have higher brain glucose consumption than the baseline.
[citation needed]
In regards to energy levels: 10.3945/an.115.010231
In regards to autism: 10.1001/archpsyc.1985.01790280026003
It's complicated for me. Sometimes breakfast makes me notice my digestive system, which seems to make my ADHD-adjacent traits worse. I also get IBS... Which is different from the meds constipation. So eating is difficult. Because of IBS my bowels are also unpredictable, so dosing laxatives is hard. I don't know how many of these things are caused by meds.
Then there's the energy thing. I guess if I'm in ketosis it's fine, but after not eating for a whole day it's hard to sustain the next day, but eating isn't alway worth it.
The saddest part is that junk foot and Tesco meal deal is so is somehow easier to digest. So I often eat that.
I'm trying Kefir (even though I'm lactose intolerant, but I take lactase with it) for the 10 time probably. My GP recommended it. Alas, maybe it helps.
Soooo, tldr eating yes, I love it, but it can have consequences that completely tank my productivity. And each time I have to ponder this it feels like I've done a chore but without the reward feeling of completing a chore, even though I just say there in silence for 5-15 minutes
Idk if other people are in a similar boat
i would interpret physical fitness as cardio exercise routine and depleted muscle glycogen stores: so breakfast is very welcome and without it is not possible to keep up exercise routine
You have definitively diagnosed yourself as not being on the spectrum.
Hard to describe, but there is a tendency to self-sabotage (for lack of a better term) that you have to take into account. Sure, it may be my car, and I may have control of the radio, but I don't always act upon the need to adjust my environment.
This is correlated with the amount of energy and attention you have to give to processing your environment, much like the health bars in the game UI.
> Sure, it may be my car, and I may have control of the radio, but I don't always act upon the need to adjust my environment.
But in the context of the beginning of a game, people without autism are probably confused. Why isn't the car's environment already tuned to the character's exact specifications?
I get some of the potential reasons why after playing the game for a bit. But I still would have liked to see a callback to this. E.g., if I drive to lunch with coworkers I could choose to mask by letting the passenger tune the radio. Then the next morning I get a painful sound when I turn on the car. Ah, I get it now! That seems like more satisfying gameplay-- maybe the game already does it and I died too early to see!
We're definitely reading too far into this, but the game does incorporate this concept, so I'll make the case.
You don't get to choose every option every day. Some days you're on, and you make (almost) all of the right choices for your wellbeing. But not every day is like that.
Optimized and tuned for what?
Try tuning your entire environment and then maintaining it all the time. Best I can do is get it into a failure mode that isn't a disaster.
Mapping anything into a perfect system fails. So I'm surrounded by half working shit that works well enough that the energy from the shittyness that it sucks from me is made up by the fact that it's good enough to not crash out over. But I will still stress. Because I do want to fix the Bluetooth but I also have 8000 other things at home to perfectly tune as well.
My shoes are a year and a half old. A little stained, a little green from mowing the lawn. I sure as fuck don't want to go to a shoe store and tell the poor young worker there that I don't need their help. I'm not buying shoes without trying them on, so internet is out. When the soles fall off and the social impact is great enough, I'll replace them.
I haven't cut my hair in a year and a half because the hair dresser lady that I went to for 15 years moved away. Staring into a mirror while someone talks to me and cuts my hair is a fucking nightmare. I know this makes me look unconventional, but worth it for now. I have to carefully wash, condition, dry, and brush my hair. It's more work. But it's optimized.
Until, for example, they are out of style and it functions like a crack in the mask, draining social energy for being perceived a certain way.
What if you're like gay and always struggling to stay in the closet?
Did you play the game? If I'm understanding it correctly (a big if), every single time the author is forced to leave out edge cases when talking to management it is a form of masking. They have to suppress their natural urge[1] to list the edge cases, and come up with a more appropriate message based on a non-intuitive guess about the salient points their interlocutor wants to know.
That implies active work to mask that is almost certainly measured in hours per day, across nearly every domain of communication and human interaction.
How many hours a day does the average employee spend talking to coworkers about their sexual preference?
Edit:
1: An urge probably backed up by a good faith, well-reasoned, ethical understanding of the literal words that the manager spoke to them!
Then you’re like a closeted gay autistic person. Speaking for a friend.
Of course you don't get it: you're not autistic. Did you expect to get it?
There's what's that quote about good art disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed.
Eating is very stressful for many autistic people because of trauma and lack of (non-enmeshing) support in childhood. They don't learn how to make a comfortable environment for themselves or that it is even possible. Every meal becomes stressful. Force feeding or depending completely on others.
Masking goes so deep, it's just not possible to easily convey with words, because after a lifetime of masking you don't even notice all the things that you do that count.
"Presenting behavior in a socialized way when necessary" has a hidden part. Presenting what behavior? To whom? Presenting autism-coded behavior around autistic people is stress-free.
I think masking is easily conveyed with words because everybody does it - other terms used are "code switching" where you talk differently to friends, family, parents, bosses, subordinates or children; "emotional labor", a phrase often used for service industry people (think receptionists) where people pretend to be in one emotional state (happy and cheerful) for the sake of their job or role while they really aren't. This is even worse / more obvious in the US where a lot of people can / do switch their personality on a whim, e.g. when picking up the phone.
What's different is that for neurotypical people they don't seem to be aware of it and it comes naturally, but for ND it's learned behaviour that costs energy and conscious effort to do. And they feel like they have to do it because society is used to people effortlessly doing it all the time, so if you don't you're considered off, or simply don't get to participate in society because you're weird/boring/scary. The latter is the worst, you're just yourself but people get uncomfortable around you. They won't tell you why nor just accept you (which is understandable, biological defense mechanisms etc), but you do become an outcast. Unless you play the social games.
> Presenting autism-coded behavior around autistic people is stress-free.
Anecdotal, but... not necessarily, any one person's behaviours can affect someone else negatively.
> but for ND it's learned behaviour that costs energy and conscious effort to do. And they feel like they have to do it because society is used to people effortlessly doing it all the time, so if you don't you're considered off, or simply don't get to participate in society because you're weird/boring/scary.
And of course, every now and then you fail to do it right and people think you were acting really weird but won't explain why.
I'd like to elaborate a little more on why "autistic masking" is different from "neurotypicals' masking".
For neurotypicals, masking is to exhibit behaviors that you subconciously know how to do because they are part of your natural range of behaviors. When a neurotypical is masking being friendly and happy in a social occasion (when they actually don't feel like it), they draw on their previous experience of having been friendly and happy in another social occasion. They know what it feels like, they know how to behave instinctively whey they really are happy and friendly, and faking it is only the effort of drawing from prior experience. For actors, this is called "the Method".
For autists, masking is emulating behaviors they wouldn't normally exhibit on any such occasion. They don't know how to do it, not subconciously, not instinctively. So they explicitly have to observe others, emulate their behavior on that occasion. That leads to two kinds of problems: First, they need to have observed this behavior, learned and practiced it, and need to know how to reproduce it correctly. Second, they need to recognize the occasion correctly, and not misinterpret their surroundings, the feelings and moods of others. And since autists also do have problems even interpreting their own emotional state (they do have emotions, but no intuitive way to know what they are at the moment) and even more the emotional state of others, the effort is far higher. Imagine an actor who is asked to play a totally alien role without any frame of reference and without prior experience, no do-overs and all the other people around him are also directors and constantly judging his performance and measuring it against their effortless instinct what it should look like.
I can buy your arguments, but not in the context of this game.
Saying "I'm tired I'll go work more silently" is just reasonably workplace behavior. Telling your coworker "can we sit down and talk about this somewhere more quiet" is just reasonable thing to say to improve productivity. Saying "This meeting is a bit unstructured and i feel if would be more productive to write out an agenda" is not breaking a mask or being an ass, it's focusing on getting shit done for everyone. Sending an email about concerns about unclear and un-mensurable performance in a post-meeting summary is productive and useful for the team (and less socially draining than doing it during the meeting).
All humans mask. Autistic people are simply more prone to "over-mask" or mask things others don't. But a-lot of masking behaviors are mal-adaoptions from childhood. A distraction-less focused and structured work environment helps everyone, so be the ass and enforce it. And particularly engineering fields have a higher tendency to attract (certain) autistic traits, which just further makes speaking out even more valuable for everyone involved.
Simply put; The game makes being "breaking the mask" a negative thing, and a failure case for the game. But all options that break the mask seem to improve energy and social connection. (which goes entirely against the supposed benefit or purpose of masking)
> Saying "This meeting is a bit unstructured and i feel if would be more productive to write out an agenda" is not breaking a mask or being an ass, it's focusing on getting shit done for everyone.
But in many cases, it will absolutely be interpreted as being an ass, and autistic people are less adept at spotting those contexts and communicating in ways which don't look like they're being an ass (also, autistic people are probably more likely to be irritated by the agenda of the rest of the meeting or next meeting being to discuss agendas...)
I agree with your wider point that everyone masks to some degree, but its obviously less consequential to non-junior neurotypical people in familiar environments who can reasonably accurately predict how everyone will react to them choosing to take the mask off and hint what they really think about the meeting. Sure, a lot of other stuff like requesting to talk in a quieter environment is usually something straightforward any reasonable person will accommodate, but it's not surprising people concerned that making too many requests perceived as "weird" might harm their career and not really sure what's "weird" or not default to just trying to avoid them.
Being unable to read or intepret the reaction or social cues given as a response to such blunt remarks is indeed a core issue. I think this is a core reason autistic people over-mask.
Beyond simply masking autistic traits, some people mask to the point of changing personalities or interests. Masking to be more "normal" than any "normal" person.
Knowing when and when not to raise or point out issues or concerns can be quite complex.
So in practice, its quite difficult to find the balance. But take issue with the "inevitability" present in a lot the explanations of autistic masking.
Googling "making workplace autism friendly" gives ... detailed descriptions of very nice workplaces. Particularly the examples in this game are things every workplace would benefit from adjusting even for "neuortypical" workers. (And if not pointed out, it will just continue to drain energy the future)
Is this comment section part of the simulation?
I am, and ironically it prevented me from being able to enjoy this; too many inaccuracies and absolutist perspective frustrated me.
Like others said, skipping breakfast should not be that big of a deal for a reasonably healthy adult, we didn't evolve having 3 meals a day. Intermittent fasting is a thing too.
'Masking' parameter misses the point in my opinion. Picking what I would personally realistically do (having adapted over the years) causes it to drop to 0 over a few days. Picking what i think author wants me to pick, same result. Yet somehow I managed not to get fired in 3 days irl.
I get it, it's an illustration of 'autism is hard' for 'normies'. But it was painfully close to being realistic/enjoyable too.
Not to say it's not useful, ADHD popups were 10/10, general vibe was spot on, will probably forward it to a few friends; it's just not nuanced enough to not annoy me personally.
One of rare times where I can be blunt honest and hopefully not come across arrogant.
> Like others said, skipping breakfast should not be that big of a deal for a reasonably healthy adult, we didn't evolve having 3 meals a day. Intermittent fasting is a thing too.
I haven’t played the simulator but I wonder if it’s also trying to account for more than just the physiological effects. A friend of mine has autism, and we were getting together one day. On the way over I suggested getting some food since it was close to dinner time. They agreed, gave me some items and I bought us some food. When I arrived they were amped up and excited to show me something. I set the food down, and I ate while they were showing me this thing that had them all excited. They ate some of the food too, but were clearly distracted and not all that hungry. No big deal. But a few hours later I noticed they’d gone real quiet and seemed down or anxious about something. Turned out they had been worrying for the last hour that they had offended me because they didn’t eat all the food and they knew they weren’t going to eat all the food because they were going through a phase where eating in general was just a difficult thing to want to do and so were eating just the minimums they needed to not have other problems.
The entire later half of their evening and their excitement over their new thing had been badly deflated all because of a decision / need to not eat all the food on offer. Never mind that this was nothing new for them. Never mind that I could easily see myself skipping food just for the excitement they were experiencing before factoring in any sensory phases. Never mind that it would be a truly shit thing for me to be offended because they only ate some of the greasy fast food I picked up for us. No this simple and normal act caused them an hour of stress and anxiety over worrying if they’d crossed some social line for doing something I didn’t even notice until they said something.
But it doesn’t matter whether I noticed. Their brain latched onto the “you did something abnormal, people might have noticed, now you need to analyze everything that’s happened to figure out what you next move should be” train of thought and it would not let go. So at least from what I’ve seen, choosing to eat or not can have impacts beyond just “hungry”
> Of course you don't get it: you're not autistic. Did you expect to get it?
Am I missing where the person you are replying to identified as non-autistic?
This is absolutely spot on.
> like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not.
I can relate to this in that I barely have any energy in the mornings to do anything no matter how early I set my alarm, then end up skipping everything except the bare minimum to function, or maybe less depending on if I happen to have more energy that day.
Is there a connection to autism there?
Autism has become a culturally dominant force that's displaced other kinds of neurodiversity almost completely. All kinds of people have to "mask" aspects of themselves to get along. Black people have to talk white, Asian people have to present themselves in a way white people think is assertive. Gay people have to stay closeted. Just try academia when you grew up in a working class family.
The "simulator" paradigm pretends to promote empathy but it actually does the opposite.
I understand where you're coming from, and I would even agree with the denotation of every sentence in your first paragraph, but I think you're missing a lot.
Being "culturally dominant" is not a good thing for autistic people: it's not autistic voices that dominate, but mostly eugenics groups, with the occasional well-meaning (but usually uninformed) activist group trying to oppose the narrative. If you're familiar with the kind of "anti-racist" corporate training that's mostly just white guilt with a few racial stereotypes thrown in, then you know how far "well-meaning" can take you.
While we can draw many analogies to autistic masking, autistic masking is qualitatively different to the examples you've listed. We have other words for the other things (e.g. "talking white" is a special-case of "situational code-switching", and "staying closeted" is a special-case of something that I don't know a name for). You're skirting (and, I think, crossing) the line between analogy and appropriation in your first paragraph. (See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45440873, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45441925)
I'm not really sure what you mean by your "actually does the opposite" remark in the second paragraph, unless you're automatically treating this interactive description of autism made with care, by someone with personal experience of being autistic, as the kind of rubbish that's made by "well-meaning" ignorants for low-quality corporate training.
People with other flavours of neurodivergence have produced similar "simulators" (a kind of RPG, really). You might be familiar with Spoon Theory, originally devised to describe the psychological burden of living with lupus? That simulator is a TTRPG. I suspect that this simulator was made by someone who'd be classified as neurodivergent in respects not classified as autism.
What other kinds of neurodivergence is it masking?
You did give examples, but only for ways it perhaps fails in promoting empathy for groups with similar problems.
I don't think masking is necessarily the right word, but when people start self-diagnosing themselves they often miss the correct problem in favor of what's popular on their social media feeds.
Right now, Autism and/or ADHD are the two that are most prevalent on social media. Many people, especially younger people who spend a lot of time on Reddit, TikTok, or other sites, see these diagnoses trend with vague descriptions about what they entail. When they encounter struggles, they recall those vague descriptions, make a connection, and assume their life problems are due to the diagnosis.
It's not uncommon to read accounts of people who describe their symptoms as textbook social anxiety or depression who will nevertheless insist they have "AuDHD" as self-diagnosed via their social media consumption.
It can actually be hard to break them out of one preferred diagnosis and get them going down the right path to address the problem.
An example: Someone develops an eating disorder, but they read on Reddit that forgetting to eat and having low energy for schoolwork can be a symptoms of ADHD. They self-diagnose as ADHD and avoid addressing their very obvious eating disorder problem. They might even get insulted when someone suggests they have an eating disorder, insisting that the other person must not understand ADHD.
This pattern isn't unique to autism or ADHD. It's common to all trending internet diagnoses. You will find communities where everyone convinces themselves they have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome or Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. Doctors who treat those two conditions are currently rejecting referrals at a high rate due to extreme self-diagnosis via TikTok. The people self-diagnosing with those conditions usually do have something wrong, but they've latched on to one explanation that doesn't fit and they won't let go because they think it explains everything about them.
I, personally, just really really hate how many people use "neurodiverse" as a synonym for "autistic". I am not neurotypical but am very much not autistic, and I'm far from the only one.
Indeed using the term "neurodiverse" only makes sense if you also want to include, for example, psychopaths (another form of neurodiversity) in the group that you want to describe.
I don’t see any reason not to include psychopathy. It’s not a synonym for evil: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscien...
> All kinds of people have to "mask" aspects of themselves to get along. Black people have to talk white, Asian people have to present themselves in a way white people think is assertive. Gay people have to stay closeted. Just try academia when you grew up in a working class family. The "simulator" paradigm pretends to promote empathy but it actually does the opposite.
Why do you feel this way? Do you not think having to do those things is tiring and exhausting for the affected people? Do you think the simulator’s author would disagree? If someone wrote a simulator for trying to code switch as a Black person or an Asian person and didn’t include all the ways that autistic people have to mask, would you feel they were also not promoting empathy?
It almost sounds like you’re implying that a culturally and ethnically homogenous society would be easier for people to handle…
It would be, at an objective level.
If you're trying to imply some accusation, please be explicit about it. No vague deniable hinting.
Not sure, it's just my experience and I was diagnosed autistic at an early age
Ya, I'm curious about this as well. I'm not a morning person, and certainly am always just-scraping-by until about 1 pm. But is this some mild autism? Or is this just how I am? Or is there even a sensible distinction between those two phrases?
> But is this some mild autism?
Everyone seems to self-diagnose as slightly autistic these days. “I’ve noticed that I have personal quirks. Must be autism. Couldn’t be that everyone has their own personal stuff to deal with.”
I think this is maybe related to imposter syndrome. “There are people who can easily do this thing that I struggle with. Maybe I’m not qualified./Maybe I’m autistic.”. This thought process assumes others aren’t struggling and also tends to look to those who excel rather than the average so it’s biased anyway.
Ya, I tend to agree. In fact, even if I _do_ have something, I think I'd rather not know. Whatever it is, it isn't too severe, so a diagnosis would mostly be helpful for getting medication. I have my own coping strategies and am able to navigate through life pretty much like everyone else, imperfectly but still making it. Having a diagnosis would not help me in this situation. I know some people feel that having a diagnosis can make a difference, and perhaps it is more important if you have something in an extreme form. But idk if I have something, and even if I do, I don't think the label would help me
Self-diagnosis is the only diagnosis available to many people. In the UK an autism diagnosis could take years to obtain.
> “I’ve noticed that I have personal quirks. Must be autism. Couldn’t be that everyone has their own personal stuff to deal with.”
I would love to live in a society in which everyone is allowed to have personal quirks and their own personal stuff to deal with without being judged for it and without needing a label like “autism” to excuse it.
I have a friend who was diagnosed as an adult with Autism. 40 ish years into their life and they finally got a name to attach to their “quirks”. And the thing that they found most frustrating (and which I find sympathy for feeling that frustration) is the number of people who now treat them completely differently and with much more grace and respect.
On the one hand, of course we extend extra grace and accommodations to a person with a given disability because we expect people without the disability to behave differently. On the other hand, they didn’t just magically get the disability when they got diagnosed. They’ve had it their entire life, and needed that grace and accommodation their entire life. But only it’s only now, half way through their life with their shiny new diagnosis that people give them that grace and accommodation. Is it then any wonder that people who haven’t been able to get that official diagnosis are still trying to at least get people to accept an unofficial diagnosis? If we were better at not needing the labels in order to accommodate, maybe we wouldn’t also have so many “self diagnosed” people. Or ironically maybe we’d have more officially diagnosed people because we wouldn’t be having a moral panic over fakes.
I feel like setting your alarm earlier, thus reducing the amount of sleep you are getting, may be the wrong thing to do.
Yup, getting up earlier only works if you go to sleep earlier, too. But that's not for everyone, some people are just night owls.
Having to select self care and breakfast every morning (and meds on some routes) is a good reminder for me of the importance of those things in the long run of a whole day. I don’t think I’m any farther on the spectrum than the average software developer, but it’s still a daily decision to be made. (Of course for those people with different breakfast patterns - you still have a best approach for yourself that you must decide to follow every morning.)
Similarly for the masking meter, I don’t know what it feels like exactly to have mask. However isn’t it hard, in varying degrees, to constantly determine and go through with the right forward-looking choice in real life? My guess is what’s a challenge for some is also a heavy toll on others.
Habits help with much of the daily decisions, but are of course their own challenge to implement and maintain.
Autism with adults is rarely presented and very individual anyway. I like to see such issues like some wound. Sure you can continue your daily chores. But if you accidentally rub against it, it gets worse and worse. Eventually you need to make a longer break so it doesn't get infected like crazy.
The whole masking thing isn't about skill. (Like in the intro, the guy is in fact even outgoing at times...) It's rather that you need to run behavior with software instead of hardware acceleration. Possible but it sucks.
That being said, the whole thing with falling asleep at the desk is a tough manifestation. For me it's less drastic but gets me into problems in the long run.
I guess the personal vehicle is fine as long as you don't drive in traffic. Maybe you try cycling on your typical route to work to be more immersed in the traffic and all the stress it causes.
It's trying to give a feel, not a textbook definition
> Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.
I think the point is that for autistic people, a lot of things in their day-to-day life that randomly happen and can't be controlled for, can be the equivalent of just, random people walking by and punching you in the arm all day.
Each individual punch might not hurt, and describing the incident to a neurotypical person is probably met with "Eh, that doesn't sound that bad". An entire day's worth leaves you with a pretty sore arm though.
> like railroading whether to skip breakfast or not.
If you're talking about what happens after the first day, I think it's not due to any of the "stats" but rather because your first day is long and so you're running late on the second day, and for whatever reason you have nothing ready-to-eat at home. (Might be related to that option to go to the grocery store that you probably didn't take.)
In other words, it's seemingly a narrative-driven obstacle.
> it appears to be a personal vehicle, surely you, as the owner, can make the interior environment something that's as close to personally comfortable as possible? Maybe I'm missing the takeaway from the driving decisions.
Could be a rental car. Though my guess here is that the author actually comes from a place where the combination of culture and socioeconomics means they commute via public transit; and so they're actually trying to translate their experiences of the social impingement of public transit into analogous experiences when driving.
(Personally, I think a better translation would be being stuck in gridlock, or getting on a highway via an onramp where you keep getting cut off, etc, where there's an autistic itch there to get the other human drivers to realize that, when driving, they should "realize they're all cogs in a global optimization problem and so drive as predictably as possible, in order to decrease burstiness and so increase throughput, even at the expense of their individual perceived end-to-end latency.")
> Related, what is or isn't masking seems very confused. To begin with, it's not just code for "hiding or not hiding behaviors that appear socially irregular." But it's also not the case that deciding whether to participate in a non-working-hours event is or isn't masking in of itself.
AFAICT the "masking" gauge seems to be some rolled-up combination of 1. an odd domain-specific form willpower ("spoons" but you can only spend them on masking-related tasks, and when depleted you can't mask even if you still have motivation to do other things), with 2. a measure how close others are to deducing from your behavior that you are in fact on the autistic spectrum. (As if that's something you could ever expect to keep your coworkers and boss from realizing about you over years of continuous interaction.)
I say this because of the interaction I encountered about coming to a charity event, where literally being explicit about how you have a problem dealing with that kind of social situation... decreases the "masking" gauge. If it was purely #1, I'd expect the gauge to go up. It's only under interpretation #2 where it would go down.
(Or maybe you could describe the "masking" gauge in classical D&D terms as a WIS stat where masking attempts are Will-based saving throws?)
Honestly, I'd like to just see the source code for this. I'm surprised it's not linked; I feel like reading the source (hopefully with a lot of code comments about why the given heuristics were chosen) is the obvious "next step" to the game communicating what it wants to communicate.
I am AuDHD and this is 80% my experience. I saw this post in the morning pondering if I call in sick or work because of insomnia and being unable to have the energy.
I commute to work by train and even though I have great headphones and listen to music on Spotify some mornings it just crackles in my ears. The audio is fine, but I'm extra sensitive sometimes.
At the office people are sometimes very loud. They are excited and having fun but when it goes over my sensory limit (which varies a lot) I become unable to do anything. Ears crackling with headphones means I can't shut their noise out either. And we're supposed to be social at the office but they talk about stuff I don't know what to say about.
When I get home I am beyond exhausted. Can't sleep because of anxiety or adrenaline or something. I just zombie out streaming series or movies while reading Hacker News, Reddit or Bluesky. I promise myself I'll go to sleep early but if I do I can't fall asleep until 2-4am. If I stay up until 1am I have better chance of falling asleep faster.
Weekends are spent catching up with sleep, wanting to tidy up and do side projects as well as gaming but most times I spend half the day in bed and then stay up gaming or something because it is my time and I want to do the fun stuff. Rince and repeat unless I get lucky and catch 10 to 12 hours of sleep.
I'm a 47 year old female principal engineer. I feel like I'm just drifting through the days and months. But I do live my work, the people and challenges. I just wish I could deal with everything better.
Thanks for making this game.
I know you're not asking for it, but as someone that has a really hard time with anxiety and sleep: quit caffeine and exercise more.
The quitting caffeine is tough. It's 3 days of really bad headaches that no pain killer will touch, because those painkillers act on a different biochemistry. But, after I did that, my anxiety went way down and I was able to sleep a lot better.
Exercise is a bit harder, as it's a schedule problem. Even just a little bit will help though and increase the sleep 'pressure' or so I have found with myself.
Again, not trying to be a jerk here, just trying to help out however I can. My bad if this is not the place.
Best of luck in the struggle!
I quit caffeine with no withdrawal symptoms by reducing my intake by 10% every day for 10 days. I weighed how much iced tea I drank on day 0, then had 90% of that on day 1. The last day was just a shot glass full.
I probably picked the idea up here, but don't know from whom so I thought I ought to continue sharing it
>3 days of really bad headaches
I never got this, my mom would complain about this when she was out of coffee when I was younger but I have never gotten caffeine withdrawals and I have had periods of time when I consumed a lot! My last two jobs offered free coffee so I drank a lot and when I stopped working I stopped drinking coffee cold turkey because I don't have a coffee maker at home nor want to go out just to get to a coffee and no headaches.
I also drink a lot of energy drinks when I'm working on personal projects, more than the recommended amount per day and I feel like those have less negative effects than coffee, coffee gives me cold sweats for some reason. The energy drinks give me insomnia but I think it has more to do with the other ingredients than the actual caffeine.
I have quit various forms of caffeinated drinks cold turkey many times and never got a headache, but it is a little harder to get the day started the first few days after stopping because I just feel a little sluggish.
easiest way to exercise is to take a walk. add it to your commute. on the way home, make a detour.
My personal favorite is take the stairs and double step it so you skip every other step. After a few months you'll have rock hard thighs and calves.
I love walking, but the lack of time is the biggest issue. The only advantage of higher intensity exercise I see is that you do not need to do it as long. I could walk for hours every day otherwise.
fair point, but that's one nice thing about adding it to your commute: you are already out, so you can add walking time in short increments as you adjust your schedule. your commute is also variable in time. some days it goes faster, sometimes slower. pad it out so it is always the same length. it may not amount to much, but it is a start. same goes for every other errand you do.
lack of time is an issue of priority. i lack time to get all the work done that i want and need to. but i also know that i need those breaks. and that they potentially make my other work more effective.
higher intensity exercise takes more prep time. and probably a shower afterwards. so half an hour exercising at the gym might take 1 hour or more of real time. walking takes no prep time at all, so i compare that half hour gym with one hour walking.
I used to do it while coming back from work but lately I feel too exhausted and want to be home asap. Going to work no way, too much stress. But I go by bike which is still something.
The point of higher intensity exercise taking additional time requiring shower etc makes sense indeed. And I agree that walking is much more accessible: I can suddenly just decide to go out and walk, other types of exercise do require more of a plan or preparation.
Another thing I enjoy during walks is listening to podcasts. I cannot really stay focused on most podcasts unless I am walking.
well, if you commute by bike you are already doing exercise, so you are already ahead (compared to someone who doesn't exercise at all), but also your commute time won't fluctuate as much, so there is less flexibility. it would be unlikely that you arrive at work early for example.
if i am exhausted after work (which is a problem in itself, but that's a different topic), i'd look for a more relaxing route to bike. sideroads with less traffic, detours through public parks, etc. after an exhausting day i want to relax, and so i would try to start relaxing the moment i get out of the office, not just after i get home. one of the reasons why i like public transport. someone else is driving.
i am not trying to suggest that you should do the same, but maybe something resonates with you.
Ime biking is not the same as walking, mentally. Walking helps much more for a mental winding down. Otherwise I agree with the advice and often I prefer longer but more scenic routes for this reason.
depends, that's my point. i have done a lot of biking when i was younger. for me it does have the same effect, but only if there is no, or not much traffic. biking through a busy street is like walking through a busy market. to relax you want a quiet empty path. for 1 hour walking that path is 4km long. to get the same with one hour biking you need 20km of quiet empty road.
FWIW i play video games at a standing treadmill desk and that seems to help my motivation to get walks in
exactly. i listen to fiction, but i work from home. if i don't go out either on errands or just for a walk, i don't get any listening time. that itself is a motivation to go for a walk.
> quit caffeine and exercise more
With respect, you weren't asked and it's shit advice besides. I'm happy you have something that works but you may rest absolutely assured anyone with these issues that is a day over 20 has heard this "advice" hundreds, if not thousands of times.
At this point the bad advice (yes it's bad, it doesn't work) is almost as alienating as the fact that nobody seems to understand.
I think it's good that people give advice. I need people to be explicit and not leave things unsaid. Better be upfront. I have needed this advice. Of course it takes luck for it to land, when you need it, but I have needed it. Quitting caffeine definitely did wonders for me (and 2 years after I ramped it up very carefully).
> With respect, you weren't asked
With respect, you weren't asked.
Indeed. As someone who deals with the exact same issues as the original comment and have been fighting with sleep issues for over a decade, it's pretty fucking insulting to think we haven't tried to vary caffeine intake. Apparently we're too fucking stupid to think that the drug most known for wakefulness might be what is keeping us awake! It's like when I talk about crippling executive disfunction they chime in with the ever helpful, "have you tried setting a five minute timer to get started?"
I can guarantee that folks who suffer from these symptoms have read far more about mitigation than the average drive by commenter who doesn't suffer from them. Our whole lives at some point becomes about mitigation. So the "just drink less caffeine" is stupid and insulting and unfortunately way too common.
It is a public forum, people say all kinds of stuff. The commenter did not try to insult anybody, and they were trying to be polite and share how that worked for them. If you think their comment has no value to you, ignore it and move on. Hopefully you find other comments more stimulating/interesting (or not). Maybe some people find some value in that comment themselves. Not all people here are in their 40s with decades long insomnia issues.
> With respect
> it's shit advice
Those two statements seem to contradict each other.
I can respect you but not respect one of your actions. You say "with respect" to mean "this isn't a commentary on what you are as a person, but on what you did specifically". Given that context, I don't agree with you.
Why spend the energy masking in the first place?
I have a child with AuDHD who has trouble masking consistently. That coupled with impulse control issues and an inability to regulate between the two just looks like chronic deception, lying for the sake of lying. It is exhausting for him and it never works in his favor. We spend a lot of effort coaching him to not mask and to not seek unearned attention, and its a huge challenge.
There is a death by a thousand papercuts situation with being disabled where you will have to explain yourself dozens of times a day and you get stuck with having only one conversation subject with any given stranger you meet.
For some people, masking is just an easier, freer form of existence. It's like asking for a dressed up coke at a happy hour so your coworkers wont grill you about abstaining from alcohol. Or how people who work in callcenters seem to converge on a way of speaking that makes the interactions a little easier.
It's just that for autistic individuals, they are highly analytical about how everyday social interactions work and doing this costs them more cognitive load than you would expect.
I completely understand why people do it. My point is to pick your battles well. There are many cases where masking brings far greater pain than return on investment. When masking does fail people see right through it AND the thing you were attempting to hide is now exposed in great glorious fashion when like a Striesand Effect.
Masking is a learned behavior - learned specifically because the person in question had sufficiently unpleasant experiences being unmasked that they decided they needed to try hard to mask in order to avoid said unpleasant experience.
No one masks at birth. If you want your child to stop masking, perhaps it’s helpful to investigate what caused them to learn the behavior in the first place and what could be done to make the experience of being unmasked more pleasant and less aversive for him.
Just as you say, masking takes an incredible amount of energy and is exhausting and often backfires. Why would anyone expend such exhausting amounts of energy without some extremely strong motivating factor? The alternative to not masking must be perceived as exquisitely undesirable.
I think people think masking is just for those who have Autism. I think at some level all people mask. Most people behave differently outside of work or in public places when they are alone or with close friends.
I think with Autism the process of masking is just harder, and the ability to read social queues takes extreme focus to understand the general emotional state of others around them.
> Why spend the energy masking in the first place?
Because of things like this:
Coworker: "How are you doing?"
Me: "Bad."
The conversation, and the rest of my day, does not significantly improve from there.
Does that example really require masking? Absolute not. You don't have to lie when you provide a neutral response. Examples: "Busy day", "Just feeling tired", "Many things to get done.". Those are not necessarily good or bad and suggest you aren't making small talk.
Or, if you provide a never ending story they will see your disability for what it is and they won't ask you a second time.
> Examples: "Busy day", "Just feeling tired", "Many things to get done.".
That's masking.
Not if you practice a few and cycle them all the time. How does that require any kind of effort once you practiced a bit?
"This is an example of masking."
"Not it's not, because if you practice masking, the masking becomes easy."
Masking is (supposed to denote) maladaptive strategy. Learning social and other skills is not the same thing. Hopelessness is being learnt, too.
Not if it is accurate to your actual day/emotions. Masking is a form of deception.
I'd say that's not masking, since literally everyone does it. As a famous comedian that I can't quite place right now once said, (paraphrasing) "the only valid answers to "how are you doing?" are good, fine, or okay.
But I assume that for other people, it's easy, and doesn't take a spoon each time.
Most people are miserable, and will respond to the contrary. It's just a bad example of masking when everybody does it equally, IMHO.
Honestly, some things like this are solved with learning certain skills, practicing them a bit, and then it becoming easier. Answering to "How are you doing?" does not require masking, people asking it in casual contexts usually do not expect any kind of "honest answer". It is as hard as answering "hi" to "hi". There are plenty neutral answers that neither require you to smile and play it happy, not invite some long, awkward conversation. It could also depend on where you live though, of course.
Thank you so much for writing this. I have a feeling there's way more of us that we realize.
I have lived very similar to what you're describing during a few periods in my career.
> it goes over my sensory limit (which varies a lot)
This line hit home. Some days I feel randomly very "thin" for no apparent reason.
> When I get home I am beyond exhausted. Can't sleep because of anxiety or adrenaline or something.
This is the worst and it doesn't make any sense so nobody understands when you explain it to them. With anything else autism related ymmv but CBT-I is the best tool I found for this. It didn't totally unfuck my sleep but it at least made it a tenable balance.
I didn't really have a point in writing this I just found your story touching and my heart goes out to you.
I'd love to interview you (anonymously or by name) for my blog if you'd be open to that. You can contact me at d+rjoshcs+immons@+gm+ail+.com (remove the + signs, my crappy attempt at bot-defeat)
On overstimulation: there is something about office conversations that I find overwhelming now, and it's that, since COVID, people seem to have lost their inside voices and are talking at volumes that seem quite a bit louder than usual.
Because of this the 'pub conversation' effect comes into play, where multiple conversations take place in the same room and the different groups compete on volume in order to remain heard.
I pretty much shut down at that point, especially if someone is also trying to talk to me at the same time. I can't stand it just the same as I can't stand it in a loud pub.
Never use to happen before 2020. Or it did and I wasn't nearly as sensitive to it as I am now.
In fact, it happens when people are on their phones in otherwise silent places too. If I can hear you with almost perfect clarity when you should otherwise be out of earshot, then it is too loud.
I don't know if this is useful for you, but getting my MTHFR and COMT genes sequenced has been incredibly helpful for managing my own mental health. Since getting these results, I've been able to understand my own neurology better.
I'm sorry to hear about your issues with sleep - and can relate to them. In particular, my slow COMT means that my baseline cortisol is higher than most. Taking phosphatidyl serine before bed helps me a lot, and lets me sleep through the night.
Best of luck.
Get heavy duty ear protection from home Depot like they wear on construction sites to protect workers from the noise of heavy machinery, and wear airpods/in-ear wireless headphones under them. ymmv, but they saved me.
Or get some good noise-cancelling headphones.
Good in theory, but for me when I’m at my sensory limit I can’t have anything in my ears, nor the pressure of anything over them.
It’s a no-win situation in that respect and it sucks.
I can’t have anything in them either. Too sensitive in the skin.
But I can have things OVER them. So AirPods Max or the Sony cancelling big headphones. No earbuds.
Everything after (and including) "When I get home I am beyond exhausted" is me. Although, I don't think I'm on a spectrum. Could that just be the insomnia, independently?
Insomnia def makes it worse, but I still have it in periods I sleep pretty well. I did not have it in the past, at least to that extent. Not sure if it is an aging thing, a medical condition, or just having to do too much work and deal with too many people there, together with difficulties to put boundaries.
The part about the headphones crackling even when the sound is technically fine really resonated; it's such a vivid way to describe sensory overwhelm that most people might never even think about
Anti-anxiety medication can help, there are plenty of people online that will tell you it's terrible or does nothing, but think about talking to your doctor about it.
based on my experience im going to assume you don’t keep the strict 8 hours maximum and also work at home. you need more boundaries, that helped me a bit
Where are they commuting to by train and how did her loud colleagues get into her home?
are you me? are we definitely autistic together? should I go see a shrink?
Nice to meet you me and me
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
Why do both eating a proper breakfast and skipping breakfast affect your masking negatively? No one is around, what difference does it make?
This is a really interesting aspect of masking. The thing is, it's often not the direct presence of external scrutiny that drives the feeling of needing to mask, it's a lifetime of having normal behaviour expectations reinforced to a point where they truly internalised that there's something wrong with not doing the "normal" thing. So they will even be masking in private and have to go to great lengths to even discover where they are doing that and proactively "undoing" their private masking in order to allow them to restore energy during their own private time.
All this is often referred to under the notion of "internalised ableism".
Okay, but isn't this just what all people do? Everyone has a lifetime of normal behavior expectations reinforced to a point where they are truly internalized that there's something wrong with not doing the "normal" thing.
That's called enculturation.
I find a lot very confusing about the idea of masking. Everyone masks, even people who are more neurotypical than autists. Getting along with social life means not showing every emotion, it means being uncomfortable, doing things that you personally dislike or find uncomfortable, feigning more comfort in social situations than you actually feel, regulating your behavior to fit in, etc. And then going home to detox and restore your energy with private time.
I'm not saying that masking is autism is not a thing. But most of what I hear described is just ... normal life for most people ... except perhaps to the degree it is felt or needed.
Most of the challenges of autism are also present in neurotypical just to a lesser degree. No one likes annoying loud sounds but to someone with autism the limit is going to be much lower. No one likes sudden changes but someone with autism won’t be able to handle them as easily. And so on.
I'm sure most people mask, but the difference between neurotypical and neurodivergent people is how much they mask, and when.
For instance, like many people on the spectrum, I feel discomfort making any form of direct eye contact. When I don't have a lot of mental energy, this discomfort can become quite intense, to the point that maintaining normal eye contact takes up so much mental effort that I can't listen to what someone is saying anymore.
I don't exactly have the "normal" experience to compare with, but I don't believe most people experience that. I've learned the hard way that people don't really appreciate it when you stare at the floor during the entire conversation, so forcing myself to make eye contact has become more automatic over the years, but it adds just a little bit of extra effort on top of what everyone else is feeling.
Sometimes, it's also other tiny issues. Deviations from how things "should be" can trigger an irrational feeling of upsetting. As a kid I remember crying about a door being painted, or the class using a different set of stairs to the normal route because deep down it felt extremely wrong. Even in my teens, having fries on a Tuesday was something I sometimes needed to recover from. I've learned to dismiss/ignore/crop up those irrational feelings, but sometimes they can sneak up on you and become quite taxing. The worst part, in my opinion, is how the mental impact remains despite knowing how absolutely bonkers those feelings are.
I believe I'm not affected as strongly by my autism as some other unfortunate souls are, because people seem somewhat surprised when they learn about stuff like that. I can only imagine how stressful their daily lives must be.
> normal life for most people ... except perhaps to the degree it is felt or needed
Well, yes, precisely. Almost everyone can relate to experiencing mild or moderate back pain for a couple of days when they sleep in a weird position, but some people have chronic back pain that makes life unbearable without prescription pain killers.
While talking to people about my ADHD in real life I noticed that many of them speak like they understand ADHD. Even when I try to explain in more detail they come really close to "getting it" by superficially relating to some of the ADHD symptoms, but unfortunately almost all of them end up taking the logical leap to say that "everyone deals with this" and start recommending "solutions".
Most people will never understand ADHD just like I don't truly understand what life is like for people with chronic pain, and that's fine.
People seem to at least conceptually understand that chronic pain = pain like they know it + much worse + never-ending, which they recognize as being awful. The thing that bothers me is that when it comes to ADHD (and autism) the calculation suddenly becomes ADHD = concentration problems they experienced + exaggeration + lack of discipline.
ADHD is relentless, it follows you everywhere, you can take many months off from work for stress relief and it will still be there (I tried). You can make sure to sleep well, eat well, exercise, avoid all stressors, focus on hobbies that make you happy and it'll still be there.
People juggle sleep deprivation, stressful job and/or kids, socializing, chores, appointments on a daily basis and say that concentration problems are normal, and yes, of course they are if you're overloading yourself like that. But many people with ADHD experience those (and much more) at our baseline and if I tried to achieve half of what other people achieve on a daily basis, I would burn myself out in under a month.
Some people might read this and think that this I'm an outlier but I think I'm pretty average as far as ADHD severity goes, I managed to finish university before struggling to keep up outside of highly structured environments, and ultimately getting diagnosed with ADHD as an adult.
What did you end up doing for your ADHD post-diagnosis? Has it fixed your concentration problems?
I'm currently on Elvanse and it's a far cry from being a fix or a cure, but it makes things more manageable. My concentration on work that I find stimulating has always been alright so that hasn't changed much, I'm slightly less distractible during boring work, but it's been most helpful in other areas of executive functioning like task initiation.
For example at home I usually knew which chores needed to be done, and I desperately wanted to do them but I could never get started because I didn't have enough willpower. I would procrastinate for weeks or even months while constantly beating myself up over it.
I still don't enjoy chores, nobody does, but with medication I have noticeably more willpower to get started on things that need to be done. The thought of folding laundry, a task which I always knew would take me no longer than 5 minutes, no longer overwhelms me with dread and I end up doing it in a "reasonable" amount of time (reasonable for me, plenty of people would find it unreasonable if we lived together).
it's absolutely what all people do. The missing piece is you need to (a) multiply the severity/effort required by an order of magnitude and (b) add in a whole host of co-occuring factors like anxiety, OCD etc. that often come along for the ride
It's multiplied in some situations. I'm skeptical of breakfast while alone being one.
yeah i don't disagree about breakfast specifically if it's completely standalone. However it's worth recognising that autistic people in burnout lose a LOT of executive function. Something seemingly simple like making breakfast can actually be challenging if they enter that state. It's really hard for someone who hasn't experienced it to even conceive.
There is a difference between grabbing salty string cheese, a handful of cherry tomatoes and cashew nuts and literally eating them while standing in front of the fridge vs. actually making a breakfast and sitting down with it like a "human".
Well if that's all implied by "proper" breakfast then it's pretty unreasonable to have to choose between "proper" and "skip".
Not really. I would say most people have a morning routine and they just follow it out of habit without thinking too much of it.
That doesn’t explain why both eating or skipping breakfast affect masking. Everyday, everyone either eats breakfast or they don’t, they can’t both be abnormal.
They could be if your options are “skip breakfast or eat something insane for breakfast because your brain and body crave it and it’s all you can manage to get yourself to eat if you are gong to eat.”
Think about how you might react if you were talking with someone about what they had for breakfast today and they answered “a bag of cotton candy and a beer”. That’s really weird right? Like you might be concerned about them for making that choice right? And what if on other days you notice that they’re a bit grumpier or more tired and they admit to not eating breakfast on those days. Now imagine over a few months you come to realize that your co-worker is either always skipping breakfast despite how it affects them, or they’re eating a bag of cotton candy and a beer. You’d probably be really concerned for them. You might even in an attempt to be helpful and supportive try and help them have better breakfasts, maybe even bring in some bagels (even though they always decline). This is an extreme example of course but for some autistic people, they will go through phases were if they eat they can only eat very specific things and those things aren’t going to be “normal”. During that time, the decision to eat or not to eat and the decision for what to eat are extremely fraught things because very well meaning and well intentioned people find the decisions being made odd and feel like they need to “help”. But if you don’t want the help (or worse if you know you should be doing something different but your mind will make you physically ill if you do) all that “help” is really just another stressor on top of everything else.
Also, everyone has to mask at work.
This is because autistism advocacy groups misuse the word mask. It is supposed to refer to extra work you have to do playing a specific persona. E.g. at a party pretending to be a character from a movie or a book. And especially trying to force yourself to become that persona to fit in.
A lot of people in the advocacy space use it to mean basic things like being well behaved or being nice to people. Everybody has to be well-behaved at work. Everybody has to consider the feelings of others etc.
The idea of "wearing a mask" in the sense of being polite is older than the notion of masking in autism. For example, P. G. Wodehouse used it a few times in the 1920s to refer to the social expectations made on aristocratic families. E.g. from 1922:
> I didn’t like the chap, but we Woosters can wear the mask. I beamed a bit.
In this sense everyone masks. In fact they mask almost all the time from the time they get up until maybe the time they go to bad. Masking in autism originally referred to something different that was specific to autism.
The way it's used now it essentially just means "it's harder for me to fit in." Which is true but doesn't tell you anything about autism from a psychological point of view beyond the obvious fact that it's harder for us to fit in.
> people in the advocacy space use it to mean basic things like being well behaved or being nice to people
Thank you for this comment. As a family member of a young AuDHD person I am continually battered by a combination of their behavior (which directly and un-ignorably degrades the experience of everyone around) and by various 'advocacy' ideas that use phrasing like that to not-so-subtly imply that it's actually our bad for daring to expect to "not be hit," or to not be forced to constantly base our whole lives on one person's preferences, etc.
It's tough sometimes to figure out what's real, what's a fair expectation, what's something that can be learned/unlearned, and what's just inevitable.
Some kids are just really wild by temperament and it shows up in their first year or two on the Earth.
Short of breaking their spirit there's not much the parents can do to make them less wild. Parents have to try to find a way to let the kid be wild and feel good about being a temperamentally wild kid while also recognizing that there are limits and boundaries. A similar experience is perhaps owning a dog that needs to run around outside every day.
But nothing in the autism or ADHD diagnoses says you can't learn social skills or that they shouldn't. Nor does it require anyone to endure abuse or physical attacks.
Assuming you're not the parent (since you say the more generic "family member"), probably the best thing you can do is try to befriend this kid and learn a bit about what's like to be them. And try to find traits in yourself that help you see why they act one way or another.
Another thing to keep in mind is that things you take for granted may be very distressing to this person. They may be able to hear noises or smell smells or taste flavors that you can't. The parents have a tough job because nobody wants their kid's preferences to dictate everything, but nobody wants to knowingly make their kid distressed when they can help it. That becomes a tough tradeoff when you have someone who is easily distressed by a world that isn't really designed with their brains in mind. This is where things like earplugs and sunglasses can help. It's a bit like being hungover all the time. If you reduce the sensory input everyone becomes less irritable and more even keel.
Having had personal experience with this problem, there is actually a simple but difficult solution to your problem:
Focus in the effect if the person's action on you, and set hard boundaries for yourself.
Note that boundaries are in this specific form:
"If you do X in Y situation, I will do Z"
The consequence to the instigating person (the Z part) is important. The person you described likely has a deficit in empathy, so feedback on actions has to happen to modify behavior.
Note that I'm not saying to hit back. Consequences are generally best when withdrawing something of value than adding something of negative value.
For example: "If we're watching a movie and you are physically rowdy, you will have to leave the living room and entertain yourself in your room".
Focua on how things affect you, and what actions you can take in response to boundary breaking behavior. Then be ruthlessly firm and consistent about it.
> The person you described likely has a deficit in empathy
Sorry, but I have to correct this because it's a common misunderstanding. It's actually a name collision.
People on the autism spectrum struggle with theory of mind, which is also called "cognitive empathy." We can have difficulty understanding the mental states and emotions of others.
On they other hand, we're often higher than average on what's called "emotional empathy" or "affective empathy." Many autistic people get very distressed when others are unhappy or are suffering. For example, autistic folks are over-represented in the animal rights movements and other movements to reduce suffering.
Somebody who lacks empathy in the everyday use of the word is someone who does not care if others are suffering. That is not a symptom of autism, and never has been going back to the start of research on the topic.
Thank you for your productive addition to this conversation! Hearing from adults who can better put into words what the autistic experience is like is so, so helpful to me.
I don't disagree with you and I agree that the stereotype of autistic people as lacking empathy is harmful and generally untrue.
HOWEVER - the person I was replying to was mentioning them being hurt by the behaviors, and that signals a lack of empathy from the individual doing thise actions.
Even apart from behavioral disorders, there's comorbidities -- autism is comorbid with ADHD and ADHD is highly comorbid with a lot of conduct disorders and personality disorders.
So it could be any of that. But my basic point is that for the person I'm replying to all of this complexity simplifies if you instead focus on the effect of the other person's behaviors on you. That's what you have control over.
To add, newer ish research also posits the Double Empathy Problem [0], which (I think?) boils down to basic miscommunication / misunderstanding. However, it feels like it's often considered the autistic person's job to adjust and fit in.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem
I've mentioned to relevant people a couple of times in the past that I generally feel like I am "acting" in most social situations. Like I have an idea as to who/how I need to be in that moment and act accordingly. I'm used to it and it's not really something very conscious in the moment, but if the event lasts a long time it gets kind of draining since you have parallel tracks going - reading the room, predicting what reaction someone expects at any time, issuing that reaction, etc. It's not that I don't enjoy the events, but I can "fill up" on interaction quickly and want to go home early to recharge.
I figured that was just being an introvert.
That's more like social anxiety.
Hmm I wouldn't say I feel anxious during this, nor nervous before social situations. People around me would say I'm overall a social and outgoing person. It's more just playing a certain part of yourself that is relevant for the situation. It can be tiring in large doses, but not anxiety-inducing.
The constant worry about how others perceive you is the anxiety.
I don't feel worried about how others perceive me in these situations.
I'm glad you posted. When I hear masking described like it is in this simulator: "To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.", I always think, "isn't that just life?" If I didn't hide my natural habits I wouldn't be going to work at all. If I didn't hide my feelings I would yell at the person in the office next to me for listening to some webinar through their computer speakers and their door open. If I didn't imitate the social behaviors that coworkers expect I wouldn't wish the person I barely know happy birthday.
I mean, the thing about autism is that your 'natural behaviours and feelings' can be things that others find deeply offputting, like hand-flapping or other strange repetitive movements or sounds, anxious skin-picking, avoiding eye contact etc. But not doing those things requires conscious effort, because they're natural to you.
So it's kind of like going through social interactions with an itch that you're constantly aware of but can't scratch. Or perhaps for a neurotypical person, imagine that you're instead not allowed to make any facial expressions or change in your tone of voice and you have to constantly monitor yourself to make sure you're not doing what is, to you, a normal and unconscious reaction. Of course everyone has to modulate their tone of voice and expression to some degree, but with autistics the gap between how they'd behave 'naturally' and 'what is considered socially acceptable' can be a much bigger one to bridge.
An analogy I’ve heard that I like is that the difference is akin to the difference between the “act” you put on for work, and the “act” you would put on for a high stakes job interview. Both are “just” normal proper business behavior but one is much more exhausting and if you had to do that later every day, all day, that would be a huge drain on you.
It’s a bit different though. If you have autism you might not even want to wish your friend or family member happy birthday. Whereas for neurotypical I think they would normally enjoy doing that.
Or you might not want to say hello or goodbye in the normal situations they are used. Or small talk. These are all things many neurotypical enjoy.
Yes.
Yeah I like to think of it as active roleplaying instead of having to put in an effort. Most people have to put in some effort in social situations, heck I catch myself saying unproductive things to my partner if I slip completely into passive mode.
If you feel like this, you may be on the spectrum (not an insult btw).
Masking for neuro typical people is very easy, even if emotionally draining. My wife is the perfect example - her personality is to be nice to everyone and to connect with people. A lot of times this leads to prolonged conversations with people, which then she complains about, but its basically like saying you are tired after going on a long bike ride - there is some enjoyment in the activity.
Whereas for neuro-spicy people, masking is the equivalent of spilling seeds on the floor and having to pick up each one with tweezers to put them back. Its both exhausting and not enjoyable.
No, parent is right: everybody "masks" at work. Call it putting on a persona, playing a role, whatever - but as you said, it's less effortful for some than others.
I wouldn't even say its less effort. Its a whole different kind of effort. A social neurotypical person willingly engages in interactions and "masks". A person on the spectrum only engages because they have to.
For me masking at work is more boring than it is effort. Most coworkers i've encountered are so plain that the moment you start discussing something personal that isn't the most sanitised hobby ever they get funny. Tell them you spent the weekend at an illegal rave or getting drunk at a furry convention and they start to freak out. It's no effort to not talk about this but it also means there's basically nothing to discuss.
Life's too short for bullshitting. Why not just speak your mind and avoid the people who react that way? I've found that if I sanitize my words I get sanitized responses, and vice versa. Nobody is as boring as they seem.
Everybody has a social battery, but while some are working with a USB PD 240W monster you can't take on an airplane, others have to get by with an iPhone Air (and they can't disable background refresh).
While I understand your point, the air has a very good battery life and beats the 16 and 16 pro.
If you recharge at night, that's a lot of socializing.
It's true that different people require different amounts of effort to do and approach it with different tactics, but fundamentally almost nobody streams their inner monologue straight out of their lips, and I think when it does happen is actually much more associated with TBI and inhibition disregulation than ASD. (Which is not to say that it doesn't require a different approach or more effort for those with ASD.)
Yes, it's performing tasks in software that most people perform in hardware.
Yeah this is a thing that gets me. Everyone has to mask because otherwise there'd be a more conflict over shit that doesn't matter then there likely already is during meetings and stuff.
Some of the messaging too is just... off-putting/patronizing. "Brave the grocery store"? I know social situations can be tough on people but it's not you're being asked to kill the chicken and process it or grow the veggies. Is resiliency so low that it's a battle to go pick up necessities?
Maybe I was blessed to grow up in a poor, not exactly stable household at least for a while.
It's harder than you think.
- Go into a bright, commercial space
- All the packets are "shouting" at you with colorful labels
- There is noise of shoppers, a PA system, canned music and/or advertising
- Navigate lots of social interactions with other shoppers around navigating asiles, manouvering carts, who picks what
- Manage a shopping list and find a variety of goods
- Go to the check-out asile. Hopefully you can avoid interacting with a human
- Manage packing bags and paying
- Hopefully noone talks to you as you leave
_Thank_ you. I'm seeing a LOT of people in this thread who do not understand autism at _all_ and yet claim it's really not much different than neurotypical people's experience.
"Why should x situation be like y difficulty? I don't understand."
"No, you _don't_ understand, because you're not autistic. Which isn't really an insult but it is the case. So why you gotta brush off our struggles like you do get it."
Being autistic is exhausting on a _whole different level_. It is NOT comparable to neurotypicals' experiences except superficially.
For anyone who feels this way about the grocery store, I'd highly recommend curbside pickup or online ordering. Some stores are getting rid of it, but plenty still offer it. If you live in a large enough city, grocery delivery can also pretty competitive in pricing if you're willing to negotiate on brands.
And if you have the luxury of time / a flexible schedule, figure out when it's quietest. Some shops in the UK are (or used to be) open 24/7, small hours shopping is where it's at.
You can fix bright and loud.
Shouldn't a list be a positive here?
What's bad about "packing bags and paying", with "paying" being separate from human interaction? I'm genuinely curious.
> You can fix bright and loud.
Not in socially acceptable ways - people look at you strangely when you have sunglasses on indoors, and when I'm wearing headphones people usually gesture for me to take them off when they want to talk. It's even worse to have the loud noise suddenly crashing in while I have to talk to the cashier - better to have gotten used to it before.
> Shouldn't a list be a positive here?
In some ways yes, but it also brings new problems. What if a specific product isn't in stock? It's also pressure to really get everything - I sometimes can't get everything on my list because it stresses me out enough that I'd rather order some stuff.
> What's bad about "packing bags and paying", with "paying" being separate from human interaction?
Packing bags isn't an issue for me, but paying takes enough concentration that I often stumble over my words, e.g. by combining two colloquial responses. It's always embarrassing and makes the next times I go shopping even more stressful.
This feels like anxiety more so than anything. I literally walk around everywhere with sunglasses and headphones. I'm not ASD just sound and light sensitive do to physical damage. Not a single person has bothered me about this even during conversation. I chat with big ass cans on my ears. I go to stores at times where people aren't there and favor pick up if I can't do that. It's not that I can't interact. I just get really irritated by crowds and why do that to myself if I don't have to? I do self check out when possible because it is just faster and I always get irritated by how they pack things.
Stumbling over your words? Oh well. Who cares. It's a cashier. I did this all summer in a foreign country. Toddler talked my way through it and honestly with everyone. It's not exactly the same, but the pressure is. It's incorrect speech with a person you'll never see again or who won't remember you. Who cares?
Like this all feels like anxiety and lack of problem solving. And I'm not sure I even forgive it because my kid has autism and anxiety and she has solutions for these problems. She's not perfect, but she seems to be carrying on better than what you're portraying here. I also know several autistic people where what you're talking about is just not a thing. I get if you know an autistic person yoy know that autistic person, but they are coming up with solutions that allow them to be without a higher level of stress than anyone else.
> This feels like anxiety more so than anything.
When things are hard and you anticipate that you're going to struggle, it's perfectly natural that you're going to develop an anxiety response to those things. It's possible that you will describe the experience through the lens of anxiety even if there is more going on than merely anxiety.
> I'm not ASD just sound and light sensitive do to physical damage. Not a single person has bothered me about this even during conversation.
I'm glad that you have found a means to manage your difficulties and it does not cause you social issues. Bear in mind that someone who is very ASD is "manually" managing social situations which come automatically to "the rest of us." The same social disapproval you casually dismiss is likely a cause of anxiety for them.
> my kid has autism and anxiety and she has solutions for these problems.
I'm glad that she appears to be high functioning. Even those who are might want to avoid the shop because it's just a challenge they would rather avoid today. But for others I can imagine it being all too much.
You just described my shopping experiences.
Anxiety is not a rational thing, in the same way a friend of the family who had OCD would lambast me about the "particles" my outside shoes and the hems of my pants could bring inside all the while ignoring the giant stack of molding dishes in the sink.
It's a feeling in the body, a sense of alarm. That sinking pit of adrenaline.
I don't think I have autism but I do get ptsd type stuff occasionally.
I'm not sure I disagree that anxiety isn't rational. Anxiety about certain topics may be less rational, but being too anxious to sleep alone in the dark in the jungle likely has some evolutionary benefits. Similar with the anxiety at seeing large predatory animals or the lack of food leading into winter. It becomes a dysfunction when the anxiety is caused by everyday innocuous things to the general public.
Interesting observation in the last bit, research indicates links between PTSD and symptons often associated with autism: https://neurodivergentinsights.com/ptsd-and-autism/. That said, PTSD is treatable to a point, if you can verbalise what situations or what experiences cause your ptsd type stuff, treatments like EMDR may help for you.
I am grateful for grocery and food delivery services so that I do not have to brave the grocery store.
It gets worse. I haven't left my apartment in a few weeks. The last time I went out into the world is because I had to appear in court for jury duty. (Yes, it sucked. No, I didn't want to ask for a hardship.)
People experience things in a wide variety of ways. Things that most people believe are trivial can be an anxiety trigger for others.
And for what it's worth, I am not put off or patronized by "Brave the grocery store." That's an accurate description of what I feel every time I have to go to the pharmacy.
You kinda sound like a macho asshole. None of those has anything to do with "toughening up" or growing up in an unstable household. It's like you didn't read the article or any comments here and felt the need to blast your insecurities out into open?
"Why do people need the wheelchair ramp? Is resiliency so low nowa days? Are people lazy?" Lol
Calling this an issue of resiliency is completely missing the point about autism. I recommend you do some more reading because it has nothing to do with resiliency. People on the spectrum can have incredible resiliency in certain activities that neurotypical people couldn't (for example, hyper focus on a very complex cognitive task or dedicate hours of "boring" repetitive practice in a physical activity).
I think lots of people on the spectrum would gladly grow vegetables or kill chickens over having to go to the grocery store. Tolerance levels on activities placing you in highly social situations with overwhelming stimuli can be significantly lower for people on the spectrum.
Someone above this said the boxes in a grocery store are "shouting" at them with their bright colors. I know autism has varying levels but like, I sincerely worry about their ability to live if looking a box is causing a truly remarkable level of distress.
> hyper focus on a very complex cognitive task or dedicate hours of "boring" repetitive practice in a physical activity
That's awesome, take that win for sure that it's easier for them to do that and if one would rather go farm than take place in society then I think that's a fantastic goal to work toward.
> I sincerely worry about their ability to live if looking a box is causing a truly remarkable level of distress.
It’s sort of built into the definition of a disorder that otherwise normal stressors or negative pressures have an outsized and excessive impact on the person with the disorder relative to what it would be if they didn’t have the disorder.
Think of it like this, if I punch you as hard as I can in your leg, that might hurt quite a bit and make you favor your leg for a few hours. But if you have a broken leg and I do the same thing it’s going to be much worse for you and you won’t recover nearly is quickly. The input hasn’t changed, only the underlying condition that amplifies the results of that input.
And if you had a broken leg and I did punch you as hard as I could, no one would really be “worried for your ability to live” if you complained that my doing that ruined your ability to function today and tomorrow. Because of course it did, you have a broken leg.
Same idea here. Autism makes the inputs excessively intense. The only difference is se expect your broken leg to eventually heal, and we generally don’t go around punching people in their legs. But autism doesn’t heal and we do live in a word of intense advertising and flash in an attempt to grab your attention.
That is an excellent point. As an autistic person I would happily kill and clean chickens every meal . If it meant not feeling like a panic attack every trip to the store .
Yep... If I didn't mask while at work and home, I'd probably be annoying my family and coworkers with state and local land use politics issues all the time.
Is it that common to upset people at work and have absolutely no clue why or how or what you’ve done?
And not from a lack of trying, and definitely not because you don’t care?
Because to me, that’s what masking means: constantly checking yourself because you do care, and you do like people, and the last thing you ever want to do is hurt or upset someone, and yet sometimes you do, and that sucks, and you learn from it, file it away in your mind for next time, and wake up the next day with the same happy-go-lucky optimism you do every day until the world beats it out of you.
Your sentence took me back to 5 years ago.
Its a bit of a misnomer.
Skipping breakfast reduces the caloric energy you have. Eating a full breakfast is basically going against your instinct. Optimal thing for autistic people would be a energy bar that is both healthy, has good texture, and makes you feel full.
The game puts the "masking" definition right in the start page, no need to deduce. I also dislike how any form of self care reduces your masking even if you're alone.
It's designed to make you lose in a couple of days, which would imply you're not a highly functional autist, and hence I wonder how the heck did you get a job without others noticing your autism?
Like I said, implication is a bit weird.
For example, self care with video games would be different. I think the author was just trying to demonstrate that self care in the normal sense isn't the same to spectrum folks
I don't enjoy having a full breakfast before work, but I usually still do, otherwise I'd be hungry before lunchtime. It's one of the thousands of little compromises we all make every day, I'm not really sure how this constitutes masking, or I'm not understanding the term correctly.
Basically its forcing yourself to do normal things.
The idea behind the game is to illustrate that adhering to norms is energy draining, while also letting yourself be yourself results in negative outcomes.
I don't consider myself autistic, but the simulation seemed to me like the typical experience of a working adult. Most of us force ourselves through routines we need to adhere to but don't enjoy, or even hate. Most of us aren't really ourselves with work colleagues.
I still don't understand why having breakfast or changing the radio station decreases your masking, though.
My instinct is to eat breakfast in the morning because if I don't I'm flagging before lunch time and lose energy / concentration / get cranky.
(of course the other issue there is that I prefer having fixed times in the day to eat)
I was surprised to find that skipping my medication which causes drowsiness instantly caused my energy to crash to zero and lose the game. I think this is well intentioned but weirdly designed.
You have to titrate off by halving the dosage, not stop cold turkey. This is common with antidepresant (and other) medication.
If I don't eat in the morning, I have extremely low energy and am very cranky.
That makes it harder to mask, because the decisions I would make with low energy and crankiness are not the same ones I would make if I had eaten. It impacts my ability to converse with others in an effective way.
It also impacts my work output and mood..
It's more of a system-level drain than a moment-to-moment judgment
This just seems like "burnout" simulator. What makes it unique to having autism vs being overworked in a job you hate in an alienating urban environment not congenial to human thriving?
Everyone would rather be cozy on the couch under a warm blanket than wake up at 6:30AM every day before commuting to type meaningless stuff at a computer desk, be exposed to a sensory environment that is far from ideal, and converse with people they would never associate with if they didn't have to. The experience of the wage worker is a universally reviled existence that is far from a unique plight afflicting those with high-functioning autism.
Is the implication that someone without autism could deal with all these stressors effortlessly with no need to think or put any effort in?
I answered this as somebody with 20+ years in this industry. I burned out instantly.
I had my wife do it, as a stay at home wife. She still burned out and has no reason too. She made it 6 questions. She said she wouldn't have chosen half of the optional questions.
I'm burned out. She's burnt out from the quiz.
I'm going to take a PTO Friday.
Everyone's different. Some people genuinely thrive under the conditions you're describing, others don't like it but are able to put up with it no problem, and others can't stand it but are forced to.
The perspective I've found most useful is this. There is a constellation of correlated "autistic traits", which everyone has to a degree, but which like most traits become disabling if turned up too much. "Autism" is a term describing that state. So, it is much less a particular switch that can be turned on or off, not even a slider between "not autistic" and "very autistic", but more a blurry region at the outskirts of the multidimensional bell curve of the human experience.
People on the furthermost reaches of this space are seriously, unambiguously disabled, by any definition. They're what people traditionally imagine as "autistic". But the movement in psychiatry has been to loosen diagnostic criteria to better capture the grey areas. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is a social question, not a scientific one, in my opinion. Most of us want to live in a society that supports disabled people, but how many resources to allocate to that is a difficult question where our human instincts seem to clash with the reality of living in a modern society.
On your last paragraph: I think this is a serious problem with the discourse around neuroatypicality today. My opinion is that the important thing is that we become more accepting and aware of the diversity of the human experience, and that this is a necessary social force to balance the constant regression to the mean imposed by modernity. If that's the case, then drawing a border around any category of person, staking a territorial claim to a pattern of difficulty the group experiences, and refusing to accept that the pattern exists beyond it: it's just unfair, it's giving into defensiveness.
> They're what people traditionally imagine as "autistic". But the movement in psychiatry has been to loosen diagnostic criteria to better capture the grey areas.
There has also been a change that reclassified what we would previously have termed Asperger’s Syndrome as Autism. To be clear, AS was always considered to be a form of or closely related to Autism, but that change in language does mean we’ve had a big shift in what is Autism medically and what the public pictures when they think Autism
The key difference here is magnitude and mechanism. For autistic people, even "normal" sensory inputs or social interactions can cause physical discomfort, confusion
If the expectation of the job is to "type meaningless stuff at a computer desk", doesn't this point to a problem with the expectations of the role? I would submit that if the work is truly meaningless, and it often is in my experience, it doesn't need to be done. Of course anyone would choose a pleasurable activity over meaningless, mundane busy work - regardless of their unique expression of the autism spectrum.
I also think that there are many wage workers who do not revile that existence. My intuition says it is more common in "office jobs".
I think the implication is that someone without autism can recover from these stressors more easily. And they tend to be able to absorb these stressors with less of an impact on their mood. People without autism have more control over when their brain is engaged with something, and have to expend less effort when exerting that control. It's not just about physical energy.
The brain of a person dealing with these types of symptoms is kind of like an engine running near red-line 99% of the time. When someone is masking, for every thought they express, there were likely dozens you didn't hear or see expressed over the course of a short social interaction.
Other times, they are caught in mental loops. Reading the same line of text over and over, or replaying someone else's comment over and over, and not comprehending because of an auditory stimulus that is monopolizing the comprehension processes within the brain. When this happens, it's easy for them to miss important context or body language when working with others. That requires even more masking to cover up because it's a social faux pas to admit you missed something important. So then your brain goes into overdrive trying to derive the missed information from followup conversation.
Using sustained, intense thinking to overcome challenges that others don't encounter as often can become the default coping mechanism for this kind of thing. It's not something that is easily noticed, because it's part of masking, but it tends to be more draining than many people realize.
I tried this -- I am undiagnosed, but my kids are diagnosed. On one hand I thought parts over-dramatized, on the other hand I thought parts were watered down.
Misophonia for me does not give me any choice. Either the noise stops or I am leaving. If necessary I will explain later. If the noise stops I am possibly leaving anyway in case it starts again. Fortunately in my case the trigger is pretty obscure, like nails on a chalkboard type of rarity -- people don't actually do that so often.
The explanations I thought were dramatized. One of the challenges I think people with autism have is trying to explain their reactions and coming up with things that neurotypical people cannot relate to. It is more like reflexes. I'd be slack-jawed if my co-worker asked me to explain why my leg moved when the doctor hits my knee, "it just does that when you hit it that way", "probably something to do with ligaments, or tendons? IDK". Could you make an "undiagnosed" mode where your scores just go up and down?
And the options -- when the people team came through at $bigcorp and announced tiny hotdesking, I filed all the necessary paperwork, gave constructive feedback, worked with my manager etc, but started looking for new work immediately and noped out at the first opportunity. The people team was happy to close the file which was growing fat with demerits like not hanging my coat the right way, but my peers and reports were upset. well done people team! This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
> This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
It's easy to mouth slogans, and modern companies employ teams of specialists in that department. You can't trust their words, which should be assumed to be lies, only their actions (especially their actions when they're under some pressure).
Here's an absurdly clear example: I recently listened to these podcasts about Saudi Arabia's Neom project. It is hyper-dysfunctional and was run by a guy who literally bragged about treating his subordinates as slaves trying to work them to death. But all the responses from the project are pitch-perfect corporate "we value our employees," "we follow best practices," etc.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/neom-pt-1-skiing-in...
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/neom-pt-2-the-emper...
If a company professes to be supportive of neurodivergence, it means either (1) they're supportive of neurodivergence; or (2) they are hostile to neurodivergence and have gotten into trouble for it, so have strong motivation to claim that they are supportive. There will probably be written policies and strongly-worded emails that are supportive of neurodivergence, which enable them to continue being hostile to neurodivergence.
I would guess there's far more of (2) going around than (1).
This is an overly polarized view -- what does "supportive" even mean? What forms are actually deemed permissible? -- but it's probably more right than wrong.
It's like the schools with posters everywhere declaring "Zero tolerance for bullying" or "Bully free zone". Except that there is no (1) at those places. Those signs mean they have a problem with bullying and haven't come up with any solutions.
I am not autistic in any way afaik, but "tiny hotdesking" sounds like a torture come up in the seventh circle of hell.
> This was at a company that professed to be supportive of neurodivergence.
No company is supportive of neurodivergence, if it actually causes a difference. They are supportive if your issue is you need to wear noise cancelling headphones, and they can put your photo on the careers page about how they support neurodivergence.
Something I am not quite able to compute is why they are so rigid. I paid for a house with enough rooms that I turned one into a generous office. My peers tell me my hobby productivity is off the charts. There is / was no price at which I could solve for an acceptable office environment at this company. At any company I have worked with or heard of.
I get that there is back biting and intensive score-keeping, resentment etc, but the act of putting everything on a synchronized linear scale (with sub linear progression) seems cruel. Some people like tchotchkies, some people don't like those esoteric office snacks, some people like mouthwash and shoe polish and fancy towels in the restroom. Why gatekeep it all and shove the same exact bundle of goods down everyone's throats?
If they were really minimaxing your next unit of work, this is not an optimal strategy. It's just lazy, a children's tale of how an office might be.
Because for most people, someone reacting with disinterest for the thing they care about is a rare and upsetting event, not their entire life's experience. That's what it means to be "normal", you align better with your peers. Most people don't need what you need. Most people can work with what you can not. You are choosing to be the exception. You chose to be like this, so unchoose it and stop being a problem.
Of course... That's the quiet part. The out loud part is just dismissing everything you say and passing you over for promotion.
The objections you have raised, the things you have said. I really understand what you mean. There's evidence all around that the aspects of our experience isn't alien at all. Why can't others see that? At this point I think that not seeing it is necessary mental infrastructure for some people. It's a bridge over an abyss that for us broke.
I think the solace I get is that this line of work tends to funnel people of our disposition into it. So we find ourselves less alone than we normally would.
One problem is you can have 2+ neurodivergents or autistic people with conflicting needs or ideal environments. You can only do so much past a certain point in light of that condition. One needs a bright environment to stay awake, another is sensitive to light. Hyposensitive and hyper sensitive. One needs the volume low and the other high in the same meeting. One gets easily distracted by another stimming that they need to stay focused. It gets frustrating fast.
Autistic people can get sick of other autistic people's shit. Pathological demand avoidance can just make it near impossible to work with them in a normal context and on and on it goes.
Those all seem like easy problems to solve.
Draw straws and one person dials in from their desk or a phone closet. Take advantage of multiple locations, which are frequently if not always part of the landscape. I had a similar experience, there was a lady on the same floor who was sensitive to light, versus I had a plant that was dying, so I bought a timer and a desk lamp and set it directly under the lamp to run after hours, and we kept the lights dim during the day.
At some point the rigidity is just another type of enshittification, there to subtract. Ingrained in their culture and part of their prerogative. Denying them the privilege is an insult that earns greater retribution. Pour encourager les autres.
It would literally cost them nothing to be flexible. Solzhenitsyn level material.
Suggests a new unit of measure, the Solz, which characterizes how occult and byzantine the rules are and how vindictive and arbitrary the application. Bonus points for tail-eating and Lysenkoist aspects. Stalin era normalized to 1.
I had "exceeds" ratings the whole time at this job, btw. I am told my contributions live on 10 years later, I can't say that about most of my work experience.
TIL misophonia.
I’ve realised in recent years that I’m quite far on the spectrum. Very obvious when I was young but am exceptionally good at masking now so most people don’t realise.
Nowadays I experience misophonia in “attacks” that just come on. Recently I was on public transport and the noise was suddenly so unbearable that I had to get the hell out of there, hadn’t really felt like that since I was a kid. Fight or flight feeling. When I was a kid I had a lot of hearing tests as a result, ASD was not on anyone’s radar.
Didn’t realise this had a name.
I also thought I was exceptionally good at masking. Turns out I was exceptionally good at showing a differently weird version of myself that was still quite clearly weird.
my sister has this which led to many awful fights that i didnt understand. now i send this graphic to people in order to describe it: https://scontent.fhio2-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/130843014...
This is a question out of genuine curiosity and not intended to minimize misophonia in any way:
I do not see any examples of a "naturally occurring" sound there. Is the sound supposed to be human generated in some way? That would feel a bit incongruent with my understanding of it as a pure stimulus response situation.
Yes, natural sounds do trigger it (for me). The difference is that if it is a natural sound, it becomes a problem to be solved - intermittent dripping from taps, the noise of the wheel in my daughters hamster enclosure, or something tapping a window are specific cases I can cite. Those incidents resulted in a) me learning how to replace a leaking faucet assembly (the taps and faucet were one unit) , b) upgrading to a better, quieter hamster wheel, and c) trimming a tree.
When people are the cause it becomes more challenging. People feel attacked when you tell them they are chewing loudly, or they think you are weird when you complain about the sound of the specific pen they are using makes when they are writing on the paper bothers you. Couple misophonia reactions with ADHD justice sensitivity and the emotional reaction can overload my rational comprehension that it is quite normal to make, tolerate, and ignore those sounds to make the stupid fucking meat between my ears feel like I am being targeted by whoever is making the noise. 95% of time I can manage it, but when it gets overwhelming my reactions can be suboptimal (like, wildly inappropriate when I was a kid, but as an adult pulling an Irish goodbye and just leaving, which can be a career limiting move when you are in the workplace).
Not sure whether you'd consider it natural, but I first noticed this with the sound of running taps. The bathroom was next door to my bedroom and I'd often get up and turn the taps off if someone left the bath running... not sure if anyone ever noticed!
Not sure if it's the same for everyone, but for me it's caused by an over-focus on the sound. Once I've noticed it, it's like the sound gets louder and louder...
[edit] I'm fairly sure my Dad was on the spectrum, and the sounds young kids make would make him very distressed, shouting or banging etc. so I don't think it's synthetic vs natural sounds.
interesting observation your sibling also made. its commonly described as making the sufferer IRATE at the person causing of the sound which matches your comment
anyone who experiences willing to shed light? id guess if the sufferer expects we all dislike certain sounds, causing them intentionally is especially hateful?
Another observation is that they're either idle sounds (pen clicking, finger tapping) or necessary secondary sounds made during some activity. It's literally impossible to unwrap a piece of candy without making some noise, and damn near impossible to stir a liquid without the stirrer hitting the container once.
>id guess if the sufferer expects we all dislike certain sounds, causing them intentionally is especially hateful?
I think it's pointless to attempt to look at it rationally, given the reactions I've heard seem entirely irrational and disproportionate.
I remember one time I was at work and a coworker on the opposite end of the room was using what I thought was the exact same model of mechanical keyboard I was using, with blue switches. I had never realized just how loud those things were until then. I kept glancing at him and could feel myself getting unreasonably annoyed, but I really had no grounds to say anything under any circumstance, given I had been using those very same switches in that same office very recently. What really struck me was how the same noise would sound pleasing when I made it and annoying when someone else made it, and I wondered if I had bothered someone with my typing, or if it was just me. I don't know if I'll use my own keyboard with clicky switches if I share an office with someone again.
Silent keyboards (and mice!) are a blessing; and not just in an office environment.
I wanted to repair a HyperX mouse, but the switches I needed weren't available. I bought ones on a gamble because they were cheap, but they didn't fit, so I gave them away to a friend, and he used them to mod a cheapo mouse. It felt wrong to me for the clicks to make so little noise. He seemed happy with it, though.
Right, there is definitely a short learning curve where you have to get used to the fact that your mouse button is not making any noise. It almost feels like it must be faulty, but it's not, it's just silent.
That's like hearing one side of a phone conversation, where the utterances are nonsensical because you are missing half the context
When you are typing, the clicking is concordant with your finer movements and the text you are writing. When someone else is typing, it's not.
Interesting how they're all noises people make. It's not chirping birds, or running motors, or anything that could occur when no one else is around.
This was an interesting piece on misophonia. It seems like it goes beyond just the sounds alone and it may depend on a perception of intentionality behind the sound.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/misophonia-beyond-sensory-s...
My SO has misphonia, and strongly reacts to many sounds I make like smacking while eating or tapping my foot while thinking. She can also react strongly to noises outside the home, like if a car idles loudly outside.
She works in a kindergarten, and so I asked how she tolerates all those kids making noises while eating and such, given how adverse she is towards the sounds I make.
She said it didn't bother her the slightest as she knew the kids couldn't help it, and the reason my smacking annoyed her for example was because she knew it could be avoided if I just were more careful.
great share. the authors so introspective it almost seems like a straw man vehicle. i mean that in a good way, i think? not used to people writing about their shortcomings matter-of-factly like this
As in, something designed to facilitate setting up misrepresentations of other people's arguments? That doesn't sound like a good thing.
Now I need a screechy audio that explains the "misovisia" I experience from seeing that graphic.
omg tick tick tick.
Does everyone have this to some extent? Or is it really only a thing neurospicy folks experience? I have to run away from my wife when she's chewing loudly sometimes, the rage is real.
I've just realised that my hatred of foly in films is another symptom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foley_(sound_design)) - can't watch films where this is overdone.
As others mentioned, noise cancelling headphones bring me so much peace.
I carry silicone putty ear plugs with me pretty much all the time.
They are very squishy and I can place then in my ear and depending on how thick I make them, they have varying levels of blocking out sound. Super useful if I want extra blocking or just a little light blocking so I can still hear things around me, but dampened.
They have been a life changer for me. The best kind I've found are Mack's. Maybe they would help you too.
Ahh I can't stand that pressure feeling, makes me take them out instantly!!
ANC over-the-ear headphones can also do a very good job against certain kinds of noises, esp in higher frequences.
I gaslit myself over it for so long. It makes me see red when I hear open-mouth chewing noises. Totally illogical.
Oh wow, I was just feeling grateful that I don't have misophonia, but then you had to mention chewing noises. I had that for decades. It wasn't all the time, but it didn't have to be loud or open-mouth or anything. It would just switch on and I couldn't hear or think about anything else. I daydreamed doing violent things to make the person stop, even when I logically knew it wasn't even slightly loud or unusual or ill-intentioned.
It almost never happens anymore, thankfully. Once every other month or so.
(Note that I am not autistic, or at least undiagnosed and my guess is that I wouldn't be. I just have some fairly mild autistic tendencies. I have a toe on the spectrum, or something. Those tendencies have a pretty dramatic impact on my life, but I think in a mostly neurotypical way -- we boring people can have similar problems too!)
I have to feel that most people find this unpleasant to some level since "eat with your mouth closed" is such universal manors that gets drummed in to you as a child. But I guess the difference is if you find it gross vs if it sends you in to a fuming rage at the smallest exposure.
yeah the misophonia one confused me too. Why is the radio even on, why does turning if off use up so much energy?
I love it, I have been meaning to put together a similar simulation to demonstrate the effects of interruptions and context switches on developers.
Something like the following:
- a game or puzzle which requires working memory, like matching pairs or some puzzles that need a lot of working memory and/or flipping between screens
- this gets interrupted by fullscreen interruptions of someone's face, and text asking questions, or announcing something, and you have to pick an answer or a reaction (multiple choice)
- it could start with questions like 'hi, are you busy?' or 'can I ask you a question?'
- answers which tries to end the conversation quickly could lead to even more demanding reactions or questions
- interruptions stating there is an emergency can lead to a lot of questions and answers which then leads you to discover than it is in fact not an emergency
- once one of these engagements finish you can return to the game and try to complete it
- you'll get multiple interruptions like this
- other interruptions can also flash up, like a notification that a meeting is due in x minutes
- it could then have a short simulated meeting, perhaps just a line by line scroll of dialogue between others, where you need to say nothing
- however, at some point someone will ask you directly about one of the items discussed, and you will be given a set of fairly ambiguous multiple choice answers which you will have to try out until you get to the 'correct' one
- at the end of the meeting you return to the working memory task/game
- this gets interrupted by someone then asking you about the action points in the meeting
- return to the game
- get notifications about the end of your work day coming up
- more interruptions, etc.
I will share the source code in a few days once it's cleaner. It'd be relatively easy to fork it and plug a new story into the code :)
Would love an adhd one.
I’m sure someone will build one, one of these days, when they get around to it...
In agile circles I have seen this exercise:
Have two people sit next to each other, each with a blank piece of paper and a pen.
Have them both simultaneously write down the numbers from 1 to 1: one time in decimal, one time in roman numbers and one time as letters of the alphabet (a=1, b=2...)
One person goes about it system by system (first decimal, then Roman... ). The other goes about it number by number (1,I,A,2,II,B...)
Time them both and compare their times.
So interesting to me how many comments here, which are intended to be critques of the game, unknowingly end up giving insights into the autistic experience. I'm not sure if this is intentional, but there's some elegance in how that's played out.
In my experience at least, these are the responses to the real world that are at the centre of autism - especially for those undiagnosed / late-diagnosed. Why don't I understand this thing that everyone else seems to, and nobody understands this thing that I've clearly explained 3 times now? Why is x that is so easy for everyone else so hard for me? I don't understand what I did wrong.Games like this are never going to be perfect simulations of even a single person's experience, but are great for demonstrating that others might not experience the world in the same way as you. And the more people understand that, the more empathy and less conflict there will be in the world.
I think the point of the game is that it is almost impossible (the character is already at the end of the rope in the beginning, surprisingly realistic, since I been there), showing how hostile and random the corporate office jobs are - for anybody, but especially if you have any type of disabling factor.
But instead people complain ”But it is not a fun game :cry:”. Sigh.
If people aren't expecting an "end of the rope" simulator then it's reasonable if they get confused and object to how decisions are working out.
It's not your strawman about funness.
I think it is reasonable to expect that a game that is called ”Autism Simulator” is likely neither going to a) be easy b) very enjoyable c) make much sense. You could also complain similarly about the game called ”Paying Hospital Bills Without Money” being unfair or that ”Terminal Cancer Ward” -game is impossible to beat. Hell, why not complain that Josef K in Kafka’s trial is quite unfairly treated? I think it is fairly reasonable to expect the player to manage their expectations and consider the game more as an art piece. Otherwise you miss the point completely.
I think it's very reasonable to expect it to make sense. For an autism simulator in particular, I expect my stats to make more sense than in the average simulator.
That doesn't mean it has to be easy or even winnable, but I should be able to figure out how my choices directly affect me.
And those other games you theorize put the difficulty in the title. "Autism simulator" does not, and it says at the start that this is supposed to be a "typical work week".
Being confusing and difficult on a meta level gets in the way of learning anything at a direct level. I wouldn't call that elegant.
Perfect. So if I'm understanding you correctly, I can throw together a game with arbitrary/irritating rules that many people won't like, and I'll just call it an autism simulator.
Is it supposed to work. I am in the spectrum and I feel like while energy may go to zero, there is in reality a separate resilience masking, where you actually keep up for the rest of the day. Also cannot relate to medication. I don’t think that’s a necessary part of the experience.
Agree. The idea that autististics rely on a large box of daily pills is insane. -chugs coffee
I was just going to fill it out how I would normally live Self Care > No Medication and immediately failed. That makes it feel like it has an agenda.
I'm in this sentence and I don't like it. :)
I don't really relate to a lot of it, it's mostly a crude caricature of my experience, though it's still funny.
I believe the medication here is for ADHD, given there's a "special event" at one point.
Almost certainly not ADHD. "Massively increased appetite" is not a typical side effect of ADHD meds, which are typically stimulants which have the opposite effect (and mine give me nausea on top of that). And "drowsiness and brain fog" are what they're trying to combat.
From the complaints I've heard from friends, those sound like pretty typical side effects for SSRIs. (Bupropion OTOH is both a stimulant and an antidepressant, and may be more effective for people with comorbidity ADHD and depression; the POV character should talk to their psychiatrist)
Buproprion is an anti-depressent with some stimulant properties, but it isn't a stimulant. It generally takes several weeks of treatment before it has any therapeutic effects on ADHD. Stimulants work immediately.
Neurological medicines are extremely complex - while massively increased appetite isn't a usual side effect of meds like Methylphenidate it can cause eating disorders in the other direction due to an inability to perceive fullness and I have a close friend who suffered through this.
Having had other close experiences for the med balancing for someone with bpd and a complex host of other disorders - most of the times neurological med families are just trialed until one sticks and the specific efficacy and side effects of each can vary wildly from person to person. Brains are really complex and we don't really have an understanding of the method of action (specifically - why the med works - what it is changing in brain chemistry and why that has the impact we observe) of most neurological meds.
We even still struggle to comprehend specific biological markers linked to certain disorders - probably in part due to the fact that we're categorizing those disorders by wide swathes of symptoms.
Appetite from adderall, yes.
The only medication I know about that some people on the spectrum take are antipsychotics and that's for specific situations, but maybe if you're in that situation life seems even more like a dystopian text based adventure game.
I know of some taking antidepressants (for obvious reasons, because depression is a common effect).
And I know of some taking ADHD meds for their co-morbid ADHD (autists have a higher probability for ADHD).
I'll be honest, it feels a bit whiney. Many of us in tech are somewhere on the spectrum, but owning your problems is the first step to handling them and this doesn't feel like that, it feels more like blaming the diagnosis.
> a bit whiney
> owning your problems
What do you mean? That makes me think about how people react to others having depression symptoms, saying that they should "just" get better... The best course of action is to ask for help.
When you have a condition that alters behavior I think it's pretty fair to blame that condition for said behavior changes/differences. People are so weird about mental disorders in a way they would never be about physical disorders.
Own your chronic fatigue and deal with it, quit blaming it for your tiredness!
Here's my genuine and honest question: What does "owning your chronic fatigue" look like in practice?
Having the knowledge about how your own mind and body work is essential when it comes to dealing with the challenges you are presented with. Having a diagnosis of some kind doesn't let you off the hook. But it is comforting to know that it isn't your fault. You aren't a lesser person because of it - you are just going through the game of life on a different level of difficulty than you expected, and a different level of difficulty than someone without that same challenge.
It would be exactly the same thing people expect from people with mental disorders. You must manage your disorder in such a manner that to the outside world it appears as though you don't have it. Which is totally not an unreasonable ask and definitely not exhausting and untenable to have to fight against your own body for 16 hours a day.
You can't blame your disorder so no turning down plans because you don't have the energy today—better take another dose of stimulants and power through! And don't you dare ask for or expect any kind of accommodation because that's just using your diagnosis as an excuse to be lazy.
This is one of the most under-discussed hardships about the reality of living with nearly invisible disabilities. The expectation that it remain invisible at all times is hard to live with.
If you care about people who have disabilities, give them grace when the facade slips.
I guess the main point I took away was that the expectation of masking creates a lot of pressure on everyone. Maybe the optimal solution is us all dropping the pretense and being chill with it.
Lol. They made a game, and shared it publicly. How much more can they own it?
I am guessing your definition of “owning” involves not talking about your problems ever. I don’t think that’s healthy, but you can find out for yourself.
Half true, Half snuffing out lamps to trick you.
"blaming external factors for your situation inherently diminishes your sense of your own power, even when external factors are actually to blame" - some redditor
i wonder how a slave would react to the idea of autistic burnout ... isn't 'masking' just a way of shifting blame by juvenilizing impulse control ?
I cannot understand this sentence: " isn't 'masking' just a way of shifting blame by juvenilizing impulse control ?"
shifting the blame of what? what is being juvenilized? Impulse control? How does masking make or keep young or youthful; or arrest the development of Impulse control?
The whole point of masking is to try to hide things that others would find socially uncomfortable or inappropriate for the context. Masking is the continuous effort you pour in to maintaining decorum and professionalism. And I have worked for many bosses, managers, and clients who have utterly failed at both on several occasions, but nobody would call their behavior some sort of failure in impulse control. That would only happen for people with less authority and influence.
I guess I don't really understand "masking". I made all of the decisions I would make if I was feeling overstimulated. I scheduled the coffee date for later. I put on headphones to block out the noise. I turned down going to the charity thing. But then I lost because I was "masking too hard"?
In my mind these decisions were literally the opposite - I was being honest about what the character wanted and was making space for myself.
Is masking about faking interactions with other people? But nearly everything that I get dinged for about masking doesn't even involve others. Is it about hiding symptoms from others? Or from hiding things you don't like from yourself?
Replied a bit more on another comment, tl;dr this is a quite silly simulator that is not representative of autism and you’ve found the biggest tell (almost everything is masking by the scoring algorithm).
You could replace it with an HP bar or Foobar bar and it’d have just as much meaning. I grew up taking care of my autistic sister and have a couple diagnoses of my own, I found it almost offensive that this claims to be representative of autism because of how generic and distanced it is (ex. “Masking” is collapsed down to being the same as “spoon” discourse with depression)
I think a thing a lot of people are missing in the comments - which OP even mentions in the description above - is that this simulates their experience, not every experience. It's like the oft-repeated mantra "if you've met one autistic person, you've met one autistic person". For one person, maybe both eating and skipping breakfast aren't great choices - sometimes there aren't any good choices. You're either dealing with a caloric defecit and you're going to risk doing something that'll make you stand out - ie: unmasking - or you're doing something that doesn't feel good at the time, and will sap your immediate energy. It might be as simple as 'eating breakfast gives me time which I'll unwisely use for circular thinking or stressing'.
For me, even though I didn't personally relate to a lot of the situations and experiences - not a software dev, working for a small company that knows and supports my neurodiversity - the overall feel had just enough familiarity for me to go "yep", and it actually got me thinking about my own choices and self-care, on a day where I'd been beating myself up about things outside my control.
Good work, OP.
> Someone from the "People Team" appears at your desk with a bright smile and a clipboard.
THE WORST! Why can't we just work?! Do stuff, make money, get the f- out.
It's a valid frustation... sadly the social bits are often useful.
E.g. communication tends to work best if you have A: trust and B: a mental model for the other person. A is a buffer against friction. B is essentially API documentation about this specific person
The social bits are how most people build A and B
I develop A and B by working with people and paying close attention to them. I learn what they’re good at and what they’re not, how they like to communicate, how they like to work, what they don’t like to work on. I do this by paying attention during work. For me, the work is the social bit. I don’t need to play “escape from a room” with someone to do that.
Now, if other people do need corporate staged social games in order to build that up for themselves, then that’s ok for them, but why is that considered the norm? Why are they required? Why is it up to the neurodivergent person to exhaust themselves for them? Why is it considered normal for someone in a “People team” to ignore the needs of some of the people? I don’t see why other people’s needs are inherently more important than mine.
I think the norm often becomes the norm because of frequency. If most people like some social stuff (and the rest pretend to, to blend in), it's the norm
I don't know it has to be that way at all. There's probably lots of room for compromise. The "people team" would need to both know about the need and care enough to try to take it into account
Yes, they're useful. But B: doesn't occur naturally for some of those with Autism. Sometimes names with faces is near impossible, at a baseline. Masking with those individuals, or feigning interest can be exhausting. Dancing around not wanting to discuss outside-of-work life can make one stand out, etc.
There's no polite way to tell such individuals to f- off, of course, and it's often expected.
sadly for who?
Sadly for those neurodivergent who do not see the social bits as 'useful'. Social bits are, ultimately, useful, even for those with Autism, even if masking et. al. is exhausting.
Humans are social creatures. We can't live in a vacuum nor on our own without support from other humans (i.e., food production).
Sad for you more like, Mr edifice of self-serving assumptions.
let's put a pin in that, circle back
We're a family here.
looping in Useless Manager Alice and Useless Manager Bob, let's get some time on the calendar to discuss
Let me double click on that before you pin it and circle back.
Had a "people" guy at a previous employer. At every corporate social thing, he'd run around with his huge DSLR camera and take pictures to post on the company social media, to show how this is a great place to work.
He was an irritating person even without his camera. I hate having my picture taken, and I don't consent to having my face posted on social media. Later, when the company realised that setting money on fire isn't a solid business strategy, he was thankfully fired.
I had an over-enthousiastic guy at work. I don't know what pills he was on, but I'd love some. Once during lunch I was sitting with my coworkers, having a completely shitty day. Suddenly he showed up "oooh, you all look so lovely, let me take a photo" and pulled out his phone. I subconsciously responded with death stare full of hatred. Would love to see the photo someday.
I agree, which is why it drives me crazy to be on HN and see people be like "if you want to work as a programmer you must live breathe eat sleep code and have a resume of Github commits three miles long."
It's a job, not a religion.
Seems like an unrelated (maybe even opposite direction) complaint. Plenty of autists are obsessed with programming and technology.
10 hour day in the terminal just to come over here and find this! Me obsessed? Hell yes!
It’s my personal escapism from the everydayness of existence.
Boy, that's a straight shooter with upper management written all over him!
For some people it's a job.
For others it's a calling.
Nothing wrong with either - I just think it's worth being aware that people have different motivations.
My biggest insight on my (self diagnosed, high functioning) Autism.
For most people, the golden rule works. Treat other people as you want to be treated, and modulo rare interactions with asshole people, you get along well.
For autistic people interacting with most non-autistic people, you've got to use the diamond rule. Treat other people as they want to be treated.
I love when people just straight up tell me directly that I am wrong because of X and Y. Give me Crocker's rules. This works very poorly in most situations, however. My superpower is offending people by telling them my (readily correctible) perception of the truth.
> Treat other people as you want to be treated
I want to be left alone, and when I do that to others (leave them alone) they think I'm arrogant.
Wouldn't be an autism thread without all the self diagnosers coming out to throw in their two cents.
Wouldn't be an autism thread without all the label gatekeepers
Would you instead like to have a conversation about the costs and difficulties associated with getting an autism diagnosis as an adult?
Not to mention the risks of being on a list.
True, as someone whose country of origin just this year had debates about registries for mentally ill people, i feel like i should've added that point as well, thanks
I think this is nice as it underlines how certain seemingly small things can feel incredibly disturbing to another individual (non-autistic one as well!)
It seems like one of those games that I'm going to recall in various situations in the future.
The ADHD modal is hilarious.
Thank you I was quite proud of it. The popup topics are from various special interests of mine :)
Yeah... you captured it very well. Another idea might be having it do a jarring transition to another topic, speed up a bit, go to another topic, etc.
The snap back to "now it's time to give your morning standup update" hit hard btw :)
ADHD is nothing like this. After returning from dayjob, you spend until past midnight on your pet project. For months. And then simply abandon it without a second thought.
It made me laugh as an ADHDer. Totally what it's like sometimes!
Though it took me a second because the page was St Anthony IIRC. I'm Eastern Orthodox so for a second I was like "how did my ADHD-self open this here, wtf?!". Then I laughed once I got it.
So, bigger and more important question here. How do I help neuro-divergent folks in a work environment? There's no one size fits all here, everyone is different, and not just on a spectrum sliding scale. How do I glean what is important for neuro-spicy individuals beyond "just ask?"
Welcome thoughts on what has worked and what has not worked.
Pay attention to people and try to be empathetic. Do this to everyone, not just those you suspect of being autistic. That's all anyone can ask of you, and it works. Autistic people aren't aliens - if you engage empathetically they will respond positively, like any other person.
This is the answer. I’m autistic and I don’t want anything for myself that I don’t also want for everyone else. All I want is to be treated like the individual human being that I am. I have specific things I’m good at and other things that are difficult or impossible for me. Other people have different abilities and challenges. Stop acting like there’s some “normal” that we all need to aspire to. No individual is normal.
Create an environment where people feel safe requesting adjustments. (This is a general disability thing, not just a neurodivergence thing.) Nobody can tell you how to do that, because any public description of a reliable signal will be diluted by bad actors. (See also: signalling theory, euphemism treadmill.)
This is generalisations and doesn't work as all autistic people are different, but I'll give some tips anyway. Let them do what they are good at and gives them motivation. Ask for their opinion, and you will likely get a straight answer. If it's a highly ambitious and motivated person you need to protect them from over-working. Protect them from internal politics and bullying. Also be a good example for social interactions and culture because they will do like you do, so better be nice and smile.
Chew with your mouth closed. And no apples or other crunchy foods.
I find it amazing how some people here lack the empathy to understand this is the author's personal experience and that they feel entitled to cosplay the confused person thinking all of this is absurd and makes no sense from their point of view.
I think you can have empathy for their situation and also recognize the gluttonous amount of self pity in this.
How do you tell someone earnestly asking vs "cosplaying the confused person"?
By their costume, of course.
“You can’t tell people anything” I read this on a blog article a long time ago and I’m constantly reminded of it. This gives me that same feeling where someone is attempting to give some insight into their POV (precisely /because/ it’s alien to so many) and the responses (well, some of them) miss this point entirely.
It's all so tiresome. I find it amazing people are not as tired of adult make-believe.
[flagged]
While everyone deals with some version of these issues, what you’re missing is the scale and quantity of these issues for autistic people. Would you want to work in an office that smelled like rotting garbage, loud distracting music was constantly playing, and strobe lights randomly flashed in your eyes? This might get you close to what it’s like for me to work in an open office.
I can often smell the people around me. Generally, they don’t smell good. I can often hear conversations that are on the other side of the office. (Have you ever tried to add up numbers while someone else says other random numbers at you? It’s like that.) When people walk past my field of vision, I can’t focus on my screen. When I try to tune out all of these distractions, it consumes a lot of energy. Doing it hour after hour, day after day would leave me depleted, exhausted, unable to focus. I’d be unable to do the work that I was hired to do. How is that reasonable?
> I can often smell the people around me. Generally, they don’t smell good. I can often hear conversations that are on the other side of the office. (Have you ever tried to add up numbers while someone else says other random numbers at you? It’s like that.) When people walk past my field of vision, I can’t focus on my screen. When I try to tune out all of these distractions, it consumes a lot of energy. Doing it hour after hour, day after day would leave me depleted, exhausted, unable to focus.
I always just thought putting up with this was what I got paid for. Like isn't this why working on-site sucks?
That's why open office plans suck. The fact that software developers (assuming you are one, apologies if you are not) are idiots in not engaging in collective bargaining association (don't call it a union, lol). The "technology" exists to create private offices for everyone (and sufficient conference rooms while we're at it) so that working on site isn't terrible because you have your own private office with a door that keeps people and sound out when you're trying to get deep work done, regardless of your autism or adhd or other mental illness status.
That’s a sad way to see things. Aren’t you paid to solve problems? To create value somehow?
And apparently there are people who find these environments energizing. It seems like those people are the ones who make these cruel policies. But 20-30% of all humans are highly sensitive and they generally find situations like this draining. Most autistic people are highly sensitive. My guess is that many of us would be on the high end of the HSP spectrum. When I take HSP assessments I max out every measure. I often feel like a bundle of exposed nerve endings.
And I need to point out that this is not inherently disabling. When I’m out in nature or experiencing great art or music, it’s clear that I’m having a better, more intense experience than most other people. Music moves me to tears often, sometimes several times a week. It’s wonderful to experience the world this way. But the only way for me to tolerate an open office would be to drug myself. This, to me, is dystopian.
This high sensitivity is why I’m able to solve problems that many others can’t. If I can focus that high sensitivity on the problem space, and I’m given a few days to process all the information, then I’m often able to untangle messes and solve problems that many others find intractable.
But corporations expect that we all conform to some standard of what’s expected of a “normal” human. By doing this, we’re not getting the best out of the human race. We’re actively disabling people that could be doing valuable work. It’s absurd.
“Get up out of that wheelchair and stop being lazy! You’re an adult!”
Excellent counter lol
Getting "old internet" vibes from this one. Good job.
I'm not at all familiar with Autism, and I have no idea what "Masking" means at all, but every option I choose seems to lower that stat, to the point where I never make it to day 2. Is there a cheat sheet that lists the "correct" selections at each step?
> Getting "old internet" vibes from this one. Good job.
Thank you. Neovim has radicalized my design sensibilities and I really miss the internet I used in the 90s as a kid.
> I'm not at all familiar with Autism, and I have no idea what "Masking" means at all, but every option I choose seems to lower that stat, to the point where I never make it to day 2. Is there a cheat sheet that lists the "correct" selections at each step?
I got a chuckle out of this because it's how I felt IRL for a long time. Especially "every option I choose seems to lower that stat" This is a good rundown https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/behavio...
No cheatsheet but I'll opensource the code in a few days when i clean it up a bit
Wow, thanks for the link, this and the other replies have been helpful.
I approached the game as a non-neurodivergent person making whatever the natural decision I personally would have made in each situation, and ended up dying to the "masking" every time! It kind of gives me an appreciation that what comes naturally to me, at no cost, imposes a tremendous cost to others. I suppose that might have been the whole point of the site. Well done.
Congratulations! By realizing this insight, you won the true game.
Masking is just acting in a way that you normally wouldn't, but have to. Think of a spy blending in avoiding to get caught, it's a conscious effort not to screw up and it takes more energy/willpower from you than not having to pretend to be someone else. I guess it gets harder the more different from yourself you have to act, like having an itch you can't scratch or will get "punished" somehow, damn.
Even just learning that there’s a word for this has kinda opened my eyes
Masking is someone suppressing their natural autistic behaviors. It's not even necessarily conscious but it takes a large toll on mental energy. Besides the energy required for the masking itself there's the compounding effect of setting unrealistic expectations in others. The better someone is at masking the more is expected of them which creates an even larger drain on mental energy.
>Masking is someone suppressing their natural autistic behaviors.
Well, masking is done by everybody, not just autists, but in this game it's used to refer to that specifically. Arguably autists have to do it more, or feel the exhaustion from it more strongly.
This is also fascinating from the perspective of me, someone who is autistic and open about it at work. My work collaboration profile comes out and says "I'm autistic", and sets out a few things to know.
When I hit the workspace rearrangement event I felt it in my bones, since my employer did that. However because I have a doctor's note about my noise and light sensitivity, they were able to accommodate me with a dedicated desk in a quieter area.
It isn't the quietest, and I still get shuffled around, but I get to preview the new location and pick the best spot for my sensitivities each time I've moved. So in my case, being open with my management (and reports) about my autism has been a very helpful thing.
I'm not autistic but in the intro it says "promtotions" instead of "promotions".
I think that's the most I can deal with today ;)
Hahaha good catch will patch this.
This is pretty interesting.
I wonder why in my 30 years of lived experience (in India), I never met or heard of anyone being autistic or needing meds for mental health, even amongst the software engineers. But this seems to be fairly prevalent in the US.
It might be under diagnosis but medical services and pharma are extremely cheap and fairly competent, at least for the engineers.
May be they don't openly talk about it due to stigma.
I can't imagine what they would go through here, it's a extremely social culture where you are socially forced into group festivals, gatherings and frequent visits from relatives.
Nobody in India has mental health problems. Yep. That checks out.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10438407/
It might as well be that the prevalence differs between different populations.
It changes with age too. Like the first question I was presented with was 1. Take time for self-care, 2. Get straight to breakfast and work prep.
Yeah in my 20s, and early 30s, I could eat breakfast while logging onto the computer and starting to work.
But now in my 40s I take some time for self-care, not sure if it counts, but it's difficult to answer a question like that with either or.
Decades on the computer has forced me to do Yoga every morning too. So it's not like I want to do it, I just realized that I have to.
I lost when I went to a work outing instead of staying home, but I had RSVP'd to the outing. This is what the game doesn't cover, I never RSVP unless I can keep my word. Never commit!
Similar experience here. I used to just be able to brute force mask and burn energy against the problem. Eventually it caught up with me.
On sounds - as a non autistic person but as someone with a good "audio memory", music and sounds especially in an office can absolutely get on my nerves. It's mostly the repetitiveness.
Being able to hear songs in your head sounds great until you have the same one on repeat for days.
This morning it's "the things we do for love". Not sure where that one came from.
Also high pitched sounds (seagull deterers) or electricity buzzing. I learnt at a physics class at high school that I could hear higher pitches than other kids as well, although now that I'm older I've probably lost some of that.
What is the medication you're supposed to take? Ritalin or something?
The side-effects are vaguely evocative of antipsychotics or some sort of antidepressant.
There's no specific autism medication that I'm aware of, but psychiatric diseases often have plenty of comorbidity. There's some ADHD popup in the game that distracts you with Wikipedia, there's misophonia, it sounds like the character has a whole mix of different things.
Had I paid more attention to that, I probably would have skipped them instead of saying I’d take the normal dose.
Some questionable doctor prescribed me something like that a couple months ago as a precursor to dealing with ADHD. He said it would take a few weeks to build up in my system with once daily pills. I took a single pill and didn’t sleep for 3 days, and felt “off” for a good week or three. Never again.
My doctor tries to put me on antidepressants but I'm scared of side effects. My main complaint is that my energy levels are virtually zero despite relatively healthy lifestyle.
My doctor was asking me about taking a sleep study to see if I have sleep apnea. Many people in my family had it, but I’ve been told I don’t snore, and while I don’t have energy, I don’t fall asleep at the drop of a hat like they all did before getting a cpap.
I really don’t want to do a sleep study, as it sounds like nightmare fuel, so I got an Apple Watch which is supposed to be able to signal if there is a possible issue over the course of a month. I’ve had a couple days in normal range, but most days show elevated breathing interruptions. If it signals me after the end of the 30 days, I guess I’ll feel forced to get a sleep study. While I hate the idea of needing a cpap, being tired all the time isn’t fun either.
CPAP can change your life. It had a huge impact on my partner.
How old are you? There's like a zillion health factors. I've struggled with this because if IBS and getting older.
Taking Ubiqunol now, red light therapy for mitochondrial health - there's a bunch of other related supplements. Started exercising. Energy is better now.
There's no medication for autism, nor there really is supposed to be any.
A bunch of medications are commonly used to help manage it, though. And it's so often co-morbid with other diagnoses (these are all just classifications we made up anyway, so that they're two "different" things is basically just semantics, it's all happening in one brain, like we could easily and no-less-reasonably halve or double the number of labels we apply to these same situations and the underlying reality would be unaffected) that it's common to be diagnosed autistic but also taking ADHD meds or mood stabilizers or antidepressants or what have you, under other diagnoses.
Ponders
Damn, it's way past the time for me to take my SSRIs, because I forgot to take Adderall earlier in the day and zoned out on HN instead when I should've been finishing that API.
Narrator: the actual task didn't call for an API redesign, but if we're doing things, we're doing them The Right Way™ or we don't do them at all, right?
A lot of times they take an SSRI to be able to manage their emotions better and not be triggered by daily life. That’s what I remember when I was trying to help an autistic friend deal with having autistic children that were having a lot of issues.
Edit: Just asked her and the final cocktail they have settled on is aripriprazole (Abilify, an atypical antipsychotic) and hydroxyzine (first-generation antihistamine with anxiolytic and sedative properties).
I sent her the game and she said it was hard haha. I asked if that was what autism feels like and she said this-
“Not for me but I have ASD. For my son, it would be similar but different since he can't tell me what is going on in his head. I can only guess with him, poor lamb.”
Autism is a super diverse condition so varies pretty wildly person-to-person.
This. I have no medication as I built up immense resiliency and masking mechanisms over the course of my life. Others may take a cocktail of meds just to make it to lunch.
It’s a condition that exists on a spectrum, as does its treatments or coping mechanisms. That said, I’m the “take my assigned medication” type, so I always took the full dose in the game.
Yeah, I wish there was a bit more clarity on the medication prompt.
IE, medication can be hit-or-miss. Did I (as the person in the game) go to a pill pusher and thus the medication causes more problems then it helps? Or, is the medication something where the benefits outweigh the consequences?
As many other people in this thread point out, there is no "medication for autism," so I assumed that it was a case of poorly prescribed medication from a pill pusher and didn't take it the first time I played.
Xanax, Zolpidem, Belsomra, and a fifth of your favorite.
Nitrous oxide, ketamine, buspirone (not buproprion), gapapentin, abilify, lamigtal.
No alcohol.
Also look at your environment and its stressors. Moving out was one of the best things I did for my mental health.
My food can touch without me melting down, so I'd consider it a win. This is not medical advice.
Do you view autism as a pathology or a difference?
I'm pretty strongly in the difference camp. It giveth and taketh away. I can't get through a full meal hearing people chew food without some background noise going but I also completed my PhD before I was 30 so it feels wrong to call it a pathology ya know?
Is it rare to complete a PhD before 30?
Not much rarer than completing it at all, probably. It's still certainly an accomplishment.
I just looked it up - I guess it's not! As I said in another thread, paid the price, didn't receive the intelligence.
What I was getting at in my question is, in response to the question about medication, is the intent to "fix" a perceived "problem", or should any medication taken be tuned to provide support for coping with a world that can be actively hostile to neurodivergent people.
Any psychological disorder is treatment-worthy iff the patient suffers from it. So not just "you were diagnosed", but "you were diagnosed, have problems caused by it, suffer from those problems, and want relief". So yes to both, treatment can be intended to fix a problem that a patient suffers from that is just related to his perception of things. But it can also be intended to support your interactions with a hostile environment that you suffer from.
"disorder" is a loaded term in this context.
It's redundant. "disorder" and "iff the patient suffers from it" are basically the same thing in this context. So you can remove the word disorder and that comment means the same thing.
FWIW (and I do have relevant personal experience) "fixing" is not in the option set. One can only cope. SSRIs, VPA, amphetamines or whatever (including alcohol, THC, DMT and opiates), they just shift the person's perception/consciousness a bit so it might become more copeable in the current society. That is all.
People are touting Leucavorin. (It doesn't work) There are a lot of different things people have tried.
What's it like for people not on the spectrum? Can someone share a "Normal Simulator"?
This is one of those things where I think autism has become a tag for the shared experiences of things like awkwardness, feeling out of place, or running out of the desire to socialize. Everyone wants an answer for why they have unpleasant experiences that aren't, "That's just life".
There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect.
These labels are useful insofar as grouping experiences together that tend to co-occur makes it easy to talk about certain categories of aggregate experiences or strategies for navigating life, but I think too many people relegate too much importance to these arbitrary labels, like "autism", derive too much of their identity from them, and too often use them as excuses to not deal with life's challenges and complexities head on.
Look into the history of autism research and you'll find a history of fraud. People like Bruno Bettelheim simply lied their way to prominence and now we are on a road of ever-expanding diagnostic criteria and an ever-growing autism industry to the point where it is now trendy to self-diagnose on social media.
Recall that psychology has had a gigantic replication crisis, and that the founders of the field like Freud and Jung were charlatans, and that there is no agreed-upon mechanistic explanation for autism, and that a primary diagnostic tool is a literal questionnaire, and that psychology and psychiatry have been abused for political reasons by every totalitarian government of the 20th century.
Given all this, we should have some humility about this topic. Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
And maybe we can normalize the idea that employees have special emotional needs that can be accounted for on an individual basis without medical permission slips or any need for wielding constructed identities.
When I was in grad school, I worked in a lab that performed research on children with Asperger's syndrome (AS), mainly through fMRI and DTI brain imaging techniques. AS was merged into Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), but at the time was considered a high-functioning form of autism. I met dozens of children with AS; they were typically between 9-13 years old. All the children I met were clearly autistic. I'm not going to attempt to describe what that means here, but the nature of their disorder was evident, compared to other disorders and compared to the age-matched controls [1]. Back then I'd confidently tell you I could easily pick out the kids in a classroom with an AS diagnosis. These days, I have no confidence I could do so (mostly due to false negatives).
[1] anecdote: at the end of explaining the fMRI procedure to the participant children and their parents, I'd ask if the child had any questions. Neurotypical children would usually ask about any reward $ for completing the task. AS kids would usually ask something poignant about the experiment.
I agree that there is a "there" there. But I'm not confident in the ability of our culture to define it in a mature way, or use the knowledge responsibly. I don't want to see therapy culture continually creeping into the mainstream. I don't want people to start medicalizing the traits of those in their families and social circles.
And since every phenotype exists along a normal distribution, there will always be resemblances and fuzziness, and no clear lines demarcating order from disorder.
But it is also obvious that nonverbal people who are stimming most of the day and can barely tie their own shoelaces exist, and these people need to be cared for and studied by responsible professionals in mature and private settings with their loved ones.
I still remember my psychology class in high school pretty well. It was memorable cause we’d spend a week learning about some theories Freud came up with, and then there would be a very short footnote of “turns out it was all totally made up and never scientifically verified in any way”. I was like what? So psychology isn’t science??
Recently a friend explained to me that Freud really wasn’t a scientist, but he was so influential in getting western cultures to think about the mind in new ways that we still learn about him. Like nobody cared about psychology until he get famous
The 19th century was a wild time. Everything was a science back then. That's why communists speak of the "immortal science of Marxist-Leninism." Marx literally said he was performing science, but that wasn't seen as an absurdity because that is how everyone spoke.
It wasn't until the mid-20th century when people started to get more serious about defining science. Philosophers started critiquing it in the early 20th century like the Vienna Circle and Popper, and eventually the definition of what constitutes science was narrowed down to one that was defined as a particular sort of empiricism.
That, too, has its own problems.
Feyerabend: the only rule is "anything goes"
I don't think it's any less science, inasmuch as science seeks to explain the natural world. It's just at a higher level of complexity and a different point in the learning curve than more externally observable levels of science.
Would we say that Copernicus was a charlatan or not a scientist because the heliocentric model turned out to be wrong? As you acknowledge, Freud pushed the collective understanding further.
The heliocentric model turning out to be wrong made Copernicus more of a scientist. Freud didn’t even make it to the level of falsifiability.
Then how do we know that Freud was "wrong" or "inaccurate" or "just made up" or "a fraud"?
It's definitely a lot more murky and there are massive gaps in our understanding between biology and neuroscience and psychology, and fundamental differences and limits on methodology that we may never surpass, but his work still has its place on the timeline of progress does it not?
What about something like phrenology? It's easy to laugh at it now and consider its proponents charlatans or lunatics but at a time it was considered a worthy avenue of exploration, that turned out to be a dead end, but that's part of science.
Maybe let's not leap to medicalizing large swathes of the human condition and just accept eccentrics as part of life.
I agree that a healthy dose of skepticism and acknowledgement of our rudimentary understanding is warranted, but it does start to sound a little anti-science. I don't think there's anything wrong with continuing to explore and attempting to explain or put words to these things even though they are near the highest level of complexity in nature and the hardest to empirically evaluate.
Are NSAIDs considered to be medicalizing large swathes of the human condition (or caffeine, or alcohol for that matter)? Where is the line between a universally accepted and ubiquitous pharmaceutical and an overmedicalized one? I think we should be moving more towards the question of "do you feel like this medication benefits you or would benefit you?" than "do you check these boxes in the DSM and officially receive this diagnosis".
Given that we can’t do the latter due to gestures vaguely at everything then it seems like the former is actually a rational reaction.
Objectively, I understand what you're saying here, and agree that it's almost certainly happening.
Subjectively... I see people around me casually doing things that I simply cannot do. I'm 41 years old, and not once do I recall performing any action without actively forcing myself to do it. That includes things as small and trivial as getting up from my desk to use the restroom.
I can't relate at all to the concept of a "habit". Combing my hair requires an explicit decision to do so. I usually have to find my brush, since there's no consistent place I put it. When I'm done, I'll forget that I wanted to put it back where it belongs while actively being frustrated with myself for not doing so the previous day.
It's glaringly obvious to me that other people don't struggle with the things I struggle with; at the very least, they don't struggle to the same degree. It's exhausting.
Oh, and I've never even been diagnosed with autism. I have ADHD. What I described above is classic "executive dysfunction".
I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum. Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
Psychiatry is in its infancy. To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
It's tradition to warn first-year psychiatry students about over-diagnosing themselves and everyone around them. There is a well known phenomenon where as soon as students start reading about conditions and symptoms they start seeing it in everyone at rates far too high to be accurate. Fortunately for them, their professors are there to warn them about this effect. They also realize how foolish it was to diagnose everyone with everything based on generic symptoms when they get into practice and see what these conditions look like in real patients.
Unfortunately, these psychiatry terms have spilled over into social media without the same warnings. This leads to extreme over-diagnosis by people who learn basic symptoms and start spotting them in everyone.
> I estimate that at least 1/8 of all people I have ever met are on the autism spectrum.
Unless you are only meeting people in an environment that is extraordinarily biased toward Autism Spectrum Disorder and you’re avoiding mingling with the general population, this simply isn’t possible.
> Around 1/4 to 1/2 of all people I have ever met have some form of executive function disorder.
You are grossly over-diagnosing.
When you see a characteristic in half of all people it’s no longer in the realm of something considered a disorder. You are literally just describing the median point in human behaviors.
A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.
Autistic individuals have systemic changes in their mind and body which let them see life from a different perspective.
People with executive function disorder have issues with rapid thinking, focusing, and other things that can work in their favor often enough to be passed on.
> A system with one perspective is a system waiting to fail.
Speaking in cryptic aphorisms doesn't help anything.
Psychiatry isn't a field where everyone has a single perspective. There is a lot of debate within psychiatry and much research exploring different perspectives.
However, I don't think it's appropriate for a non-psychiatrist to start diagnosing half of the population with a disorder or 1 in 8 people they meet with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
An untrained perspective is not on the same level as the professionals and researchers.
This boils down to "I think you are wrong because you are not an authority figure."
I trust trained professionals with years of experience across thousands of patients to be better equipped to diagnose people with mental health conditions than someone online who diagnoses literally half of the people they meet with disorders, yes.
Repeating “psychiatry is in its infancy” over and over again does not elevate your opinion to the same level of trained professionals and academic research.
You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population. People connect with similar people, form relationships in similar envioronemnts, so your social group is vastly more specialised than it might seem.
Autism compounds this greatly because of the double empathy problem, so one should expect an autistic person to have mostly autistic friends and to be in environments where the rate of autism is far higher
> You're assuming people sample unifromly and at random from the population.
I'm not assuming anything. I literally explained that the only way it's possible is for someone to avoid the general population and only socialize in environments with extreme bias.
The more important point is that diagnosing autism is not something you can do by simply meeting people in social situations. It's something that takes training and experience by professionals, not an untrained person who sizes people up as they meet them in a social capacity.
Again, psychiatry is in its infancy. Many professionals use outdated models or stereotypes in practice. Living as an autistic individual can make it easier to clock other autistic people, because it's rare to meet someone who functions or thinks the same way you do and sticks out like a sore thumb. For example, "thinking in pictures" is not a universal autistic trait, but it's a pretty well known one.
Being easy to clock won't bring the ratio of something up to 1/8 or 1/4 or 1/2.
> To see autism as an "excuse not to deal with life" is just plain bigotry.
Almost all of my social circle is somewhere on the spectrum, and quite a few are diagnosed.
So I can say with some authority that there are absolutely some people who use it as an excuse, which is made even more apparent than the people that aren't using it as one. TikTok and other high-information-low-veracity social media is only making this trend worse. It's not bigotry to acknowledge that.
(Most of said individuals ended up getting cut out of said social circle, after the people actually making an effort got tired of them constantly using their disability as an excuse not to even try to modify bad behavior)
That said, I'm not against diagnosis, or even self-diagnosis. Improved diagnosis is a good thing! But mostly because it makes it easier to understand how you can structure things to adapt to it. Or to quote a coworker's email signature:
> “Undiagnosed neurodivergence is like being handed a video game that has been set to hard mode, but having people tell you over and over "it's on easy, why do you keep dying? " Diagnosis is learning the game is on hard mode. It doesn't make it easier, but you can strategize.”
I agree completely with this comment, though most often I see it for ADHD. It's a level of nuance that people don't seem to be able to handle, though. People want to be on either the "just suck it up, losers" side or the "the duty of society is to make sure nothing is ever hard for anybody" side. It pisses me off to see people take advantage of the accommodations that are needed by some, and saddens me when people who legitimately need accommodation for some things end up depending on it for everything.
It would be nice if there were objective tests that said exactly where someone is, but those are both impossible and would be subverted even if they were possible.
There will always be humans who take advantage of a system. Why do you, like the parent commenter, think that is in question here? No one here is espousing the extreme position you put in quotes.
Because I am seeing how this is playing out in classrooms. Tons of kids are requesting accommodations. Some need those accommodations, some don't, and the ones who do often don't need all of the accommodations they're getting. Anyone who pushes back -- eg, a teacher calling out a BS requirement -- is demonized and seen as ableist. Among the kids, anyone who doesn't request an accommodation that they don't need but could get, is seen a foolish. And access to those accommodations produces a lot of kids who don't even try to improve their executive functioning to what it could be. And people know it, so a stigma is developing where people who need it have to prove that they're not taking advantage of the situation.
Parents are doing the best they can, but in the end they're still making decisions for other human beings who are not them, and those human beings are going through a time of life that is undeniably hard and requires growing to be able to do all kinds of things they couldn't formerly do. How can the kids know what is reasonable difficulty and what is excessive due to their neural makeup?
It's a tricky and nuanced situation, and so I really do see people falling into the opposing extreme camps. I agree that humans will take advantage of any system. That doesn't really have any bearing on how things are going, and whether people are seeing the nuance clearly or not. My personal experience is witnessing kids who are taking advantage of accommodations and failing to grow as a result, and how the system cannot distinguish which of those accommodations are appropriate and which aren't. It's also witnessing kids who need accommodation but won't ask for it, because they or their parents believe that muscling through is necessary, or that their problems aren't real. How are those not examples of extreme positions?
My point is that in order to get better at this, we need to be doing the hard work of figuring out what's real and what's not, or even how real it is, and what interventions do and don't work. Surely it's not controversial to say that giving a procrastinator twice as much time to finish their tests is not always the right thing? It can hurt as easily as it can help. And yet, it is the right thing for some people, for some situations. If it takes me 10 minutes to solve a quadratic that takes you 5, getting a failing grade is not going to help me learn, nor does it mean I'm incompetent at mathematics.
If you don't think people are saying "just suck it up", you're not looking very hard. Same if you don't think people are saying that we should offer any and all accommodations to anyone who requests.
There will always be humans who take advantage of a system, that is not in question.
Believing that "too many" autistic people are using it as an excuse - an entire category of people - is bigotry.
I never said autism was an excuse not to deal with life.
I did say that it is common for people to see themselves in the descriptions of many psychiatric disorders, because many of the symptoms are experiences that most people can relate to, in some form or another, and then use that as a vehicle to avoid enduring some of life's necessary suffering.
The audio stuff, the concentration stuff, the always coming late and so aren't difficult to categorize in terms of "normal" and "not normal", when they're basically constant and have been since a very young age. It's simply being in the long tail of the frequency distribution or not, wherever you set that line.
> There is no normal experience, only the kinds of experiences that people have. Some people have buckets of experience that are worse or more challenging than others, everyone has shared experiences that cross-sect.
A lot of people are in the short head of the distributions when it comes to nearly all of these markers. Some people are in the long tails for a large number of them. Those are the ones we label. Being in the short head doesn't mean one is never awkward or never late or annoyed by certain noises, it means that they're so at a frequency that's common.
Then there's actually people who live their entire existence and every waking moment on the spectrum, and compensating for it - which is what the topic of discussion is. You minimizing it or thinking it isn't real isn't entirely helpful to discussion and frankly is pretty insulting.
> If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere.
No, because the endpoints of the spectrum are not defined as 0% autistic and 100% autistic.
The spectrum definitionally only includes people diagnosed with autism.
Your approach is like saying "there is a 'how bad is the cancer' spectrum" where 0 is "no cancer" as opposed to something like "cancer but easily curable." No reasonable definition of "cancer suffering spectrum" would include "doesn't even have cancer."
Autism is called a spectrum disorder not because it ranges on a smooth continuum from "no autism" to "lots of autism".
It's because there a handful of associated symptoms for autism and different people have a different mixture of them. You don't need an equally large amount of all symptoms in order to be autistic.
Think of it more like a light spectrum where there are different mixtures of hues for the symptoms, but autism still implies some amount of significant overall intensity. In short, it's a spectrum, not a continuum.
If you experience some or all of the symptoms associated with autism but at a level that doesn't significantly impair your overall functioning, then that's not a diagnosis of autism. Just like everyone who gets sad isn't depressed and everyone who worries doesn't have generalized anxiety. That's just normal human variability and life challenges.
I have encountered this definition of "spectrum", as a vector of numbers that go 0 to 100, rather than a single number that goes from 0 to 100 (which you call "continuum" IIUC).
But... I mean, if you asked 100 people what they think a spectrum means in this context, how many of them would think it meant "vector" rather than "real number"? I would guess fewer than 10. I consider myself a fairly well-informed nerd, but I think I had encountered many usages of "spectrum" describing a single trait for many years, and I think this is the second time I've ever encountered someone using the "vector" definition (the first one was also using it to describe autism). Has this linguistic battle already been lost? Does it improve clarity to call it a "spectrum" and insist on using the "vector" definition?
(I've personally been using the phrase "collection of imperfectly correlated traits")
I think the word "spectrum" is reasonable, as it implies a broad range. Or it's analogous to the rainbow with a variety of colours.
But what people consistently misunderstand is that there is a fundamental dichotomy at the diagnostic level. Speaking from the perspective of the DSM, which I prefer because it's at least concrete and has medical relevance in North America, you meet the criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder ("on the spectrum") or you do not ("not on the spectrum").
In other words, the diagnostic criteria themselves do not constitute a spectrum, especially not a linear one. Maybe people are confusing this with the DSM's three levels of support needs.
I agree, the terminology is confusing. It is extra confusing because the intent is to capture both:
1. Different autistic people may vary in which symptoms are most severe while all still being autistic.
2. Different autistic people may vary in the overall severity of all symptoms and how much it impacts their quality of life. (At the same time, there is still a distinct cut off where you are not considered to have autism if it doesn't manifest significantly in your life.)
The latter point is why "Asperger's" is now simply lumped in with ASD. But that tends to obscure the former point which is also important.
Perhaps "cluster" would have been better, but here we are.
> If it's a spectrum, everyone is on it somewhere.
This is faulty logic. Just because it's a spectrum doesn't mean every single human is on the spectrum.
No, you're just heavily implying it and minimizing it. I'm telling you it's extremely insulting. You can take that for what it is or don't, I don't really care.
he's saying that the label Autism includes different traits that various people have or don't have. He's falsely using that semantic manipulation to imply that people use it as an excuse not to deal with the conplexities of life.
saying "that's insulting" doesn't impact his assertion. you have to meet their logic where it is to disagree. lucky this case was so easy.
No, I'm not using any tricks (or implications) to argue that people often use psychological diagnosis (self or otherwise) as an excuse not to deal with the complexities of life.
I'm arguing that directly and asserting that web sites like the one posted are exactly the kind of things that make it easy for people to do that because they are relatable to basically everybody.
Not disagreeing with the content of what you said. However, sometimes telling people they sound insulting (unintentionally) has its own value, outside of the logical debate-making about the content of what was said.
I can't speak for everyone, but for myself the scenarios in this simulator basically don't affect my life at all. Annoying radio ad, "That's annoying". People team requests my participation at some event, "No thanks". Don't want to go to work, "oh well". If someone suggested we get coffee I'd be excited. I've never even considered not taking meds I've been prescribed. Other things seem normal to me. I put on ANC headphones at my office job all the time.
While going through the simulator, I was shocked with the response to some choices and situations. I was not aware that these things were so disruptive to some people.
I don't consider myself autistic, but a lot of the situations in the game are familiar. That's an extreme version of me on a bad day. On a good day (enough food, sleep, etc) I can handle it, sometimes explicitly thinking about it, sometimes no action required.
> While going through the simulator, I was shocked with the response to some choices and situations. I was not aware that these things were so disruptive to some people.
Well, I guess the simulator did a good job spreading awareness that it is like that for some?
I have ADHD and while I'm medicated I cannot fathom some of the struggles or decisions that unmedicated me makes... like I struggle to have empathy for unmedicated me.
I imagine without such deep personal experience it would be much harder or impossible to understand or empathize.
The normal simulator is the negative space in this game. The people on the party committee. The networking event. Your mom who has called three times. Just imagine those activities boosting all of your stats.
> The people on the party committee. The networking event. Your mom who has called three times. Just imagine those activities boosting all of your stats.
It’s a problem when our definition of “normal” is the blended combination of every more outgoing and more successful person we see combined into one composite super-person.
Most people don’t do anything like a party committee. Most people don’t go to networking events and of those who do, many don’t network or socialize much. Most parents don’t call three times per day.
Yet it’s easy to see (or imagine) all of these behaviors and mentally blend them up into a composite idea of what “normal” means in a way that is far from average.
I see this a lot in students self-diagnosing with ADHD right now: Their mental model of “normal” is actually more like a 99th percentile studying and self-discipline machine, not a typical student. The way they describe “normal” or neurotypical people is more like superheroes with super abilities who have infinite motivation to study for 8 hours per day after cleaning their house to spotless precision and never touching their phone for a break. They have mentally erased the average person from their minds and replaced it with a hypothetical super person who doesn’t exist.
There are plenty of people who would not consider some or even all of those activities (depending on circumstances) enjoyable, most of them probably don't consider themselves autistic.
I disagree. I'm not autistic but pretty much everything in this simulator would stress me out to one degree or another.
I don't think that extreme is normal. Yes, there are people who take an energy boost and are never worried by situations you mention, but they are rare.
Those things stress me out. Am I not normal?
No. Joining party planning committees, socializing at networking events, and calling people multiple times are not things that the average person seeks out.
Cool take, well put.
I don’t think it would be possible, as a lot of what ASD people process consciously is processed subconsciously by neurotypical people (which contributes greatly to ASD burnout).
Something I’ve thought might be a helpful AI app, for a product like smart glasses or earbuds with integrated cameras, if it were possible, is a live nonverbal communication translator, to help with the cognitive load of ASD people, as cognitive empathy is often a performance issue socially.
I’ve seen a lot of criticism that using AI as a cognitive crutch is unhealthy, but the same argument could be made about mechanical advantages, beasts of burden, or machines, reducing humanity’s physical fitness. AI’s potential to be a cognitive force multiplier is its killer app.
Imagine having basically infinite social energy and no situation where you'd tend to react super negatively to socialization itself. But most things extra are very boring and you only live for things not related to your work.
Or that's how I imagine it at least
I don't have autism and it's nothing like that.
I highly doubt that describes the average neurotypical experience. Maybe an extreme one.
I don't have Autism, and none of those things apply to me.
What's 'normal' for me is pretty much the same thing, but without the intense reactions to the light and sound stimuli. And the rest generally toned down.
It’s pretty great. You don’t have to find ways to interject in conversation that you are on the spectrum like some weird ass non sequitur.
I played it a couple times and found that a lot of scenarios just didn't have an option for what I would actually want to do in real life. A few examples:
- One scenario had a team unboxing an espresso machine and making too much noice by using it, clinking cups and laughing. The options were to put on noise canceling headphones, find a different desk away from the noise, or just endure it. Personally I'd take a break and go join them, and I don't even like coffee.
- The scenario where the user is in a room with a PM and a couple other people debating the tone of copy on a website, and the conversation is meandering without clear turns (iirc): there were only options to essentially hurry the conversation along or not participate at all, but IRL I'd join in with the other three debating the tone and just generally be bullshitting/sidetracking/meandering the conversation because I like to talk to people.
- The scenario where somebody comes up and asks for a new feature without clear acceptance criteria: the options were to turn to the computer and type out acceptance criteria in front of the person (which feels passive aggressive to me); tell them you'll do it; or ask them to schedule time with you to hammer out the criteria. I would've just chatted with them right there about the feature they wanted, let them know that XYZ is what I think the acceptance criteria is at the end of the conversation, and if that's wrong they'd correct me.
Most of what you'd do is the last thing I'd want to do (I have autism). You don't say if you have autism or not, but going by what you just said I would guess not.
Woops! I should have clarified: I don't have autism.
Count yourself lucky. It's no fun on the autism train. Everyone has there issues, and I can only comment on my own experience, but it's thus far not been great.
The burn out due to unproductive meetings would probably be at a similar scale
Modify all the social interactions that subtract energy and instead have them add energy.
I'm not autistic and social interactions are incredibly energy draining for me. Granted I'm quite an introverted person, but not having autism doesn't mean you get pumped up from being around people.
"Since you've decided to not disclose your autism at work, you'll be raw dogging it today and every other day. This seems marginally better than the alternative of being potentially passed over for promtotions or raises."
I was passed over without disclosure. When I did disclose, they tried to fire me. It would be great if they add a feature where you're told for a decade by peers, leads, and managers that you're at the next level, but never actually get there. Then they try firing you while the internal interviews give feedback about how you're likely overqualified for roles at your level. How's your mental health doing after that? The game should add a part about wanting to get hit by a bus during your commute so you cana avoid the torture.
It's extra fun when you manage to get positive feedback from colleagues and hit all your concrete performance expectations, but then at review time you still get poor marks because it's a stack ranking system, so, as far as your manager is concerned, there was never a realistic option to give one of the limited supply of good scores to you instead of one of the people who have enough spoons left at the end of the work day to permit some enthusiasm for the quarterly optional-but-actually-mandatory after-hours team Whirlyball outing.
Stack ranking has got to be one of the dumbest and most toxic ideas in tech.
Pitting teammates against each other like that? It's a guaranteed way to kill off mentoring, knowledge sharing, and any real sense of collaboration.
> Stack ranking has got to be one of the dumbest and most toxic ideas in tech.
Not just tech, but business in general.
@giantg2 dude I feel you. I've never disclosed but I've heard about people being retaliated against for doing so over the years.
I wish I could have added this story knot. I'll open source it soon and you'll see how crufty dealing with inkle is https://www.inklestudios.com/ in JS. Credit to the folks working on inkle but something like this is pushing the tech beyond what it says on the tin.
Non-autistic people also get this. It's in your salarypayer's best interest to keep you thinking you're on the precipice of getting a raise (so you work harder), but without actually giving you one (so they don't have to pay up). This is just ordinary capitalist paperclip-maximization, and we need way more people to realize their employers are not their friends, and it's a simple exchange of money for work where at least one party employs people whose entire job is to shift the exchange rate in their favour while convincing you they aren't.
wanna say you are right. maybe the impact is different on neurodivergent, thats hard to have hard data on. HRs job is litterally to use a certain budget to fit all the ppl in, thats why they never give a raise if you dont ask, unless they need to give it to cover other risks (retention).
best lesson for me was an HR manager explaining it to me, after finally after 3 years i asked pretty please to give a lil raise, i was still trainee after all that time.
he smiled and said he thought id never ask. made me senior on the department matching my input. and told me this exact fact. He said, why should i give you a raise if you seem happy where ur at? never complain, never ask, never get.
its harsh but its good to understand certain hashness. Then you can work around it, step over that bridge, and be more active in tracking your input, their expectations, and showing them the mismatch deservant of a raise or promotion.
its often peoples shyness or false expectations that get them in such a situation where they feel very under valued. they are because they under value themselves or dont know how to translate/express their value to another persons perspective. another harsh truth. Especially if you are neurodivergent, the way you see things and another is further apart, so your words need to do more to reconcile that difference to generate mutual understanding.
in an ideal world this would not happen or be needed, ofcourse. but we dont live in an ideal world, and there is no switch to flip to make it an ideal world.
It might be experienced by non-disabled people, but I would say it disproportionately affects people with autism. Promotions are political and most people on the spectrum are at a disadvantage in the political realm due to the way ASD tends to affect social behavior etc. I've seen everyone other dev that joined around my time is at least 1-2 levels further than me. We can see these impacts in data for things like disability pay gap research.
That's a Manichean perspective that probably applies in a lot of workplaces, but definitely doesn't uniformly apply to competitive software jobs. In a competitive software shop, your employer is probably motivated more by retention, churn, and motivation concerns than they are over whether they can hold on to the extra comp money it would cost to raise your level. Losing a performing developer is very expensive.
I don't doubt at all that a lot of software developers have had the experience you describe, but when you describe it as intrinsic to the economics of commercial software development, I think you're bound to end up in some weird places.
But practically every "competitive" software job uses stack ranking that's mostly centered on an individual team or a few teams where 20% of the people have to be given a bad rating regardless of objective performance.
I think stack ranking sucks ass and I agree that it's prevalent but even stack ranking isn't well-modeled by an executive team looking to squeeze every penny out of each employee. Some of the most notorious stack rankers also have some of the most notoriously generous comp packages.
I'm not seeing TC having gone up over the last 7-8 years with those "notoriously generous comp packages" places. Your typical senior eng at FAANG is still getting $350-450k/yr TC. Yet, inflation has changed a lot and the stocks at these companies have skyrocketed. They're only raising the bar in terms of competition for employees to stick with the company and not with their compensation.
I lose interest in salary equity discussions when the entire range we're discussing is more than I currently make. :)
I've been rate-limited for comments far more useful than this one.
The difference, I think, is that non-autistic people aren't as inclined to believe the same lie when it's told over and over for years.
my personal experience is this is usually something i see well meaning religious people caught up in. when ive met autistic people in similar situations they have been vocally agitated and frustrated by it, which i would say is the first step in learning to work around it
Blue collar workers have understood this for a long time, and even occasionally took up arms against their employers. It's the white collar folks who are just starting to figure this out.
This is an "all lives matter" flavor of comment. Discussing difficulties that autistic folks often have, which are usually exacerbated by autistic traits and struggles but not caused by autism, does not mean nobody else has those troubles.
But it's common and extremely frustrating for anyone neurodivergent to be told "but everyone feels that way" whenever they discuss any of their issues.
> This is just ordinary capitalist paperclip-maximization, and we need way more people to realize their employers are not their friends
But I've repeatedly told over the years by clever libertarian software engineers that I don't need a union because it's better to just go to the boss with your concerns, instead of making things so adversarial.
Nice game, but indeed simplified. Did not make it to day 2. Autism is a huge spectrum. I have a family member who needs constant care in a facility because he will try and destroy everything he does not like, but also another one who has light Asperger’s syndrome and functions like society would like him to be as long as you respect his social capabilities. As with most mental things, because people can’t see or sense it, they don’t understand and it gets very very difficult to even acknowledge or respect it.
I think this clip of Man of Steel did a very good job of showing how Autistic people get bombarded with sensory information. There are comments under the video claiming that this mirrors their experience.
Man of Steel - The World's Too Big, Mom
https://youtu.be/VcdFURryKjA
Zack Snyder described perfectly the ADHD/ Autistic experience growing up in one single scene. Intentionally or not. This movie made me feel less alone in this world. Superman helped me realize that wasn't a freak. I just perceived the world differently. Thank you Zack. I will forever be grateful for Man of Steel for many years to come
> As with most mental things, because people can’t see or sense it, they don’t understand and it gets very very difficult to even acknowledge or respect it.
Compounding this issue is the fact that people often refuse to accept that a mental thing is actually a physiological thing, albeit harder to fix because it’s currently poorly understood. People’s mental models of brain-related conditions often create a separation of the person from their physical self, either due to some subconscious or conscious belief in a metaphysical representation of the condition.
This may be incredibly offensive, but how big could a potential overlap be between ADHD and autism?
Pretty big. The key word is "comorbidity"; having one of them means you are more likely to have the other than a random person.
There's also an overlap in traits.
I'm AuDHD (autism + ADHD). You can read about my ADHD side if the experience (with memes!) here:
https://romankogan.net/adhd
What a weird word for things that are non-lethal. Why don't they just call it correlation?
"morbus" also means disease, not just death.
Neither autism nor ADHD are diseases.
It's not clear how distinctive a lot of mental health conditions are. For the most part we're just making up labels for groups of signs and symptoms, after all. To the extent the labels are "real" things mostly rests in their utility—I mean, that's sort of true of all labels for everything (what's a chair?) but these are far more fluid than most.
It could be that autism really is, exactly as we describe it and conceive of it, in some meaningful way defined by actual reality, a thing.
It could be that it's ten different things that aren't actually connected at all, but happen to look kinda similar. Some of which either are a variant of ADHD (or vice-versa, doesn't much matter) or just happen to include similar symptoms and behaviors that respond well to the same drugs and therapies we use to tread ADHD.
(now, to some degree we do have real tests we can do to pick up e.g. genetic markers of certain disorders, but these largely remain just another clue, not exactly solid proof, with some exceptions)
To illustrate: imagine we couldn't ever see the inside of a human body and just had to guess at what was going on when something went wrong. We'd probably have something we just called "bad kidney" that was actually several different problems, and we'd just throw drugs and other therapies at it until (often, but not always) some set of those relieved the symptoms. Meanwhile, sometimes it's a kidney stone, sometimes it's cancer, et c. And maybe we even have a whole step that's trying to figure out if it's "bad kidney" or "bad bladder" and sometimes we'd get that right, but sometimes wrong, but also some of the same medicines work for either (depending on the actual cause) so we might incorrectly diagnose "bad kidney" then accidentally correctly treat "bad bladder", and think we were right all along.
> how big could a potential overlap be between ADHD and autism?
The lack of executive function is overlapping, but this particular post might be more of an ADHD simulator.
The very first "Follow the morning routine" or not is where this veers off my experience of the spectrum.
"Changing plans because of situations internal or external" is hard.
The option should've been "Spend 20 minutes making eggs again, because the yolks weren't the right kind of runny", miss the train, take a cab to work, but tell the driver that you've now got a system for eggs which you didn't have today (yeah, fun fact, the recipe was off because they don't refrigerate them over in France).
There seems to be a prevalent pop psych view that a bunch of these conditions (Autism, ADHD, Anxiety-Depression, OCD) are sort of clustered together and people who manifest one will often manifest symptoms of others. It gets muddier because a lot of these conditions are understood as spectrums and different people who identify with them may manifest them in vastly different ways. I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.
> prevalent pop psych view
It's called comorbidities. It's very common in mental health conditions.
>pop psych
It is not "pop-psych", it is reality.
These are just labels we apply to buckets of symptoms. The underlying problems and biological differences that can cause these buckets of symptoms probably will be found, and then we can re-categorize things quite a bit. My bet is we do this within the next couple decades.
What causes difficulty is that actual symptoms of one of these buckets can cause behaviors and coping strategies that look like other ones.
Another issue is that these symptoms are not specific. What one neurodivergent person means by "I have sensory issues" is vastly different from another neurodivergent person, and your psych health provider will dig into those specifics and try and tease out which label fits the best, or whether it's even an example of that symptom. How those symptoms affect you is the entire point.
>I'm still hesitant that "autism" these days may describe either someone who's completely nonverbal and living in assisted living, or someone who's a successful academic/engineer/entrepreneur.
And you have that same feeling towards "blind" or "deaf" right? Since a lot of blind people struggle to lead "normal" lives but there are accomplished blind software devs right here on HN
Consider how many people live life with some sort of mild delusion and yet are perfectly functional 99% of the time. The brain is complicated and cannot ever be reduced to single dimensions like that, and it is weirdly good at still functioning when part of it is broken in some way, like with Broca's area or Phineas Gage.
Yes, "syndrome" and "disorder" are vague labels that don't have hard cutoffs or any test you can objectively run. That's the point of those words. When you have a hard test you can run, it becomes a "disease".
I also wonder if we kinda screwed ourselves by expanding pre-existing labels for disorders that appeared similar, instead of using a mixin pattern of describing the spectrum. So you could have a Photosensitivity and Social Inertness "Disorder" instead of people constantly debating whether your combination of symptoms is "bad enough" to be called Autism.
With Autism, as noted elsewhere in this thread, a general social understanding of it is required to help normalize environments that don't exclude autistic people. Having specific labels could, on the one hand, help bring focus towards the specific needs of those people. On the other hand, it's harder to convince people of a 100 different neurodiverse profiles than one...
Honestly it's difficult to expect people to communicate all the things in the bucket that might apply to them. Naming the bucket is easier for a lot of purposes.
I get that. On the other hand, by making the buckets smaller, you're forced to specify the corresponding phenomena a lot more. Which might actually help people understand what applies and what doesn't, better. Understanding something is pretty much a prerequisite to communicating it.
EDIT: I misread your comment earlier, ignore the above paragraph. I definitely get how exhausting it might be to list off everything. I suppose I feel the Autism label is too big at the moment to communicate effectively though. See the following, I think it still applies.
It also helps people on the other end. If someone says they have "Misophonia, Aural sensitivity, and Rejection Sensitivity" I would understand a lot more about their situation than if they simply said they're mildly Autistic.
The diagnostic criteria and symptoms have substantial overlap, ultimately everything in the DSM is a descriptive diagnosis not based on a mechanistic understanding of neurobiology so it's VERY likely that our categories don't map 1:1 to the underlying causes.
One is impulsive, the other requires structure. The two are not mutually exclusive though, because both conditions are pretty diverse. AuDHD is a term used to describe people with both.
This is a massive oversimplification of both autism and ADHD which approaches uselessness. Impulsivity is one possible symptom of ADHD, but doesn't even begin to describe the experience, and by itself paints an incorrect picture of the experience. Same for autism and structure. I know plenty of people with autism who absolutely do not deal in structure.
I know it feels nice to be able to craft a simple narrative, but this narrative feels more harmful and misconstrued than useful.
I have autism and have a lot of trouble with routine and rigid timelines. But I also have ADHD, so I suspect there is some internal struggle there. I want to have routine for a lot of things, I just can’t seem to make it happen.
I've seen Twitter use "AuDHD" for the intersection. It's big enough to have its own label and subgroup who identify with it.
Not offensive at all, in fact there's a massive overlap. See the chart at https://neurodivergentinsights.com/adhd-vs-autism/
Significant enough that the DSM-iV recognized ADHD symptoms as symptoms of autism and didn't allow a comorbid diagnosis of both conditions because of this. (The DSM-V does recognize both as possibly occurring together.)
Not at all - the stat I've heard is that 30-50% of autistics also have ADHD
> Energy Burnout: You collapse at your desk [...] HR schedules a 'wellness check' but the writing is on the wall. You're fired. Congratulations! You've successfully burned out in record time. The HR department will be in touch about your "performance improvement plan."
To be fair, this doesn't scream autism, it screams abusive employer. Given the workday that was described, I'd have been out of energy too.
If anything, if you've disclosed autism as a disability, it would be harder for them to fire you, especially if they failed to provide "reasonable adjustments".
Reminds me of the the old quote: "before you diagnose yourself with depression, make sure you're not in fact surrounded by assholes".
If there isn't a way to get pass more than a few days, regardless of any choices made, the one lesson simulator is giving is "there's no way an autistic developer can last a few days without burning out". Or from a coworker's perspective: "my coworker is struggling, but there's nothing I can do to prevent burn out in my coworker".
Perhaps tune the choices, and the effects to have a net neutral bonus and penalties to have a longer gameplay loop. Having random weights to the actions might work as well.
not autistic but i also mask like crazy at work. my experience is its the default mode in consulting
the first 2 years i had a sense that i needed to read between the lines in many conversations and asking for clarity on topics of budget, clients, and contracts was not done. to be clear: asking for details on requirements is completely normal and encouraged
ive become competent at compartmentalizing after 5 years. ive offered unsolicited advice to my less socially aware coworkers which only lead to more confusion as they had not noticed things said "between the lines" and have almost no interest in clients
i cant imagine having to mask through day-to-day life and a job which demands masking by people without disability. no wonder i didnt make it to dinner in the sim
Choosing autism speaks as a place for support and advocacy is an interested and, in my opinion, a short-sighted choice. They don't hold a strong track record or convey an image of trust towards the ND community. Even when they tried to improve their brand image, their funding mostly going into advertisement and their current choices such as comparing Autism to Cancer and stating that it is a hopeless condition (At least changing away from the autism is curable stance they had) are less than ideal.
I got home, chose to call my mom and then immediately got fired at work because I had run out of masking points :(
If you've met on autistic person you have met exactly on autistic person.
this is a fun idea and I like it. You're experience wont be the same as my.
Maybe I'm not supposed to get it, since I'm not autistic, but why does turning off the radio with an annoying sound reduce energy? From my perspective, I can't find any logical correlation between the choices made and the outcomes.
Seems like turning off the annoying sound would be a good thing. This, unfortunately, just makes autism seem inscrutable and something I will just never understand.
It is mental effort to have to recognize what is triggering you and to take positive action to fix it. The radio is more symbolic of having to do it 40 times a day across all the things you find triggering, or having to find ways to live your life outside common neurotypical ways that take more energy. For example, finding dishes clinking to be really triggering means I have to use ear protection to unload the dishwasher, and if I can’t find ear protection that I have to spend time looking around for it, and now dishes have taken me 3 minutes longer than it would someone else. Over a dozen instances a day of something like this adds up
Game just _assumes_ you drink coffee. That's a big decision, and I'd say coffee wears you down at least as much as everything else on the long run. Sure, short-term effects can be good, same as alcohol.
Seriously. Skip coffee.
Moderate consumption of coffee is fine. I'm not aware of any severe damage from drinking a cup a day. I don't think the comparison with alcohol is apt.
Not for everybody on the spectrum. I certainly see the difference if I go a week with coffee and no coffee -- the weardown and overwhelming effects slowly accumulate with coffee.
If the author feels overwhelmed, I'd say coffee should be tried first. It's not easy (caffeine addiction is real, especially for the spectrum), but it gets easier and easier with time.
Amazing. Loved the ADHD interruption with the wikipedia page, spot on, and hilarious
Really appreciate the effort you put into this and being vulnerable sharing your own personal experience so openly with us
Thank you
Have you heard of Depression Quest? It's a very similar idea: a text adventure about managing depression.
It faced some controversy in its day. Do you think now is a better time for games like this?
I must have vaguely remembered it. I knew I had seen this idea before with some other thing but couldn't place it. What was the controversy?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate
I like the bit about the rattling hvac or whatever. Years ago before I knew I was on the spectrum, the A/C system in the office I worked at was noisy (to me), and barely worked in the summer. Nobody seemed to notice or care.
The noise was distracting to me so to complained, after a long while they eventually got someone in... but they just put in a really noisy fan in the office close'ish to our desk. They didn't fix it the extra fan did nothing, it couldn't pull more air then it was given.. obv.. so then I had even more noise and the A/C system still didn't work.
I gave up trying to get it improved, and worked with headphones most of the time. No one else finds it an issue.
At the end of the day when staying late and the A/C systems turns off, I can feel a huge load lifted of my shoulders, and I can think much clearer.
Also the lights are horrible, if I'm working alone in the weekend I'll leave them off, it's so much nicer, less harsh. But again I seem the only one who noticed and is affected by it.
I eventually got so burnt out, crashed and quit... have been unemployed for... many many years now. Hard to say why I couldn't another job. I think maybe PTSD of my (first) and last experience, along with intense anxiety to just start. (interviewing is a painful experience, not only do I have to answer and ask questions, but need to fake eye contact, make small talk etc, all to get a job I'll probably have to bail out of.
I've tried to do some self-employed stuff, but nothing has given much income. (living with parents, I feel terrible about it, but no idea how to escape my living hell)
The back-to-back Robert Caro mention and unskippable ADHD Wikipedia popup hit too close to home.
Now I'm wondering how far on the spectrum Robert Moses was.
We might be best friends.
It's easy to get Energy or Masking to 0, but no matter what I tried I can't have the game end by getting Competence or Relationships to 0. Is it possible at all? I'm just curious what the ending texts will be for those...
Even when clicking responses that seem like they should make relationship go down and energy up, like giving a minimal response, instead it makes energy go down a lot and relationships go up.
Love the aesthetics of this. Very cool. Love that its a game for web and just a really interesting choose your own adventure deal.
As for the game itself, it seems a bit punishing / too pessimistic? I don't want to be insensitive but I don't think my choices would lead my character, who was maintaining a full time job for this long, to collapse at their desk midday and be fired.
HN’s response: “As someone neurotypical, I think this is completely wrong”
Honestly I appreciated the one comment from someone with autism and everyone else complaining just seems like they think they know everything. One commenter even called it whiney!
Do you honestly think in the future, Gen Z and Alpha have demonstrated any willingness continue the childish "neurotypical" LARP?
This was awesome, mainly because the paths I could choose were real things I might do. So relevant to my life. And I’m not taking the stats too seriously as it seems so many others are, which is almost comical given the topic. Thank you!
I chose to skip breakfast. I am never hungry in the morning. I almost never have breakfast. I eat "late" the night before, like around 8-10 pm. Maybe that's bad? IDK.
While the topic is eating, I hate lunch around noon on a workday because it disables my higher brain functions for a couple of hours. It is almost mandatory however because what else am I supposed to use that mandatory break for? Just vegging out? That's pointless. I'm not working construction, I don't need to rest my body, I'm doing screen work. What I need is them not riding my back about how I'm not always laser focused on the BS they have us do. My brain decides when I need to put work aside and think about things that aren't such tedium.
Wow fired on the second prompt...
"Energy Burnout: You collapse at your desk, your body desperately trying to atone for days of fragmented sleep. As the waves of deep, restorative, dreamless sleep wash over you, you're roused by a gentle shake. It's 2AM and security has found you asleep at your desk. HR schedules a 'wellness check' but the writing is on the wall. You're fired. Congratulations! You've successfully burned out in record time. The HR department will be in touch about your "performance improvement plan."
I survived one day. Feels accurate. I don't get why there are so many serious comments around this game. Its not rocket science. We often make fun of autism in the team, its just a nice way to chew the fat in the modern workplace.
This was great and a really unique idea. In thinking about sharing it with people who don't have a dev background, changing some of the situational descriptions could be helpful: "vendor kickoff", "standup", etc
This is one audiovisual representation of Autism that some of us can relate to.
https://psyche.co/videos/enter-the-sensory-world-of-an-overs...
Bro, I'm not autistic, but 99% events in this game would trigger me even more than in your game.
Eg.: party near my desk (near my office, even in my office) I will personally cancel their "party", or message each of their bosses etc.
I think, the best thing you can do is to don't care about anybody, "I'm (we're) here to work, if you're not here to work then GTFO".
"Let's have camera's on"...ehm no thanks ;-) etc.
I'm still polite though, I would say highly polite, but if anyone behaves like an idiot, then they will have a problem with me.
Is really being autistic, meaning you take shit from other people all the time? I'm not sure.
This is actually a huge part of "getting better" as an autistic. A large amount of this masking is a trauma response from childhood when authority figures were a threat and not understandable so you pretend and "mask" and appease.
But once you are older and able to sieze your own power and set your own boundaries? The healthiest high functioning autist I know share this "don't give a fuck " attitude.
Very sad for the hell lower functioning ones must live in... Almost like the horror stories of locked in comas.
I mean they say it's a spectrum.
Maybe you are just not diagnosed LOL
Sad that autism has become such a trend. I have a niece on the spectrum and it was obvious at a very young age luckily she is more high functioning now via years of therapy.
No one wants to hear it but there is a vast difference between those on the spectrum and those not. I am in tech and i have never met anyone autistic. This is because the sad reality is that autism makes it that hard to hold down a job even if high functioning.
It is grossly over exaggerated by many and used as an excuse. This is not saying anyone here does that but in media it is extremely common. This only makes it harder for those who do suffer from it. The majority of autism stereotypes are almost all on the high functioning side. Closer to the low functioning side, it is very sad.
People are tired of being forced to do bullshit meaningless or net negative stuff, obey people they don't respect on a deeper level etc. People live in a way like captive animals in a zoo. Everything is urgent, the sky is falling, but all behind a glass screen.
But the only vocabulary they have to express all this is therapy speak and mental health. So everyone has ADHD, autism, PTSD, anxiety, depression, bipolar and more. When it's often actually a lack of purpose, a lack of enduring value, being a standardized cog in a machine, ripped of context and roots, atomized, etc. But this is not valid vocabulary, we are modern people, we have chemical imbalances and not nonsense medieval concepts. Medical labels still have power even in a lifeless bureaucratic corporate HR hellscape. Medical diagnoses and credible claims of unsafe work environments. Anything else, they sleep. These two and they listen.
> we have chemical imbalances and not nonsense medieval concepts
That is not how the brain works. The whole chemical imbalances thing is a gross over-simplification. Honestly how it is used in pop science is often very analogues to the medieval theory of Humorism.
> When it's often actually a lack of purpose, a lack of enduring value, being a standardized cog in a machine
If you are subjected to an toxic environment it is a very healthy and good reaction to be unhappy about this.
Yes, psychologist mostly focus on the individual. That is their job. They can't fix unemployment, alienation of labor and so on. Those are societal issues that need political solutions.
However, this does not mean ADHD, autism, PTSD and so on are not real issues.
If I lived in a perfect utopia, I would still have ADHD. If ADHD were made up, why do my genetic children also have a 40% chance of having ADHD? Why would that not be true if I adopted someone?
These are real and disabling things that need specific treatment.
I agree with most of this. Though it gets really conceptually murky what a mental illness is and the DSM diagnosis checklists are quite different from how diagnoses work in "body"-medicine. The psychiatrist blogger Scott Alexander has written a lot about this.
For the common person, psychology and therapy are a new skin on spiritual guidance, shamanism, or rituals like Catholic confession.
> That is not how the brain works. The whole chemical imbalances thing is a gross over-simplification
I know and I was implying disagreement by the placement of that sentence in the context. I was trying to present what the common notion is. If it's a chemical imbalance, it can't be your fault. We trust science, we are physicalists. It has to be imagined as some miswiring or chemical problem for it to be respectable and taken seriously.
> If I lived in a perfect utopia, I would still have ADHD. If ADHD were made up, why do my genetic children also have a 40% chance of having ADHD? Why would that not be true if I adopted someone?
Personality and temperament differences exist yes. What we decide to label as a disease diagnosis is an entirely orthogonal question. ADHD is often diagnosed in rigid school environments that look nothing like homo sapiens' evolved natural habitat. It's not necessarily a disease not to flourish there. Yes I understand that given the environment, it makes sense to try to help as best as we can, and we can't single-handedly change society with a magic wand. Of course.
Ok, I slightly misunderstood and I see now better where you are coming from.
Yes, you are not wrong but as a ADHD person it comes off as super invalidating.
It is kind of like discussions where gender radical people tell to trans people that gender is just a social construct. Like it is but that doesn't exactly help trans people.
I mean I am sure you recognize this as you wrote.
> Yes I understand that given the environment, it makes sense to try to help as best as we can, and we can't single-handedly change society with a magic wand. Of course.
Still, I do believe that you massively overstate socially constructed aspect of having ADHD and underestimate the physical reality of it.
Yes, my environment makes a huge huge difference. But, as someone who was diagnosed very late in life, it was always with me. Even when I was alone. Even when I thrived. It is a fundamental part of who I am.
Not having a diagnosis earlier set up for constant spirals of failure, for internalized self hate. It did not allow me to find strategies to cope effectively.
I couldn't find or build the environment I needed because I didn't know my needs. This is why the diagnosis must come first.
ADHD is a disability and it is a real as being deaf or not being able to walk.
> it comes off as super invalidating.
Once this is on the table, it's hard answer in a way that doesn't come across as being the asshole. But that's kind of my point. People tie identities and emotions to labels. It reframes how people react. Since it's real, you're given support. If it were fake, you'd get scolded. The shift in view that I got from Scott Alexander is that the arrow points the other way around. Since we see people who can benefit from some support, and we generally don't want to be assholes and want the support to be paid by insurance etc, we have to declare the thing as a Disease(TM). But this categorization is in good part necessary due to the bureaucratic system we live in. There are many ways that societies have conceptualized such things. All the way to demon possession. In comparison blindness is much easier to understand mechanistically.
No. Knowing that I have ADHD is something that would benefit me even if I spend the rest of my life on a remote island with no human contact. Yes it is as real as blindness.
> But the only vocabulary they have to express all this is therapy speak
What? I deal with all of that and more at work, and I just roll my eyes (to myself) and think "it's a paycheck."
If you're lucky you might find a sense of purpose and value at work but it's not really normal from what I've experienced. Even if you like the people you work with, the job itself is probably mostly bullshit. The only jobs I've had that weren't were the jobs that had very standardized tasks: making burgers, framing walls, painting, cutting grass. There's not much bullshit in those jobs because it's very clear what you are there to do. And you can turn around at the end of the day and look at the wall you built. That doesn't mean you might not feel like a cog in a machine.
IMO most people should find purpose and value outside of work. Work is just how you pay for those things.
Nice game this is all i can say
Thank you so much!
I swear I went home from work but then got fired from my job for falling asleep at my desk. I don't understand what happened. (And even if I did fall asleep at my desk, who fires an employee for falling asleep once?)
> who fires an employee for falling asleep once?
Happened to my grandfather even though he was probably the best damned cab driver in all of Michigan.
When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather.
Not screaming in terror, like the passengers in his car.
I will never forget my grandpa's last words.
> Stop shaking the god damn ladder you little shit!
> best damned cab driver
Did he fall asleep at the wheel, while driving? I can see that being a fireable offense.
New screen for the game:
>> Someone posts an old joke on Hacker News
>> You interpret it literally.
> be me
> see old joke
> attempt to make ND meta joke
> see allistics not get it
This is getting too meta for me.
I see you
Bummer - this has been the hardest code I've ever had to write test coverage for. I'm using https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/ for the story routing with inkjs so I'm not surprised that there are some lingering weird-paths.
I don't have an official diagnosis, but I have markers for ADHD and Autism as suggested by a professional. It's quite expensive to pursue these as an adult, so I haven't done it yet.
That being said, I found several of these situations triggering. I am definitely a high masking ND, so I can deal with much more than what this game allows.
40 y/o. Often skips breakfast. Puts in AirPods on noise-cancellation mode with nothing playing. Wakes up at 2am with a song repeating in my head making it so I can't sleep.
Is it possible to even make it through day 2?
Maybe if you're very careful but probably not.
There are point diffs on your stats each turn. The positive diffs are always the same for the same choices regardless of day.
The negative choices have an additional 25% added to them each day, so -10 the first day for a choice would be -12 (floor) the second day, -15 the third day, etc.
Staying in home office is not possible? Then you should really switch your employer, especially if you think your on the spectrum. It is not 201x anymore.
Yeah the modern workplace is a nightmare for me with all the get togethers and reasons to be forcefully happy about everything. I functioned reasonably well in places without all those shenanigans and the ability to work quietly. Or where they just happen once a year or something. Remote was a true game changer but it's not the same.
Also I wonder about the meds part, I haven't been prescribed any despite getting a diagnosis
But generally a cool idea, I like the graphics and how the energy inevitably goes down. I think it's more of a US office experience though
ok, I went through it as a relatively normal software engineer (though i certainly can empathize with a lot of on-the-spectrum behavior in kind if not in intensity) - I have 3 takeaways.
1. Things that I brush off or bounce back from have a cumulative effect that leaves some autistic people 'in the red'. It affects them and sticks with them more than it does to me.
2. Options that are not at all realistic or sensible to me like 'not taking meds' - i would never consider skipping a prescription. several cases offered responding with formal processes and complaints that are wildly inappropriate for the offense. Are you showing that to an autistic person these terrible choices somehow seem to be viable?
3. This sample environment is over-the-top with caricatures of the worst sort of job activities populated by judgemental and sneering villains. Are you trying to show that to an autistic person they only see a day full of the very worst things - that they fixate on these problems and don't put them in context with the rest of the experience?
An uncharitable person could take away that autistic people are fragile, make poor choices, and only see the worst in the people around them.
Maybe this was more meant as a comic rant that autistic people could enjoy as a parody of their shared experiences? I'm not actually sure this is accomplishing what you want.
Question: are there any good resources out there for leading those that are neurodivergent? I haven't led anyone that's neurodiverent yet but it's something I think alot about.
Great question - been hoping people reply to this comment with resources.
I’ve learned so much, and it took only a few minutes. What a treat.
I had no idea about masking, even though I’ve been doing it for as long as I remember being alive. Aaaah, it’s so draining. When I was younger (in my 20s) I used to think there’d come a time when I’d finally come out of my shell. I’m pushing 40 now, but the shell is only thicker, the cave deeper, the walls taller. Instead of dreaming that one day I’ll be “like everyone else”, I’m contemplating the day I’ll cease to exist. Funny.
Please talk to someone about it. Living with autism doesn't have to be horrible. Even if you can't change everything to fit right now you can always take small steps in the right direction. Eventually those steps add up to a better life.
This game is going to make some people commit suicide because it's rigged such that you always lose.
Reality is not so simple. There are always ways you can change your life or your job that don't require you to hurt yourself.
You should think more deeply before publishing something like this
Fun fact, everyone IRL loses the game, eventually.
Continuity bug: I was done with work, back at home, decided to call mom back - and then fell asleep at the office desk?!
This is a fun way to try and experience for just a second what it is like to be on the spectrum. I think a lot more people are (including myself) than people even realize. It can really effect our sense of normal and how we go about our day. thanks for making this!
Eh, this just feels like "software engineering simulator." I don't have autism but a good bit of this feels familiar (am I on the spectrum?) I'm an introvert and have struggled to cope with corporate work for a while.
What helps:
- Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful. If masking is a recipe for burnout, then it actually seems like it's a strategy that will lower your chance for success. How much of the need here is self-imposed?
- Owning your calendar and timing for meetings to better suit your energy.
- Regular therapy and reflection, honestly.
- Regular exercise, doesn't matter who you are or what form, this is essential.
I can respect that this "simulation" fosters empathy, but worry that it also awfulizes/catastrophizes solvable problems. Figuring out functional routines and managing burnout is just as big a part of the job as writing code. It's very much a personal responsibility, maybe not in the job description, maybe harder for some than others, but it is our responsibility.
Heck, this isn’t even specific to software engineering. It’s basically just a “getting through the workday” simulator. I think there are a great many people who find working in an office exhausting. Personally, I was so much happier once I switched to remote work.
> Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful... How much of the need here is self-imposed?
Autistic people don't come into the world as fully formed adults with irrational ideas about the need to mask. They start off as children and attempt to socialize with other children. The autistic child in a neurotypical world just "being themselves" finds themselves repeatedly kicked out of friend groups and rejected by everyone sometimes including by their parents. This is deeply traumatic to a young child's psyche. Unloved and rejected, a solution appears! I'll just pretend to be like the other kids, even though they're stupid and wrong. They may actually objectively be stupid, but apparently they don't like being told that to their face. Pile on another decade or two of this, and hey, this child, now older and wiser, has autistic masking tendencies that cause them to burn out. Blame the now-adult person with autism all you want to absolve yourself of a need to concern yourself with other people's problems, but that's not actually helpful for those people suffering from autistic burnout.
Not the angle I'm coming at it from.
I mask as a coping mechanism for ADHD and Social Anxiety. This masking causes me harm. I learned it in the way you describe.
The most helpful learning I've gotten through years of therapy has been to: (1) recognize what I'm doing (2) not beat myself up about it (3) try small steps to change my behavior so that I can feel good about it.
I'm the only person who can unlearn this for myself. I don't blame anyone who masks, and have nothing but empathy for the experience, but I'm proposing they can find a different way.
We'd need to have a rigorous definition on what it means to mask, and to agree on which behaviors should be considered masking, and which are simply being socialized, and what's necessary to exist in a society and what's not, before we could have a detailed productive conversation.
Therapy absolutely helps. Unlearning maladaptive behaviors rooted in childhood trauma is part of being a well-adjusted adult.
It takes energy to not do every impulsive thing that comes to mind. Fine, don't call it masking to not give into them. Whatever you want to call it though, it's exhausting.
What's the different way?
> Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful. If masking is a recipe for burnout, then it actually seems like it's a strategy that will lower your chance for success. How much of the need here is self-imposed?
Masking is not always conscious, in fact it's largely unconscious. So many autistic people will go through their day around neurotypical people and feel burnt out by lunch and have no idea why. They don't necessarily realize they're burning tons of mental effort just talking to people or dealing with stimuli.
Autistic people learn to mask just to get by day to day. It's not like they got issued a "How to be Autistic: Masking for Success" guide book when they were born.
Absolutely agree with this.
I still think it's important to (1) notice what's causing the problem, bring it into consciousness (2) understand the behavior (in this case: masking) and reckon with it if if's causing a bad outcome (burnout.)
Easier said than done. For me, therapy has been life-changing for helping me notice and understand unintentional behaviors.
Isn't that just being introverted? Also, if it's unconscious then a "simulator" shouldn't present an option. The PC should simply react automatically to the detriment of some stat. It sounds like for something to qualify as "masking" it must be a conscious choice, otherwise it's some other thing.
> It's very much a personal responsibility, maybe not in the job description, maybe harder for some than others, but it is our responsibility.
You might as well be telling a wheelchair-bound person that it's their responsibility to find a way up a flight of stairs or maneuver a cramped bathroom stall.
The reason it's called a "spectrum" is that everyone's on it. :)
Eh. No not really. There is a threshold to even be considered on the spectrum.
Most people have 2 legs and 2 arms. Some people don't (birth defects, injuries, accidents, disease, etc). There is a spectrum of missing appendages, but to say everyone is missing at least part of an appendage is not correct.
This is currently how autism is viewed.
Ok, I'll bite. What's that threshold to be considered "on the spectrum"? Is there a threshold on the other end? If so, what is that? My point is that everybody exhibits some of the symptoms typically associated with autism or Asberger's. For example: getting exhausted from being around people; sensory overload; pattern-finding in everything. It differs for each person. I frequently look for visual patterns around me, and it's satisfying to find one. Does that put me "on the spectrum"? Some sounds make me cringe. What about that? How many do there have to be? The whole reason it's called a "spectrum" is that there is no one thing that can define it.
DSM-5 is the current standard for diagnosing and classifying mental health conditions. I don't have the direct quote from the book handy, but I believe this guide from Stanford is accurate: https://med.stanford.edu/content/dam/sm/neonatology/document...
Essentially, there's a collection of behaviors you need to exhibit to be considered autistic. Then, the "spectrum" part is the severity of those behaviors.
Where are gamma waves on the visible light spectrum? It's a spectrum, which means everything is on it!
"Visible light" is just a moniker assigned to a subset of the electromagnetic spectrum. Gamma waves are on the spectrum, orange is on the spectrum, infrared is on the spectrum.
The definition of autism has changed to pull in masses more people over the years, so if you're an older software engineer you may be autistic using the up-to-date definition.
No. It got stricter.
With the DSM-5 and it's removal of Asperger's as a separate diagnosis the diagnosis criteria has been made stricter. People that would have formerly been diagnosed as Asperger could theoretically not be anymore under ASD.
The percentage of people with autism in a population is very stable and we know there is a huge genetic component to it.
People are getting diagnosed more but the amount of people with autism has likely stayed stable.
Which is really, really good thing. A diagnosis is live changing. The earlier you get diagnosed and the more supportive your network is, the better the outcome.
Come on. This is obviously nonsense if you look at the numbers diagnosed.
More people with autism are getting diagnosed and this is a very good thing. What is your problem?
This is the "there is only so much covid because we testing so much" discussion all over again.
I died of dysentery. I didnt know that was even possible.
Based hidden burnout scenario
Autism is as difficult as the oregon trail. Woe is me.
The "press y to start" is a nice touch, regardless of validity of the whole experience.
(It's probably meant as an OCD trigger; barely anyone uses anything but space/enter/any key to dismiss the splash screen)
That desk thing hits a nerve as someone on the other side of it.
It is not about "hot desk" but just not being able to see that some time you will need to reorganize how you sit. And not everyone will get the perfect spot.
Is it really a thing for some people that you need to sit on the same place always? I was never sure how much it offended some people or if they were just being comfortable.
> Is it really a thing for some people that you need to sit on the same place always?
Yes, yes it is.
Even though it affects the comfort of your colleagues?
I was hoping for more information than that answer because i have heard that type of answer before.
Sorry, thought someone else would chime in. But I've known people who need to sit in the same place. Doesn't need to be the "best" spot, just the same spot. Not all autistic people are like that.
From my personal experience most can be flexible, they may have a preference (stronger than "normal" people) to xyz spot, but will sit elsewhere if it's already taken.
So autism feels like meter managing survival games? Not saying to be dismissive, because I can see how stressful living like that is.
I woke up, didn't focus on self care, didn't take medication, and got fired immediately. That doesn't feel very realistic
Very nice game. Barely made it to getting to the office and receiving orders from a manager. I could completely relate to the "hot desk" experience, that's something that would irritate me. I do not claim to be in the spectrum, nor have any diagnosis to claim or reject it. Again, congratulations for the game and the feeling.
Thank you! Hot desking is a nightmare regardless of if you're on the spectrum or now.
Kudos, this was a lot of fun to experience my own autism from an outside perspective for once, haha Made it to day two without issues, then crashed on energy. Didn't crash on masking like a lot of others, guess i'm too used to doing that.
I love the idea of a tool to help people build empathy and better understand the experience of someone with autism. I wonder what this simulator would be like from the perspective of a young child going through school. Is that something that sounds interesting to you that you would consider creating? Thanks for sharing.
If you're from a well off family, you can be oblivious to everything and still have what you need to live so in my experience things were a lot easier. For me once I became self-aware, it turned into a tradeoff of outgrowing sensory issues (i.e. fire drills being pure hell) and weird speech issues and learning social skills, with worse executive functioning and anxiety and energy and still not being socially proficient enough to not be some level of offputting, and now the social skills matter much more so it's a bigger obstacle even though I'm a lot better at them.
Not sure about this. I am high functioning autistic. It ended my game because I called my mom and that was somehow overly taxing. I call my parents and sibling sometimes when I feel drained emotionally. Not everyone hates communicating with their family.
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
Isn't that just part of everyday life as a grown-up?
Some people find this process intuitive to the point they don't realize they're doing it, and others have to be actively thinking about it or it doesn't happen at all. Those with autism are more likely to tend towards the latter.
For some people it comes easier than for others. I personally don't feel like I mask all the time, only sometimes when I want to tell my colleague that he's a moron, but I don't.
This seems in the same direction as "doesn't everyone get sad?" for folks with depression. It's not a matter of this not being an experience for others, as much as it is how much energy it takes to get through it.
"Energy" in this case as a stand-in for willpower, for emotional regulation, for actual physical energy.
Yes, but it's more intense for people who find eye contact distracting or outright unpleasant on a visceral level, or who are suppresssing stimming urges that a 'normal' person doesn't experience in the first place.
> Isn't that just part of everyday life as a grown-up?
Yes it is.
The question isn't if you mask, it's what you are masking and to what extent.
There is a big difference between having sense enough not to wear your favorite gimp suit to work and not knowing how to make small talk and have to do it as performance everyday when you are at work.
I hope tools like this help normalize conversations around neurodiversity. If nothing else, it reminds me to be slower to judge and quicker to offer flexibility where I can
"A PM appears at your desk with an urgent ask that lacks acceptance criteria. "
I don't know what this means and I don't understand the first choice: Open a template and force crisp AC: "Given/When/Then"
Generally speaking, a lot of firms follow best practice where "issues"/"tasks"/"stories" are written (by a Product Manager, or PM) to include both a prescriptive request as well as a list of acceptance criteria that can be checked off to act as a mutually understood list of requirements for that issue to be considered complete.
The "given/when/then" model is basically, "given this circumstance, when the following occurs, the following behavior is observed" as a framing device for building ACs, though not everyone uses that.
Does it ever go beyond the second day? I tried many options but it goes from energy 73 to burnout in one step.
Some of the options don't show at all, I get a blank screen. Coming from Tor.
Autism may be the price of human intelligence [1]
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/09/250927031224.h...
I paid the price. I still haven't received the intelligence.
I was about to say, when do I get my prize?
You're posting here, this is the prize.
Consider how many people cannot even know what ycombinator is.
Harsh as this sounds, this is the truth.
Yeah but, intelligence isn’t exactly rewarded in society, execution is. And this site takes away time from that… :P
Reward was never promised. Life is strange.
Are you implying people on HN smarter than average joe ?
define smarter please.
I dare say autism is the pride of human intelligence.
Or this could be another cope
Anything but admitting environmental effects of pollution, plastics, and over medicating.
True, nobody ever says that pollution, plastics, and over-medicating are bad. Keep fighting the brave fight!
> and over medicating
don't forget the vaccines and tylenol, RFK Jr
autism predates the widespread use of plastic by generations
The Nazis had already holocausted autistic people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autism
Interesting to read about the origin of the term.
Remove the medication part than this seems like a normal day in IT as a single man.
Would you consider making a version/mode with resulting effects disclosed before the choice? I feel like that would make the whole experience smoother and more illustrative.
just reading the blurb here I thought, "Austism simulator with masking?" Ironic, autistic masking is already a simulation"
Ugh, it’s like replaying the trauma of my life the last ten years… 10/10.
I wanted to like this but it doesn’t reflect my experience in the uk or that of close family members. It seems to be some sort of burnout simulator?
I called mom back because she left 3 voicemails, and it took so much energy, that I lost. What's so bad about calling your mom back?
I did the same thing and lost a ton of energy and masking. Maybe Mom is a boss character in this game
This game is hard to win at. The poverty simulator was easier: https://playspent.org
Hmm...I recognize the opening description well as someone who has ADHD. But honestly I don't know anyone who is neurotypical for whom the description wouldn't apply as well.
You should allow people to pick more options to resolve the issues. If energy is low, enable a nap, or food, or some other way to replenish, instead of “watching tv”.
I don't like the premise of this game. If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
You'll annoy the hell out of some people, and thats fine. They can find other people to spend time with.
You can probably find a good community where you are, and if not just move to SF which is something like the autism homeland. Being autistic there is valorized and even imitated in sort of amusing ways.
Masking is a kind of hell, living someone else's life. Unmasking and living as yourself feels scary at first but the people who will love you that way can only find you if you live that way.
I've gotten much farther in life by masking it to some extent. Those gains in life allowed me more freedom overall and let me do more of what I enjoy.
"Just be yourself" is a good message in a movie, but everyone has to play a role to some extent to get where they want to be.
> If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
No thank you. I very much prefer to remain employed.
I get enough accommodations as it is; society is built on give-and-take and I’ve found a stable medium. My masking is part of that compromise. Without it I would just be entitled.
Masking doesn't (only) mean presenting as 100% neurotypical with the goal of others not even realizing you're autistic. It's also what you call any amount emotional labor you go through, trying to decrease the amount of emotional labor that other people have to expend on dealing with the ways you would, if not masking, approach interactions/tasks/etc differently.
If you imagine neurotypical and autistic as two "languages", then masking is when an autistic person is going to the effort to speak the neurotypical language, so as to remove the burden from neurotypical people of having to parse the autistic language. Most of the time, unless the interaction is very short and one-shot, the autistic person will still come off as speaking the neurotypical language "as a second language" rather than speaking it "fluently"; but it is the lived experience of many autistic people that this is still less disruptive in mixed company than just letting go and going full native autistic and expecting neurotypical people to be the ones to adapt. (Even in SF, a randomly-selected group of people often contains a few people visiting from elsewhere, who have never interacted with [non-masking] autistic people before, and so have never learned to "speak" autistic.)
Which is not to say that it isn't nice to find other autistic people to hang out with, where you can just let your hair down and "speak your native language" together! But it's not like this is something people avoid doing, if they get the chance. It's just that in most places in the world, you're rather unlikely to stumble into groups consisting solely of autistic people. (Except maybe in engineering-led tech companies!)
> If you imagine neurotypical and autistic as two "languages"
This analogy is very analogous. Damian Milton introduced it to academia as the "double empathy problem", and there are a trickle of studies confirming the obvious corollaries of the analogy (e.g. doi:10.1177/1362361320919286 "Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective") which are considered surprising by academia because autism (like most psychological conditions) is defined badly:
> Autism is defined clinically by deficits in social communication. It may therefore be expected that autistic people find it difficult to share information with other people.
The other factor to consider: no two autistic people are alike - one doesn't necessarily have the SAME native language as another - they're just both different from neurotypical. (I have a daughter on the spectrum)
Imagine visiting a new planet where every household has it's OWN unique language, most of them at least somewhat different from all the others, but they can mostly all speak passable english - is it easier for you to learn each of their languages, or for them to "mask" and speak to you in english?
Am AuDHD.
To be direct: this is a recipe for failure in a neurotypical world.
I agree with you with regard to the resulting personal relationship quality. However, there is a *massive* practical/economic cost.
I worked in Tech for 30 years. Burned out hard. Then I got my autism diagnosis.
I lived sincerely. I was punished for it.
I then tried to conform—masking before I quite knew what it was. I just knew that it required enormous effort to remain "composed".
Nope, still punished. The mask wasn't good enough.
Not only that, I began to loathe who I was becoming because of the mask. And I saw the added cost of how it was wrecking my marriage.
I'm now into year 3 (2.33) into unemployment with no idea what's next. I just know that it can't involve any masking whatsoever.
And that, in of itself, means I will be far "less successful" in this neurotypical world.
I hope you find a path that works for you.
Thank you. Very kind.
For clarity, I am not autistic (as far as I am aware) but I do have personality traits and quirks that absolutely have made my life challenging. As I have gotten older I have learned to mask those traits and it has led to far more success in life. While I still have trouble maintaining relationships, I at least can curate a professional reputation that has granted me benefits.
I am not saying this to claim that those with autism should mask, but I think the advice in this comment could be misinterpreted. While we should all be able to live as authentic selves, the reality is that this comes with trade-offs. We should evaluate those trade-offs independently and determine which of our personality traits are worth masking and which are not.
I'm audhd in real life and I've been unable to get to day 3 in this game after 5 tries. I don't know what that says about me, the spectrum, this way, or the way I live my life, but I think I also don't like the premise much either.
This game is an interpenetration of one persons experience and is too tightly defined by their daily routines. I collapsed on day 1 and got fired.
Masking is hell, I agree. But the person you are underneath isn't guaranteed to be something that people like to be around either.
"No matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter who your audience is: 30 percent will love it, 30 percent will hate it, and 30 percent won't care."
IDK if it says something about me, but my first couple tries at the game I misunderstood what masking was.
I thought when my Masking score went down, it meant I was showing my true colors too much and exposing myself as autistic (to the detriment of my career). Took me a minute to realize it was the opposite.
> If you're autistic, don't mask
I strongly agree. Masking is a maladaptive strategy and it's described that way in the literature.
But you do have to figure out who you are and what matters to you. A lot of autistic people spend much of their youth trying to be other people and only really figuring out what they like when they're in their 30s, 40s, or older.
You could drop the word “autistic” from that last paragraph and it would still be accurate.
This is just the human experience.
Yikes. I suppose "Just stop masking" is great advice if you're in a highly privilege position where you don't have to worry about losing your job. But that does track with suggesting autistic people "just move to San Francisco," where my crippling disorder is "imitated" in "amusing" ways.
Screw that. There’s nothing inherently good about authenticity. Be yourself when it’s good to be yourself. Don’t when it’s not. Try to change “yourself” when it’s beneficial to do so.
I first learned that it was possible to intentionally act "normal" when I was 12 (I'm now 47). So I spent a lot of years studying people to figure out how to do those things they did automatically but I had to do manually.
Later I learned it's called masking and a lot of people like yourself think of it as bad.
But it made my life immeasurably better.
I hated how I acted and how people reacted to me when I was young.
I wouldn't even know how to turn off the "masking behavior" now and I never would have become who I am without it.
Maybe it's because I was young and didn't know any other people like me but I don't think labelling this survival technique as hell is right for everybody.
This isn’t just an autistic thing. Everyone has to learn to temper themselves to fit into society and get along with others.
That's true, of course. It's a matter of degree and scale.
That's an interesting take. Most humans have a viscerally negative reaction to unmasked autistic behaviours, in the same way they might react to a strange spider. A mix of fear and disgust. You quite literally cannot build a life for yourself without masking unless you're already financially independent. Once you have enough power and F-U money, sure, go for it. In the meantime it's not really a realistic solution.
Spiders are good, especially in your house. They are eating something. Whatever they are eating, is worse than a spider.
It doesn’t matter what is true about most spiders, the point of the comment is about how most people react to the sight of one.
You're so close to understanding the analogy
Is it the meme about normal people beating autists, autists beating psychopaths and psychopaths beating normal people?
No. It's that it doesn't matter that spiders are good, millions of people will crush them on sight.
For example?
Somewhat orthogonal, but if the spider is not a Brown Recluse (if you live where those are), then it is competition for them.
> They can find other people to spend time with.
In the context of this game world, that circumstance manifests as the player getting fired from their job. Perhaps a person would like to keep their job and so does things they otherwise wouldn't like to do.
> If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.
What does “masking” mean to you? Because when I search for autistic masking I get a really wide range of behaviors from suppressing physical rocking to attempting to learn social skills.
Some masking might be counterproductive or even harmful. Some of the stuff I’m finding listed as masking is just basic being an adult stuff, though. If “don’t mask” means “don’t try to improve yourself” then it’s terrible advice.
I have aspergers (not sure the term is even used anymore) and eye contact is very uncomfortable, but I try to do it (or fake, it as I have to wear glasses and can take them off) because in day to day life not having eye contact when having a conversation is seen as rude and the last thing I want is for everyone that I have a one time conversation with to think I'm rude.
SF, famously affordable for people who have decided to skip success in social, academic and professional arenas. What is this, a trust fund satire?
> You'll annoy the hell out of some people, and thats fine.
Some of those people sign my paycheck though.
Changes in mood result from changes in behavior.
If you don't feel like doing something you know is good for you, do it anyway. You'll feel better afterwards.
For me, life is not living, but fighting “bad” behavior every day, which gravitate me easily towards sun.
I even build a custom AI therapy tool for myself.
Loved it.
Amazing how rewatching the same show the umpteenth time is so relaxing.
My idea of self care is trolling reddit.
Suggestion: rather than hard coded choices, allow free-form input and use an LLM to convert that into a metric
Extremely disappointed about the amount of ableism in the comments. Yes, some kids these days pick the autism label when they probably shouldn't, but that does NOT mean you get to shit on actually disabled people
Plenty of autistic people experience actual disability. And masking isn't just "what everyone does at work". Masking is a trauma response. Autistic people in genral have been abused for their 'abnormal' behavior to the point of being so traumatized that masking is not even a choice. They must hide for fear of further abuse and harassment.
Abuse such as "everyone's a little autistic" and "that's not a disability" or "you just want attention"
Making passing judgements on someone's disability that you clearly don't understand makes you a bigoted asshole. Stop it.
Yes, some kids these days pick the autism label when they probably shouldn't, but that does NOT mean you get to shit on actually disabled people
You shouldn't shit on anyone, but you do raise a good point: how do you know who the actually disabled people are?
If some people who claim autism offer as evidence experiences that almost all neurotypical folks can relate to, people are going to be skeptical. You can call them bigoted assholes, but you're unlikely to shame anyone into suspending their skepticism.
Thank you for saying this.
Hear!hear!
I’ve had a rough week. Clicked on this from the couch while screwing off work, Game of Thrones on the TV. Had to laugh.
Great minds think alike.
I'm not interested in "raw dogging" your game, "champ".
Don't really understand how this is meant to work. I burned out. Am I autistic?
Thank you for sharing your experience.
This is sort of silly. Everyone has to "mask" at work. I do not care if the HR lady tells you to "bring your whole self". Unless your whole self happens to be precisely what they want, it is a lie. And nobody is that conflict avoidant, fake-happy, and deeply committed to shareholder value while upholding the strongest standards of ethics and work ethic.
This is a grind for pretty much everyone. To give you the other side, to someone extroverted and socially attuned, the fake nonsense is more grating and insulting than it is to you, I'd guess. Life is hard and everyone has his cross to bear.
I played one day and I had to quit because it was stressing me out too much. Good job!
I could hear the misophonia dialogue
try vagus nerve stimulation yoga. kegel with diaphragmatic breathing whenever you get anxious. and limit cortisol inducing food/drink. coffee/tea/meat. sweets are okay if they make your cortisol lower but moderation is key. also eat all meals of the day. and listen to gamma waves music at work. and sleep in a room with open shades so you wake up at sunlight.
these steps will ensure your body actively tries to be in the parasympathetic instead of sympathetic. side effects.. bladder and bowel might become a little bit overactive but that is okay as you r strengthening the pelvic floor.
also replace coffee with decaf if possible or the one with chicory and milk to reduce caffeine but still give you the taste.
Hey! that wikipedia article was interetsing don't close it for me!
The blinking Autism Simulator text, in black on yellow, in the upper left is very distracting.
Maybe that's the point? I heavily dislike it when people put blinking stuff on websites.
> Maybe that's the point?
It very likely is!
I’ll have you know, I took the Quatum mechanics ADHD interlude VERY PERSONALLY.
On a more meta level I found the game quite satisfying to play because it captures the essence well and went into the comments expecting to see a little empathy for different modes of thinking. Very much for a change. Instead it's long threads of neurotypical people insisting to "just fix it" with "this one tip" or aggressively misunderstanding everything and saying it's nonsense.
It's hilarious in the sense that this too is part of a daily experience and alienation, but it's really depressing and tiring to see that even when hands are held people are still shitheads about it. Why is this the case? I genuinely don't understand why everyone can't take a deep breath and figure out that the obvious has been tried, doesn't work and therefore isn't useful? That maybe people deserve a little patience and understanding, instead of yet more pushy bad attitude?
Cool game. That said, autism is a spectrum. You can’t just say “this iz wut autism like.”
Thanks for playing and agreed! I have a disclaimer in the [About] modal
Autism is an extremely diverse and complex phenomenon. No two autistic people experience the world in the same way. This simulation is based on the experiences of a single autistic individual and is not representative of all autistic people, although, I suspect many autistic people will recognize some aspects of their own experience in this simulation.
Thats a bit uncalled for. This is a game made by someone shaped by their perspective on the world. It can be appreciated as such without applying your own additional intent.
I think masking is pretty general across the board. Even severe Autism. My daughter acts completely different in different contexts. Some could say we all do but you'll know it when you see it esp when the mask is gone.
Based on this simulator, I have concluded that most of "autism" is just a pathologization of normal human personality characteristics which are simply not well aligned with the expectations of the culture which presently dominates.
For example, sensitivity to background noise is an extremely normal thing which is strongly correlated with intelligence.
Similarly, the tendency to get caught up in learning about interesting things instead of paying attention to boring things. This is just another sign of intelligence.
Another example: I also have to "mask" in social situations, and I find it exhausting. But it is only exhausting in the presence of alien people who expect alien behavior. If I am around my own people, or if I have enough power to simply defy expectations and behave normally, then there is no exhaustion. If people like me were in control, then "normal" people would have to mask, and they would find it exhausting.
So, there is no "disorder" here. You are just an intelligent person who lives in enemy territory, and who struggles to conform to their expectations, which are completely alien to your nature.
Conclusion. If you are struggling with "autism", the solution is to band together and seek power.
Also, stop medicating yourselves.
Does this "game" have a win condition?
Only if you stop taking Tylenol, maybe /s
LOL! Yep that's the solution. Thanks Bob!
Scrolling through the comments and noticed that they are a pretty good autism simulator for working in tech with autism. The entire cast of typical characters is represented.
- guy that thinks everyone has the tism and the spectrum is everyone - this guy has more trouble reading the room than anyone. but it is the lack of empathy and not autism
- guy that thinks everything is a microaggression towards his autism and ironically makes it harder for other autists
- guy with probable schizoid personality disorder that thinks struggling with people and social issues is just life because everyone is stupid and annoying
- guy who read Bad Therapy once and now thinks autism is a tiktok trend
- insufferable fedora guy that thinks psych is unscientific - probably secretly has severe depression and is making it everyone else's problem by being a jerk. whenever called out 4 being jerk blames the autism he probably doesn't actually have
- guy who thinks the solution is just be yourself
- guy with trauma from being themselves landing them on a PIP
A primary problem in tech is how everyone is seriously lacking in social skills and empathy. This is exhausting for autists and everyone. The real autism simulator is just existing in tech.
Extremely well put. Probably best comment on this post.
Thank you! I sent this to my family so that they may get a clue!!!
The comments in the threads are interesting. A surprising amount of people are saying they don’t get it.
I can shed light into the food thing (I don’t think of myself as autistic but the people around me do, my kid is diagnosed - I was the last one to clue in “that’s just being a kid” I would say); so food, making yourself a proper breakfast is self-care, and self care takes energy. Making yourself breakfast is a lot of work, so you do it and it eats your energy, or you don’t do it and you feel shittier later because you didn’t eat.
It’s a shitty catch-22.
And some days you’re tired from the day before; I love that the sim carried over the energy levels from the day before because sleep does help but there’s no real reset, the day before carries into the next day so you’ll be like “I know I should make myself food, but I’m exhausted” so you avoid it and it turns out worse, or you do it and now you’re tired for the next task.
Wait sleeping doesn’t restore eneger to people who have autism wha?
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/topics/physica...
Autism is not one thing.
Seems like a ME/CFS simulation too. Well done.
Whoever chose flashy colors for this is a motherfluffer :')
It's a default Neovim theme: murphy
Oh well: "ouch" is all I my eyes have to say ^^
Have any HN autists here had any luck with Folinic acid as an adult relieving some of the aspects of the condition?
Leucovorin, a prescription/medical form of Folinic acid, was mentioned recently by RFK Jr./HHS as an effective treatment for some forms of childhood autism.
Politics aside, I recently saw some anecdotal cases of marked immediate improvement in young children.
https://www.tiktok.com/@cassie.hudgins/video/755601851016659...
Has anyone tried the over-the-counter version as an adult? The over-the-counter version which seems to be basically the same compound as Leucovorin, just not produced in a medical setting and exacting medical standards.
PS, please don't just downvote, reply to the comment instead with your objection or correction to what I wrote (if you have one)
Is it possible to win?
Most I was able to do is day 2. Probably realistic.
Solid slice of the more extreme side of the autism spectrum for those who can still function within “normal” society, albeit with some assistance and tolerance.
I’m lucky enough to be on the lower/moderate side of things, but man all of this stuff hit home in its own way. Annoying noises (for me it’s the whine of cheap electronics or the chaotic bass of some music genres/upstairs neighbors), the forceful imposition of others in my space (“cameras on!”, scented cleaners, voluntold activities), and the daily task micromanagement to get by (do I call a friend/family member since they’ve texted me three times today about a trivial matter, or do I watch comfort shows and work on a personal project?).
This shit is hard, and adding in the requirement to engage in political maneuvering to succeed and thrive makes it exponentially worse.
I just want to do a good job and go home to live the best life I can. I suspect most autists are the same.
You are most definitely not alone! There's many of us.
It's been long enough(about 7 years) since I worked in an environment like this that I've been seriously considering going back to it lately. I played one round of your game, and that was enough to make it completely obvious to me what a fucking terrible idea that is.
Thank you for making this, I think you just saved me from flushing two years of personal progress down the toilet in the name of... What? Fucking business logic? I'll pass on that, I think, and keep improving my life on my own terms.
And maybe address the question why, again and again, I keep finding ways to convince myself that this is what I want my life to be. No matter how many times it leads me to crash and burn and have to spend years picking up the pieces.
Seriously, thank you. If I ever meet you, I will buy you a beverage to your liking, to go, so you can go home and enjoy it in peace.
/g
I feel called out :)
I see u
It's not perfect, but considering all the bullshit and misinformation out there about autism spectrum disorder, it's a step in the right direction. I'm sure all of the other autistic people will tell you why it sucks, why it's not good, and nitpick and criticize, but it's fun, it looks cool, and it's decent media representation for a marginalized community that has almost no real representation in media. I don't really like how the goal is to just be a productive worker and exist in society that works against you in every way?
There should be more than 4 meters under "Stats", and one of them is just labeled "???" and goes to 0 for no reason.
Wow this game gives me some serious anxiety, haha.
Energy burnout isn't real. No one collapses at their desk cause they skipped breakfast and had to give an update in standup.
Unless you're super hypoglycemic I guess.
I've just got fired for calling my mom.
you are advertising this in the wrong place
Oh, am I autistic then? :-|
Honestly I think everyone feels like this to some degree and most people are hiding their contempt for the structures at work.
brekky : A handful of raw pumpkin seeds, a banana and (premade) coffee. How hard is that?
can you migrate this off of vercel
> To keep your job and avoid conflict, you must "mask." Masking means hiding your natural habits and feelings, while imitating the social behaviors that coworkers expect.
is this even autism specific?? ha
"I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face" ― Franz Kafka
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth" - Oscar Wilde
It's things like having a grating monotone, and having to pause before speaking and willing yourself to adopting the right tone for your state of mind and the effect you want to have on your audience. Every. Time. You. Speak.
It's like being an actor, except the whole world is your stage, and you have to be conscious of your character, lines, and motivation, the entire time you're awake.
Did you use HN as training data?
I'm on HN pretty regularly so, in a sense, yes
Autism is not atypical but normal evolutionary marker for higher intelligence: https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/9/msaf189/8245036
"Story mode" thinkers should be considered atypical, detached from reality, IMO. Coworkers convinced the political prison of job culture is just and honorific, for example.
Not enough meetings or e-mail.
love the ADHD popup intrusion.
Wait, this isn’t normal?
"Masking" to me just sounds like being a person. I want to tell my boss fuck you, but I can't. So I say I am frustrated.
amazing. realistic too. i had a burnout after 2 moves
The last game I want to play is "Me Simulator"
Right off the bat, I don't do "self-care" in the morning and I don't eat breakfast, so I can't get past #1
I, for one, thought it was a fun game. I can’t speak to the authenticity, but I appreciated the concept and the retro interface.
Thanks, I hate it. Keep an eye out for Nathan Grayson sliding into your DMs though.
Will do - best ingest for DMs is my substack https://blog.drjoshcsimmons.com/
lol, failed immediately, you have to be honest
Lol my life is an autism simulator
This was too real thanks I hate it.
Burned out in record time lol
good writing. you should write a short story. i would read.
Thank you :) My book is available on Amazon. Not sure if I'm allowed to directly link in comments but search "ex nihilo simmons"
Thank you! I reckon it is this one? https://www.amazon.com/-/hi/Dr-Josh-C-Simmons-ebook/dp/B0FN2...
I can't shake the feeling that the whole ontology here is subtly-yet-totally wrong. Sure: all of the symptoms and conditions here are real; the characterization of the conditions is true; the categorization of people into "those who have this condition" and "those who don't" (or as a gradation) is true. Even the "essentialization" of it, the idea that these people can't change the way they are, that's mostly true also. And yet... it's all wrong somehow. Something about this model misses the entire nature of what's going on, and thinking in this way makes it impossible to fix it, and this sort of logic is making everything worse in some fundamental way.
One reason I believe this is that my own experience is that I go into and out of this state. When I'm unhappy and unfulfilled, I find that I can't adapt to new information, and noises stress me out, and getting through the day is draining, and being around other people requires masking. When life is going better, everything seems more manageable, when I'm able to relax... all the symptoms subside again. But the state where the symptoms are real can last for months or years, because it's so hard to find the path out. It is like the feeling of being in a relationship that's not going well but not so badly that you've found a justification for breaking up. Your whole mind shuts down and you can't put your finger on why... but then later, after a breakup, or maybe some time later, you wake up and realize that that wasn't actually you; you were sick somehow, starved of something essential to being yourself and unable to perceive what was going on.
The world feeling "hopeless" induces this in me, and I think everyone around me also. More political polarization; more people seeming disconnected or unempathetic; urban ennui and disenchantment and corporatization---these all make it worse. It feels impossible for some people to grow and change in a world that feels rigid instead of fluid; that expects them to already "be there" and judge them or react with confusion to them if they're not. Whereas a dynamic environment, where people are curious about each other, where they show compassion and empathy to new people or any one who is struggling... that seems to allow them to open up and change and grow.
"Essentializing" this condition is harmful: you are not essentially broken; you are broken vis-á-vis the world around you, but it can be due to problems with the world instead of you. Actually there is something very very wrong with how the world works. People and institutions and norms are supposed to set up an environment in which nobody feels like this, but they don't, so everyone is "sick". I like to call this "The Virus". The Virus is a condition that almost everyone has---it's the virus of being closed off, nervous, and unable to open up with strangers in a way that makes them feel comfortable and able to grow. When everyone in a community has the Virus, other people around them don't get the ability to change and heal and grow the way they need to, so they get the Virus too, and spread it on. It's a condition of omission: it is only really possible to be healthy in an environment where the majority of people around you are also healthy, and when 90% of people are unhealthy, the last 10% follow inevitably. Hence the Virus is contagious, even though it's not a "physical" condition.
The trap of it is that everyone is masking, and at different skill levels. The people who mask well seem "fine", although they are not, which makes the people who mask less well feel like something is horribly wrong with them. Since nobody is able to conceptualize what is happening, they search desperately for explanations, and "autistic and/or ADHD" is the most agreeable model they find. It's wrong, but in the setting where nobody has a better model, it's the best you can do--at least it explains and justifies their immediate needs.
"Something is wrong with me, and you can't understand it because our minds work differently, but I need you to accomodate it." True, entirely, yes, but not the best model. "Something is wrong with all of us and we need to blow this paradigm up and change it to a new one so that everyone can flourish" would be a better model that would actually have a hope of succeeding.
I believe that the above characterization is true, and I believe that it's important to believe it's true, because "essentializing" the condition locks you out of the inductions that actually have a chance to do something about it. If you believe it's in your head, then you can cope by trying to adapt, but you're doomed to mostly fail because it's not actually in your head. Whereas if you believe it's a problem in the world, then the natural conclusions are things like "How do I start to change the world around me? How do I protest the way it is? How do I get people on board with changing it also?" And that's going to be more productive, long-term. Revolt, damnit. The thing to be talking about is how to do something about it. Coping is just coping.
in short, please join my revolution, stop calling yourself autistic, call the world around you fucked up. I am so sure that many of the people who call themselves autistic would thrive if the people and institutions around them weren't so devoid of human warmth and connection and dignity. Probably you've even experienced that -- in school or in some other setting in your life. Probably the reason you feel so broken now is that you vaguely remember what it felt like to flourish and you're floundering at figuring out why it's so hard to find again. It's because the world is broken as shit! It's the Virus! Everyone has it! You would be fine if they didn't; if the world wasn't broken! You've been fine before! That's not a lie; you're not broken; you're suffering because you're not getting anything like oxygen for your soul and you're suffocating in that feeling but nobody around you is even able to acknowledge it.
(a controversial opinion I hold which relates to this: one of the reason everyone else is masking so well, and therefore why everything seems so confusing, is that they're on drugs. Either psychiatric drugs, like SSRIs, or recreational drugs, like marijuana and alcohol (you might also include video games or social media addiction or gambling here). Which is not to cast any moral shade on them; it's just an observation that I wish I could test. Probably many of those drugs are "actually" needed, but probably many of them are also needed because they're helping them cope with the Virus. I wonder what would happen if lots of people weaned off their drugs at the same time. Would they all start to relate differently? Would they feel like their daily interactions are more human? Would they realize that they can't actually handle how upset they are about their life, but now that lots of other people feel the same way, they're able to organize and do something about it? I don't know, but I'd like to see what happens in that scenario.)
Fuck masking.
In my opinion the entire structure of scrum and sprints is structured to help people with autism and adhd. Most workplaces that produce creative output are much more focused on soft power, networking, and hard deadlines—things that really don’t work for the “au-dhd” crowd.
It’s easy to remove the locus of control by saying “this environment wasn’t built for me” but do appreciate how much it actually /is/ created for you.
My experience has been 100% the opposite. Daily public status check-ins, top-down decisions, every work interaction mediated through artificial structure? The points are made up, the deadlines are obviously fake, but everyone acts as if they are real? Except when they're not?
That, on its own, would make it clear the environment wasn't built for me.
The fact that the environment was very obviously built for management—for information to flow up so that decisions can flow down—but also that nobody is willing to acknowledge that? That just makes it even clearer.
I've worked in an environment that did feel like it was built for me, and it was pretty much the opposite of scrum/agile/etc. I had real trust with a clearly defined area of ownership. I was responsible for managing the interfaces and interaction points around my area and, occasionally, for real deadlines (with real context!), not a slog of fake short-term deadlines that exist just to create pressure. I didn't have to break down or justify my work in terms of bite-sized tasks that could roll up into somebody's spreadsheet.
And the best part? We got more done, faster, than conventionally managed teams.
If the culture hadn't been totally ruined by a reorg, I'd still be there. I'm still sad I haven't been able to find anything similar since. But, having experience that, I am only more confident that scrum et al are absolutely not built for me.
Of course the environment was built for management. But if you have ever been in management you know that getting useful updates on progress is like suqeezing blood from a stone.
I didn’t say that anyone liked the process, but I assure you that the average autistic engineer would actually do worse in a more feeeform environment. They would like it more though.
It is sometimes difficult to get progress reports because it's difficult for the people who are doing the work to figure out where they are in the process. For example, imagine that you have some tickets; "Add create method, "Add delete method", "Add list method". You take the first ticket, and decide to add the RPC server, and the authentication infrastructure, and the test harness, and the CLI wrapper. What do you say on the progress update? "You've been working on this for a week, why isn't at least one of those done?" The answer is because the tickets are pieces of value that the business wants to ship (you can ship without delete, I guess), but it's not actually how the software is assembled. What happens is that someday, you say "I'm done with create" and then 2 hours later say "I'm done with delete and list". That makes execs feel like they're being misled, but it's true.
Of course, if you actually enumerate the "how" and not just the "what" in your ticketing system, you can get a much more realistic view. "Add foobar RPC server", "Hook auth into the foobar RPC server", "Add foobar subcommand to CLI", ...
I think everyone does better with a clear set of expectations, autism or not. That's why we do design docs, design reviews, and try to put a realistic set of work into the ticket tracker. I would say personally, though, 99% of the time I don't really need to do that to get a good result out of myself. I can just say "by next Tuesday I will have this subsystem done". Typically this is done with heroics rather than good planning (Monday becomes a longer-than-average workday), so I try to avoid it, but I definitely understand why people want a more freeform environment.
> (you can ship without delete, I guess)
And some management type will say when you're halfway through 'add' that they'll cut 'delete', but it's impossible to automate anything without a delete option, so you implement it anyway during your testing and then they get mad.
I've been my own manager more than once and on teams from a few folks to a couple dozen in size. Rigid schedules and expectations absolutely make me less productive. My last 2 startups were chock full of fast paced, high quality work that got us off the ground and up to hundreds of thousands of users with me as the single engineer building apps for web, iOS and Android by myself. That is, until we hired engineering managers who tried too hard to get a glimpse inside my head, after which productivity dropped off a cliff. My current startup now has around 10 app devs and it feels like we deliver fewer features over longer timelines at a lower bar for quality than ever.
You're just describing a high-trust/senior team. That same group of people would have made scrum seem cool too.
Scrum can protect you some really nasty stuff.
I've also worked on some relatively senior/high-trust teams using roughly scrum-style processes, and the experience was decidedly worse. Even with the best setup and intentions in the world, the process still makes focusing on small, individual tasks the path of least resistance, which leads to less collaborative, more short-term focused work with less flexibility and ownership.
A sufficiently strong team can make even a bad process work out okay, but that just means they're strong enough to compensate for the process, not that the process had any latent merit.
Scrum is pretty bad for au-dhd crowd. It misses proper checks on business interference, which makes things even worse. It is constant pushing the worthless points (why not a time unit), kpi is about scoring points or useless improvements which have to happen anyway (merciless refactoring, yeah!). Devs could simply atomize every task and win this stupid game, but then you lose oversight and we get to lie number whatever. Everyone should be responsible, most people ain't generalists. They are specialists often.
Kanban gives more flexibility. Scrum seems to fall apart like that eventually leaving a power vacuum for tasks out bound of scrum. Active products have constant support questions.
Then you have SAFE, which is even worse. Waterfall but then even worse. Coordination seems to be very complex, the diagram is close to unreadable. Looks like a badly designed production street for its purpose.
That is a problem. For who is it created exactly?
> the worthless points (why not a time unit)
The story points people won the battle against time units, claiming that "complexity" can be measured and quantified better than "hours" could, but in every place I've worked, people just treat them as though they're actually some unit of time. Product managers and my bosses always believe you can do arithmetic with that (multiply engineers assigned to project by 2 to cut time in half right? Sum up 25 points and be confident 5 engineers can complete them all in a week right?)
Then we occasionally have to pretend to really care why our "velocity" isn't arbitrarily higher or why it's less than it once was, when all of the tasks have estimates from 1-5 with at least a 1-point margin of error. There's so much noise that no amount of smoothing yields useful data that you can use to achieve "certainty" -- such as that X project will be done in Y number of sprints, which is what senior management craves most, but can never safely be promised unless you have a death wish.
Basically I'm convinced at minimum like half of teams that "do agile" or "do scrum" are just cargo-culting and derive no particular benefit from it. I don't think I'd even do estimation of any kind if I ran a software team as I saw fit.
I had to laugh about your comment, this is exactly how it goes. People are used thinking in time units.
Then you have modified fibonacci, which make me puke. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20. I get special headaches because of names like this.
However you can find this page if you adding them up by as strings, it isn't connected, but attack on titan was a good anime: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/123581320
Weird coincidence. I need to sleep, spend a lot today in my headspace.
Thinking about complexity as entropy, the friction, so they try to estimate "useless work" in their eyes. Heat transfer is velocity then. Firing up the next cycle. Detectable Delectable malicious, makes me hot really. Fiery.
It is just engine design really;) How bad can that be?
We don't even get real time, just pretend time. But I have to say, I admire this idea. All the time wasting around it, retro's with stupid humiliations. They run on naming and shaming. Sticks and carrots.
Works well :D Until people stop participating in the retro's. There is nothing to say, nobody says anything. They start atomizing the tasks infinitely or always inflate the estimate by 2. The standup nobody speaks, but they work like silent ghosts.
Scary sight huh? Happy Helloween vibes inglorious bastards.
Scrum is literally a scam though. It was invented by some guy not even worth remembering who sold it to both sides (buyers and sellers of software). On the buyer side, the incentive was to encourage the seller to use scrum to communicate progress. On the seller side, they are encouraged to use scrum because the buyer wants it, and it "proven" to be an effective management tool.
There are too many unknowns to deal with to actually make use of it, and managing the unknowns is a whole other aspect of management outside scrum. This is why most scrums essentially devolve into ad hoc work per sprint with very loose planning.
What project estimation/management process would you suggest as an alternative?
Just rank by date needed order on a kanban board and work your way through everything in order. If it's constant fight to meet deadlines it will be clear enough that things are backed up.
Its not so much as estimation as a whole work style, but
Make it work -> Make it right -> Make it fast
is arguably the best way to go about things, then structure your work around that.
Ive done this with greenfield projects when I used to work for Amazon (while still ironically operating under scrum), and was able to get SD2-SD3 promo within 2 years (entering an an SD2).
In terms of planning work, you basically allocate people as necessary. The first part deals with a lot of unknowns, so estimation is pointless - basically everyone is on board in terms of getting software up and running and talking to other software.
Once you have that, making it right is a lot easier to estimate because you can do a lot more fine grained planning (like for example, a certain team member that worked on a feature can add all the correctness and unit testing way faster than someone who has not)
Then making it fast is basically just optimizations, which can be done by a subset of team members while the rest work on adding features (and adding features needs to be done in the same way - make the feature just work, make it correct for all use cases, and then make it optimal)
If there was a fund to help remove sprints, scrum, Jira and standups I would donate to it.
It's like a factory but the people are the machines.
Probably many of the people who hate writing code for a PM at work, love working on their own open source project.
And the difference is freedom.
Hear, hear.
I think higher management likes to believe that those things (sprints, scrum, Jira and standups) provide a safety net against lazy employees not working hard enough, so they cling to them. Of course, they actually do little and are pretty easy to game. Their failure to magically make all software work predictable and deterministic and all developer time fungible actually means that you still need a manager involved and close to the work to identify people who BS their way through everything and take way longer than they should.
I'd rather be in an environment where you are given access to simple tools like kanban to prioritize and track work, and for people who don't deliver, the manager just fires them (maybe with one warning).
I've been in the software business since 2007, which was also when I first met Jira and Scrum (at least something with 14 days sprints).
My first encounter with Scrum (or whatever it was) was good. It felt good to work in cycles and reprioritize twice a month.
Since then I have seen various versions of working systems and various versions of broken systems.
The two last projects have been extremely agile, the current project has exactly 5 mandatory meetings in an average week:
- 3 x stand ups that typically take <10 minutes and never more than 15.
- 1 stand up plus planning (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 20 minutes)
- 1 stand up plus voluntary demo + retro (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 30 minutes)
The previous project had a lot more structure but also worked well.
Common themes:
- Communication is 2 way
- Both teams are friendly and competent
- Customer care about results and leave programming to us
- Clear communication about what they hope, but without stress. Especially the first project were the stakes were serious: if we manage to hit the deadline we knew we would save the organization millions, but if not, nobody was in trouble. It was an actual challenge, not a scary thing.
Have I seen dysfunctional Scrum and Agile as well? Yes!
Some examples:
- endless estimation meetings which not only eats programmer hours but also mean that everyone feel they have to match the estimates
- one way communication (in a loop from customer - ux - programmer - tester - customer). Doesn't help if there are 14 days sprints when every sprint is a mini waterfall
- taking time of the project to do agile workshop after agile workshop while continuing to be absolutely rigid
- "release" after "release" but no actual customer
- "finish one thing" taken to mean that styling has to be perfect even on placeholder pages
I wonder how much of this is company- or team-dependent. I don't mind sprints, but I also choose what to put on them myself with very rare (like twice-yearly, tops) requests from my manager.
I don't have a PM.
Scrum gives you (the team member) the power to decide what your commitment for the next sprint will be.
If you have a manger, that decides this, or the PO decides this, IMO that’s a key problem of your scrum implementation.
This, it is costly, certain personal walks away. Proper roles seem to emerge anyway.
The cost of control and the costly overhead has everything to do with atomizing the work load. Just like in a distributed system. The synchronization mechanisms get more complicate.
The more layers, the less trustable the organization, since every manager under their manger, is a potentially corruptable.
This makes the communication lines unclear and makes people over promise. Also distributing the workload has diminishing returns.
I am not a fan of scrum or other systems.
Why would you expect freedom at work? Employment is by definition working for someone else, so you are going to be working on their goals, not yours.
Working on somebody else's goals, and being systematically micromanaged are two very different things.
This is a fallacious argument.
It’s built to make upper management happy with the facade of productivity, middle management employed, while they squeeze the most out of the workforce and keep up the constant pressure (endless sprints).
It’s not built for the product team (devs, designers, QA).
In some cases, coincidentally, it might be good for some neurodivergent folks, I guess…
…as long as they don’t mind the constant bugging for updates, interruptions, and constant pressure… I’m sure it’s an environment where people with ADHD etc shine.
Hard disagree.
It's there to help management control the 'au-dhd' crowd with a manufactured focus that rarely aligns with what they could naturally focus on.
No, just no.
As someone with ADHD, I am orders of magnitude more productive when I do freelancing than in an SCRUM based corporate environment and much happier. And I mean orders of magnitude, I am not being dramatic. (Though that only works if I work on something I am interested in otherwise my lows are even lower.)
Task switching is a typical issue for both ADHD as autism people and SCRUM has so much. Just the damn dailies are complete murder for my mental health and productivity.
The problem with SCRUM is that it focuses on everyone being a cog in the machine. Everyone replaceable. At best it allows teams to self-organize (in theory, seldom in practice) but does not acknowledge individual needs of team members.
I agree with this
In my opinion the entire structure of scrum and sprints is structured to help people with autism and adhd.
Unfortunately the principles are rarely adhered to.
Whenever you are forced to be around people, you are forced to put on your mask and perform. Exhausting.
I don't like this - there are things that really bother me. It is also very much one persons perspective and very specific. With that said here's my opinion:
I have issues including high anxiety and it's very clear that the author is not properly dealing with their anxiety which is driving their decision making process. It is a common comorbidity and this game feels a lot like anxiety - "do I do this or that" never knowing or trusting the answers.
The decision to not take or half take meds is a red flag. I am on meds that will make me feel like dog shit before noon If I don't take them. It's a worse feeling than any discomfort that comes from taking them, brain fog and headaches included. No way should you cold turkey these things. They may be on the wrong medication or an improper dose. Are they being honest with their doctor? Are they comfortable with their doctor and feel they are helping? Anxiety will prevent people from being honest with doctors and even themselves. There is also a lot of mistrust in doctors and some neurodivergent people are outright hostile towards doctors which is a problem they need to overcome. There are good and bad doctors like there are good and bad pizza joints - find a better doctor (or pizza.) Telehealth is a god send - more options to talk to professionals. There are specialists who are tuned into your issues and some even suffer the same! Meds also fuck up your appetite - don't forget to eat which kills your mental state.
Another thing is are you hydrated enough? I get this hyper focus where I WONT move. Like I wont get up for hours until I am or practically pissing or shitting my pants because I cant stop what I am doing. I have found this leads to dehydration and hunger that is ignored which severely degrades my mental state. I have learned to use a few simple methods to break this state and I have gotten better at consciously recognizing this state and take a short break.
Masking sucks. Don't bother cosplaying other people or trying to find normal because I got news for you: no one is really normal. Just be yourself but do be mindful of your interactions. I used to be so anxious around people that I would never look them in the eye or say hello and avoided contact. Now I make an effort to say hello, look them in the eyes, and during conversation focusing on their words while maintaining eye contact as much as possible. I would fidget and make noise to distract myself - even in meetings, likely some stimming thing, which then distracts others pissing them off. I love to doodle so I used that to my advantage and doodle in a notepad I take with me to occupy my fidgety hands so I'm not tapping or banging pens or phones. When I want to sing I keep it low and do it on a quick break, like get up and take a walk around the building while quietly singing a song or talking to myself.
We are animals and we train ourselves in all of the bad habits we have. Anxiety is a great trainer of avoidance which is massively harmful. Anxiety will make you take the path of least resistance every single time which leads to a life where you don't feel in control where every little thing becomes a trigger in this fragile state. It's mentally exhausting and you burn out. If you give in you will wind up a helpless mess. There are a lot of mental exercises that WILL help you but it takes time and effort. I used to think those self affirmations and other mind exercises were bullshit but you know what, they are only bullshit if you tell yourself that over and over (again, training.) I see too many neurodivergent people outright dismiss a lot of help and seek shelter in communities which are echo chambers that reinforce negative behaviors and even stir up anger issues leading to hostile behavior. Bad stuff.
I've learned I am not weak because of my brain chemistry and that I have the power to overcome a lot of my issues. I am not ashamed of who I am because I have no control over that aspect. It's not a perfect life but I aim to try and be as happy as I can. There is no magic pill that will cure all symptoms but some pills can tackle your most debilitating symptoms. You will not go to a therapist/psych and come out a new person in a day, week, month, or year. It is a constant state of being mindful of your mental state and developing skills to deal with these states in a positive and healthy way. You will fail along the way and that is okay - failure is natural and normal. Just get back up and try again. People respect tenacity and honestly, little by little it makes you feel better. Believing in yourself and investing the effort and time becomes rewarding. Even if its just little bits and pieces at first - it adds up. I used to think I was better off dead and that scared me which led me to make changes and seek real help. It takes time. lots of time. But it's well worth it.
I will never wear my brain chemistry as some badge of honor or costume - it's merely a part of what makes me whole. There is so much more to me (and you!) than divergent brain chemistry.
I found the “masking” meter the most interesting—and contentious—design choice. It seems to bundle two different phenomena: the active effort of conforming (costly even alone, via internalized norms) and the risk of social detection. That may explain why self-care choices can still deplete masking in private, which confused many.
Two ideas that might deepen the simulation without adding complexity:
- Make the intent explicit by labeling masking as “conformity effort” (with a short tooltip), and split “detection risk” into a separate, slower-moving gauge that mostly changes in social contexts.
- Offer a couple of selectable “profiles” (e.g., sensory sensitivity high/low, ADHD comorbid/not) so players see how the same day plays out differently.
As you open-source it, a “debug view” showing the per-choice deltas and rationale would also help neurotypical players connect the dots. Would you consider parameterizing those profiles so the community can contribute balanced variants?