[robotresearcher]

"Common life strategy for autistic people: achieve/overachieve until burning out and maybe the overachievement will result in enough social and economic capital to see you through the burnout." @theoriesofminds (Twitter)

This jumped out to me.

[autisticburnout]

I definitely identify with that, so very hard.

I suffered pretty horribly as a kid. On top of the autism, my father was abusive, one of the few friends I had died at 9 years old, and my mom was diagnosed with cancer shortly after. I began to act out, and the school I was sent to helped me learn to "pass" was so horrible I ended up writing about it anonymously for Boing Boing.[1]

Later in grad school, a counselor would point out that on top of the autistic spectrum issue, I may have CPTSD from the treatment I received from the teachers in the alternative school that my acting out caused me to be sent to. It's not in the DSM, so I can't really get anything for it.

I went to college hoping for some stability - anything beyond help desk in my hometown required a degree. College made me "overqualified" for those roles but didn't quite get me to the point I could get a systems admin or software engineering role. In fact between self care and classes, my technical skills declined a bit from when I was 18 to 22.

A professor who I took a job with due to the flexible schedule saw promise in me and encourage me to go to grad school. I don't need a ton of money to be happy, so I figured maybe acquiring some prestige would eventually lead to a decent job - I never wanted to be a professor but I didn't see any other path forward.

I burned out partway through grad school... I managed to pass my quals so I could prove leaving was my choice and left with a master's. Tried working for a smaller company who I told I wanted work life balance, but ended up being laid off despite putting in as much (and sometimes more) hours there than I did in grad school.

So now, like many of the guys I went to school with all those years ago, I live with my parents. The difference being that most of those guys spent the past decade as NEETS. I'm not going to claim living on disability is a picnic, but I sometimes wonder who's smarter: the "genius" who spent a decade trying to push boulders up hills until he got crushed, or the American Hikikomori sitting in their parent's putting in their 10,000th hour of Call of Duty.

[1] https://boingboing.net/2013/01/05/pedagogyofthedepressed.htm...

[pjc50]

> so horrible I ended up writing about it anonymously for Boing Boing.[1]

That sounds more like a communist prison than a school, I'm not surprised it would result in PTSD.

[ip26]

10,000 hours of CoD sounds soul crushingly boring and pointless, so I'm going with the former.

[imtringued]

If CoD really was as boring as you described then nobody would play it. Also about your comment saying something is pointless... Everything is pointless. The least pointless activity is to work but eventually it fuels someone else's pointless activity if the work day is shorter than 16 hours. Gardening is pointless. Playing musical instruments is pointless. Reading fiction is pointless. Building a DIY rubber pad former with a hydraulic press to form sheet metal for your experimental (=non-commecial) aircraft is pointless. All of these are pointless and that's why I'm not doing them.

I wake up at 10 AM to work then go to college from 4PM to 9PM and then spend an hour learning a new language and then watch some movies or play some video games. Sometimes I don't know which of them is the most pointless...

[ido]

At the end of the day we will all eventually die & at some point the heat death of the universe itself will arrive - surely rendering anything anyone ever did "pointless"...

But that doesn't matter - meaning is subjective & you make your own. If something is meaningful to you it's not pointless.

[ThrowawayR2]

> If CoD really was as boring as you described then nobody would play it.

Yeah, but 10,000 hours of COD? That's about 5 years of playing from 9-5 every weekday. That's not enjoyment; that's an illness.

I can't even imagine the ennui of playing 10k hours of the same FPS or even the same series. "Soul crushingly boring" wouldn't even begin to describe it.

[pesmhey]

It engages a lot of primal drives: hunting, team-work, hand-eye coordination, tribal warfare, etc. I mean, we basically evolved to play team sports.

[int_19h]

> That's not enjoyment; that's an illness.

These are not mutually exclusive.

[cannonedhamster]

Gardening creates food, improves your well being, improves your physical fitness, and has been shown to help with dementia. Your definition of "pointless" has no meaning and just sounds like ennui. Language learning opens up new opportunities. CoD at 10K hours is boring. You're skill level is likely to make you better than most people playing, to the point that you might be able to be good enough for esports, which would make the activity not pointless.

[int_19h]

"Boring" and "exciting" is inherently subjective. And you've literally just been told that someone doesn't find that boring.

[freeflight]

It's something where your progress and improvement can actually be tracked and measured, you can actually feel yourself improving by suddenly "outplaying" competition that you couldn't before.

As such it's a way to feel accomplishment and growth for people who don't have many other opportunities for feeling those things.

It's particularly appealing for people who struggle with participating in the usual venues for this, like sports clubs and other socializing that usually requires meat world interaction, which isn't a very easy thing to participate in for people with social anxiety issues.

[krageon]

I suspect you were meant to understand from the line of this person's story that the alternatives are almost equal. Answering is therefore not really what the author was going for (especially if it's a conclusion based on a different perspective than the author's without a very strong underpinning).

[freyir]

The person can rationalize playing 10,000 hours of CoD in their parent’s basement all they want. But I guess we can disagree, too, and suggest they don’t give up on life yet.

Maybe our perspective is that of someone who was in a similar place, and is now looking back on our lives with the benefit of hindsight.

[krageon]

I apologise for not being clearer: I was explaining first why just a single flippant response is not adequate, and also saying that if you want to post a response like that to a post like this maybe you should substantiate your argument a bit more. I can come up with a million reasons for why someone would respond that way and your rationale makes sense, but that doesn't mean that that was the rationale in play here.

It's not obvious to me that people will take a low-effort dismissal of their personal issues and turn that into a valuable learning opportunity.

[abledon]

Apex Legends and other games are all continuations of COD, so interpret that sentence as 10,000 hours of addictive online multiplayer gaming.

[DennisAleynikov]

This is way too real. Attempting to milk the high functioning part of your brain just to run away and hide forever and hopefully coast on the achieved results post-burnout is a cycle I didn't realise I was even doing.

[0x8BADF00D]

It is definitely a finite resource. When you overuse the high functioning, or social mind, you are able to tap into it less. That’s why I make it a point to avoid contact with people for at least a few days.

[bitL]

Heh, but isn't that almost everyone these days? And even normal people get a burnout when they have to run an internal virtual machine to conform to quickly changing society/rules they don't believe to maintain their status, and need a downtime to recover.

[james_s_tayler]

"internal virtual machine" is such a great way to think about it.

Today a recruiter crashed one of my mental containers when she made an API call to me telling me she had an opportunity for me and I responded with 200 "I've got a new role now that I'm happy with" then she fired a GET request for the company I am currently working. I don't implement that method on the social contract (I commented it out recently) and instead just returned a 404. She then immediately fired another GET request for the same information and my mental container just crashed. Just hung up and ended the call. That isolation is great though because I went straight back to enjoying my beer.

[TheLoneTechNerd]

First, amazing post, I want to see a blog post of someone's day entirely like this.

> That isolation is great though because I went straight back to enjoying my beer.

Second, I find the isolation to be a bit leaky - rarely am I immediately back to my normal operation. Maybe I need to reimplement my VM.

Third, isolation in theory is great, but in practice requires far too many resources. I agree that the "internal virtual machine" metaphor is fantastic, but if everyone is running it to fit in with society...we're wasting a ton of brain space at the societal level.

[motohagiography]

Many recruiters try to put you at a disadvantage out of the gate by flipping the script from them selling a job to you to where you are "applying," to them. It's like they think they are on Tinder. Even as a neurotypical, I hang up on them too.

[cortesoft]

They called out this type of response in one of the articles linked from the main article... saying, "I also have that problem!" to someone trying to explain their autistic struggles is dismissing the extra difficulty they face. While it comes from a good place (trying to relate and show empathy), it actually can make them feel worse.

[bravura]

I think the point that OP bitL was getting at is that:

There is a large class of people who are not confident about an autism diagnosis.

They read an article like this looking for clues and discriminators about their autism status, and to better understand where they fall on the spectrum.

When the feedback is: "Don't many people have that problem?", it's not meant as a jibe or an attack on the struggle of autistic people. It's meant to ask: "So how do you tell if this symptom is predictive of autism, and why?"

[jaggederest]

So the answer to the first question, fellow readers, is "Yes, but not to the degree that they read an article about it and wonder if that's them"

It's like one of the pages with autism spectrum testing tools says: "If you take all of the tests on this page, you're probably on the autism spectrum." - most people won't diligently spend 3 or 4 hours trying to see if they're autistic, to a degree that is somewhat diagnostic.

The best tests available are things like https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient - for reference, I'm diagnosed, and before I took it, I got a mid-level score, because I didn't understand the comparative degree to which those things were true for me, e.g. "I often notice small sounds when others do not" - how do you know if you aren't aware and ask?

So, it's a bit like the old saw about "If you have to ask, you'll never know" - it's worth seeing a mental health professional and asking them, because they can provide you the feedback that people on the spectrum are critically missing out on.

[mtsr]

That’s right. This way of expressing similar experiences is actually sympathy, not empathy. And sympathy tends to be unhelpful for the person sympathized with, if not actively counter-productive.

Imagine complaining about an argument with a friend and your friend sympathizes by saying “yeah, I hate him too, he’s such an asshole”. Now you have to empathize with them, while also being unhappy about how they feel about your friend.

[bitL]

Yeah, I guess it's way more difficult for autistic persons :-( Aren't there any supplements that could "boost" the brain to at least decrease the burnout rate?

[rexpop]

It may not be as simple as "supplements," but there are probably dietary and habitual augmentations to bolster these neuro-physiological resources. Sleep is crucial for replenishing neurotransmitters. Exercise is crucial for establishing biorhythms necessary to sleep. We're all fairly malnourished, given the modern western diet is biased towards cheap calories. Copper. Zinc. Iron. Deficiencies in all of these can cause mental health issues. Then there's the notorious (tenuous?) connection between suicidality and gluten.

Anyway, you can do your own research but as for supplements to facilitate extroversion... B vitamins?

[fsloth]

You can compare the experience of an autistic person to the experience of the normal person if you increase the mental load of the normal person to compensate for the extra stress the autistic person is dealing with due to neurological factors.

[itronitron]

Yes, and I think it's important to make that point. Most people get stressed out navigating complex or changing social environments and most people are not autistic.

[zerogvt]

Why do you think that this only applies to autistic people? That's exactly how a lot of non-autistic people feel/behave/strategize as well.

[samirm]

You have to realize that everyone is on the spectrum. Autism isn't a binary property.

[robotresearcher]

Nobody claimed that.

[soulnothing]

This echoes so much to me. I'm working to start a company so I get paid enough to be able to take a vacation.

I feel like if I ever do get to that point. I would just spend the free time recuperating.

[cphoover]

Is this really all that unique to autistic people though? Everyone is stuck in the rat-race.

[m0llusk]

Many people pick up the rules of the rat race quite readily as they play along learning what counts for points, what is foul, how and when to team up and so on. Autistic people tend to struggle with all of that and end up way outside the lines alone having to reel the situation in somehow.

[kstenerud]

Yes, and it never works. People don't remember what you did before, so the social and functional capital you've so carefully accumulated becomes worthless as soon as you need to cash in from some bump in the road :(

[ip26]

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

[mikekchar]

The scary thing about that is that most people are completely unaware of how they made other feel.

[freeflight]

Because that's not an easy thing to be aware of, particularly not when most societal norms train you to suppress showing more extreme manifestations of emotions.

Just try imagining spending a whole day visibly smiling happy.

People who know you will ask you what's the happy occurrence, strangers will think you either mock them or are simply crazy, that's how out of the ordinary visibly being happy is considered, which is just super sad.

[mikekchar]

Hmm... Interesting point. I'm going to try that today and see what happens :-) Umm... Of course I barely see anyone except my wife and people on the street (because I work at home), but I wonder how it will make me feel (other than having a tired mouth...)

[int_19h]

It does work (source: personal experience). But that depends on the kind of people you have been trying to accumulate that capital with. The real problem is that you don't have much if any control over who those people are in many cases where it matters most - school, work, family.

And then on top of that, depending on how far one is on the spectrum, it can be hard to judge people. It's not that you can't do it at all - it's that you are never really confident that you've got it right. And having an emergency plan that you're not confident in, but you know you will need to rely on at some point, can be very stressful in and of itself.

[ehavener]

It sounds a lot like a substance abuser's mindset as well.

[Aloha]

Yeah, this honestly fits an ongoing life pattern with me.