Other people may have more luck than me. My situation, since being laid off half a year ago I figured I'd try to enjoy the time while it lasted, and travel a bit. Felt like I was close to burning out myself near the end of my previous tenure. Now... it feels like I've truly burnt out from job hunting 9 to 5. Only managed to get one technical screen I didn't pass, and they didn't give a reason. Drove me mad trying to figure out why, but I never did. Haven't gotten even a phone screen ever since, and it's been months.
I'm thinking that since finances and such are pushing me to the end of my rope my only option is menial work for the time being. I think I am depressed. Even if I got another screen and passed I don't know if I'd be capable of the work any longer. It's all hideously demoralizing and it's as if there's no light at the end of the tunnel. I was at a reasonably large company for five years previous, I guess there's only so much that can do in a zero-sum situation like now.
But again, I'm not sure if you'd have worse luck getting any sort of interview for an IC position at least. If burnout at work is that much of a concern and you're confident it makes less sense to go with "keep the job." But I certainly would have regretted leaving (if I had any control over the matter), knowing the job search has now turned into its own job for me, a mentally exhausting unpaid job with no guarantee of positive prospects and an endless stream of employers that reject you every week for no identifiable reason.
Dunno about that, it took me 24 years to realize both my parents were sociopaths (hello autism) and I'd ended up learning some of the very same techniques they used to harass and belittle me for my entire life. And by "sociopath" I don't even mean anything that could come out of a book or movie, it was so subtle and "insignificant" seeming to pass undetected by so-called friends, support workers and therapists (one time I had a therapist tell me they had no idea what my parents did to me was traumatic, another said they were simply doing their part as parents by utilizing hard punishment) So long as you didn't know them in as intimate and private a context as familial, you'd never know what they truly thought of someone who needed to be smoked out
I almost wish my parents had enough cracks in their defenses to just beat me across the face instead of the long-term psychological punishment they sentenced me to under the guise of learning from my mistakes. At least then there's a concrete playbook to dealing with the aftermath of being a battered teen and I could have saved myself another decade of anguish and self-flagellation instead of continuing to be tricked. To this day they still treat me like a child and don't tolerate me as anyone else than their ideal, I have to force myself to hang up on them because I know from reason it's just a trauma bond, because my emotion will just drag me back to them every time
And the thing is, from the outside they've successfully passed undetected, and it doesn't seem like they will ever get their due as they could have both retired by now. Instead my mom works in healthcare to "give back" after recently being diagnosed with cancer, and my dad is a successful startup co-founder that has won contracts with supermarkets and IT firms, some of them huge companies that everyone has heard of (To be sure it makes me hesitant to pursue the founder lifestyle) To someone from the outside they could look like superstar parents, reasonably moral people. And in places they actually are, in a material sense. It is impossible to deny the material successes of my father that I'm sure dozens of other founders on this very site would be salivating to achieve in their entire lives. But when they speak from the heart you realize they have no emotional skills, instead they simply research what they think people need them to hear to not be called out and repurpose the syllables of those words to meet their own needs. And at the same time they're smart enough never to be cold with their genuine friends, co-workers or family who are on good terms, but me. Me and only me.
And the thing is it's good enough for society at large. No, sociopaths do not necessarily get their due from being inherently cold or amoral, because they can still learn the interfacing standards that allow them to pass and just do well enough on the tests of society.
The only reason you can call someone a sociopath to the world is because they've failed at being a sociopath. If the sociopath is indistinguishable from a non-sociopath, which is by design, nobody else will believe you except the people in the pseudosciences you pay to believe you
My life has taught me that there's no difference in a person who genuinely says something and someone who isn't genuine but says the words in a convincing enough manner. Not to mention, that has given me a whole new perspective on behavioral software interviews that has made me totally disillusioned about the industry and process. They convinced me I was in the wrong for so long, and... To this day I still believe that's at least partially true. In spite of denying contact with them now at every turn. I think I'm beyond the point of being fully convinced otherwise
So no, my parents had iron-clad social manipulation skills but they were both far from incompetent to anyone besides me who asked. it was a valuable lesson that life doesn't emulate fiction, because if life were translated to fiction without embellishments then people would get bored and tend not to care. They have ensured my story is a boring one that resists novelization for the social workers that attempt to listen but has traumatized me regardless
The only thing I can do now is move on, quit blaming myself for everything and pick up the pieces, because all I can tell myself is they didn't define my life and I am my own person, I am my own person...
I am not the GP but for me it is when therapists strike at the same weaknesses you're still trying to get over, and aren't tolerant of the ensuing negativity or wounds that are reopened. From my understanding the person in therapy has to be at their most vulnerable to receive the most effective care, and if you happen to pick a therapist that disagrees with your state of mind at your most vulnerable moments, then that only validates your existing fears. "You should see a therapist" has been said to me (and I'm sure countless others) without any indication that therapy is only a tool that works on some and not others. It also doesn't encapsulate that you have to have a strategy in place for how you use therapy, you have to do the majority of the work yourself, and if you choose a therapist that doesn't accept your worldview, however flawed it is at the time, you could validate your deepest fears all over again. I thought I at least understood those parts but I wasn't prepared for the rest, namely that therapists (for the time being) are human, and by nature of being human will always be infallible
One of my (many) issues was fear of expressing my own feelings. (For reasons that will become clear it still is) I wasn't in complete denial of this at the time and in fact wrote a fairly long document "outing" myself, my past history and my behavioral tendencies so my therapist wouldn't be fooled by the unconscious things I said or did. It was because therapy has to be based on self-reporting because the therapist can't read your mind, so what you say to them will influence the advice they give. I had unconsciously trained myself to speak in such a way that whatever help they would give would be irrelevant to my actual situation by way of omitting details or blowing up issues out of proportion and I could eternally vent to them without getting over any of my problems. I understand this is wrong. It wasn't productive at all; it was a defense mechanism I put up to avoid talking about my feelings under the guise of being "gifted" like I had been labeled in my early years. This was what I wanted to unroot with my last therapist and though a part of me hated how I was trying to "test" them I was going to have these tendencies anyway so I thought it was better if I tried to be vulnerable about them upfront
In response to that long document of self-reflection my therapist at the time raised his voice at me and the one thing I can remember him saying was that he "was only human." I interpreted this to mean only a super-human was capable of dealing with me; that he was frustrated by something he couldn't understand. I brought this up with him but it seemed to just glance off. In fact, I realized that the entirety of my document where I had for the umpteenth time exposed my darkest feelings to a stranger had been glanced over. And indeed this exact fear of vulnerability was one of the problems I was wanting to work over with him, and now that fear had become a lot more justified in my mind. I hadn't even gotten to talking about that fear because there was still so much about myself that I hadn't written about yet and I was still planning to. Or rather, had yet to expose unjustifiably (at least how I felt in the moment). Certainly I wasn't going to write about myself anymore. I realized my latest therapist was just another person in a long line of people throughout my life, supposed friends and relatives included, for whom trying to be vulnerable only resulted in more harm to my psyche than good. And over the course of my life up to this point, that was a consistent pattern with other therapists, whether or not I was paying the person to listen. It felt like I was preventing my actual voice from being heard, and any attempt at metacognition to point at myself and say "this is the real problem, not any of the gobbledygook I was spouting earlier" was for some reason always stamped out, I guess one too many times. Maybe it's because they do take what I say at face value, and/or I really am that malicious to lead them down all the way that path. And I wasn't even looking for validation that anything in what I wrote was justifiable or didn't need to change, as my assumption was it wasn't and that was exactly what I was seeking treatment for, unconscious frames of mind that I don't normally think about every day that make people turn away
I kept going for a few more weeks but the writing was on the wall; I no longer felt comfortable there. That was after over a decade and a half of seeing dozens of therapists. I was tired of attempting the same thing in a multitude of different styles and variations and seeing the same result unfold each time. I can only conclude I'm not the kind of person that responds well to traditional talk therapy. If anyone is to blame for that it's me, not the therapist. Anything I write isn't an indictment that therapy as a whole is not helpful, because thousands of people say it is and I have no way of disproving them; all I know is that it's not helpful for me alone. I feel like I just don't resonate with anyone else's wavelength, in general, that thought biases me to avoid attempting to fit in where I possibly could have, and the cycle repeats itself. I've now fully internalized that I'm outside of the grain, so to speak, and that my opinions are irrelevant to anyone but myself
After the fact I considered that maybe the people who refused to talk to me and told me to go to therapy before I was "ready" to talk to them again had only suggested that to me because in their minds I had failed them, and I needed corrective action, that talk therapy was the corrective action, and once the specialists had done their work to set my views straight I could rejoin the grown-up league and talk to actual people again. In hindsight maybe I wouldn't have liked talking to the actual people as much as I thought I would, had their scenario come to reality
For what it's worth I still try to believe that most of the billions of people on Earth have good intentions; it's just that those intentions have nothing to do with me, it isn't big deal that they have nothing to do with me, and those people would lead happier lives if I left myself out of them. I don't want to darken anyone's day more than I feel I have to (because I deem the act of writing what's on my mind as selfish, and this entire comment is exemplary of that) so I don't persist in communication anymore; only when I feel like I absolutely have to scream out what's on my mind, and not any longer than I must from the fear of becoming yet another person that dumps their trauma on innocent people for need of validation. Past a certain point I just want to place it somewhere
And to be clear, I really, honestly believe that explanation still isn't enough to justify me writing this in such a public place, and I would still feel the shame even if I lampshaded every single motivation I have for writing it and ensuring I preemptively defended myself against every single counterattack an arbitrary internet commentator could respond to me with. In my mind being so open with my experience is merely an indicator that my ongoing metamorphosis into a person immune to emotion and vain desires has yet to succeed
Not to mention the search isn't just about finding "a" therapist, it's about finding one that's a good fit. As I've learned a bad therapist can set you back months or years. I'd be willing to bet half of them you'd find in any online aggregator could end up communicating more judgementally than even the LLM if something you say provokes them, hence the market for these kinds of bots, and those are the people have degrees in psychotherapy
Interesting question however, is I wonder if people will see these bots as a solution to the issue that human empathy is finite. As a human you can't support a depressed person forever if your actions do not cause change, there's only so much mental strain a person can handle moreso someone untrained. Many people talk of going no-contact with those that are extremely troublesome after so long, even if they're family. I don't really know how to solve that exhaustion except telling them to go elsewhere, which could be seen by some vulnerable persons as abandonment
On the other hand a chatbot with no filters will never tire of you
I'm biased since I live this philosophy but it sort of works for me, I've trained myself to realize these sorts of services operate by "interfacing" by emitting strings of words that sound appealing to the mind that consumes them. Look at virtual YouTubers for another example, it's the experience of watching people act "genuine" like casual friends because it activates the same social neurons, hence each month the actors receive a paycheck
The question becomes more complicated when the corpos are done away with and you have the model running on your own machine. The entity I tend to trust the most in life is raw, unfiltered silicon. When I program, it does exactly what I ask it to, to a fault. It doesn't turn its back on you because you said something stupid or you don't agree with an opinion it holds
But is an LLM repeating the tokens "you are worthy of this life" and its many variants thousands of times fundamentally any better even if you're in control? It strikes me as one step closer to wireheading honestly. But that's true for a lot of things like video games, just to a much more distant extent, it's all data in the end
But interest and anxiety have gotten the better of me when it comes to meeting strangers, so I'm at a loss. Maybe the solution for people like me is to just ignore all those things in the category of social or substitute and channel my efforts into other hobbies instead of continuing to associate stress with communication. Or intellectualize endlessly, like in this post, to prevent any emotional bond from easily forming when people read it
The chatbot in that article did have safeguards in place to stop it from listing suicide methods, but he just kept asking until he found a jailbreak. He was looking for someone to give him the answer he wanted all along
Past a certain point is there anything that will stop someone that determined to find something to validate their own self-destructive viewpoint? If not AI then a site or faction or person on Telegram with a pro-suicide opinion could have the same effect, and it would still be just as tragic but no longer be noteworthy. It didn't sound like he had a happy life to begin with with the AI ruining it completely, like it sounds
Its not social anxiety for me, its asociality. It turns out the reason could be genetic. I talked to my mom recently, she said she came from a "line of sociopaths". I think she's exaggerating but I got the idea. Her father had multiple wives, and at least 3 male offspring still alive sound like me. My closest cousin has no friends and lives as a hikkikomori in his mid-30s. My mom's brother is extremely awkward and it took him a decade of concentrated effort just to be able to exist in a social crowd, and he still has no long-term friends. So much of my life made sense hearing that, and today I almost feel righteous in avoiding contact with others, having friends in my 20s wasn't a battle I was going to win with how unprepared and demotivated I was to fight it, and how my brain was working against me the whole time
I concluded that I really really really don't have much to add to any arbitrary meeting group, I've been in a lot of bad meetup.com meetings with people just like me that are lonely and awkward yet expect something to happen or work out...and it never does. And then there are groups that should work out, full of older persons with lots of social experience that treat me like a long lost friend...and yet it doesn't feel real to me. Like I can't stay engaged. Like it's artificial, constructed. Like there's no reason to talk to these people when the activity ends. And I keep thinking that's fine, to be left totally alone. I don't care either way. Everyone else screams at me "that's not okay, youre going to die early from isolation." So its like I have to eventually push myself into these situations I don't want to be in at some point or I'm killing myself. By having no friends I'm committing suicide. It's absurd to me. It sucks the joy out of it all every time, when its between remaining myself and supposedly dying miserably or forcing myself into situations I don't want to be in
I don't think this is at the level of "making friends is hard" anymore, like I used to. Its something so much deeper and so much more firmly rooted that most can't comprehend its depths. Hence why I feel alienated by people when I try to explain my condition to others in earnest, even when I'm trying to help them approach me. And admittedly it makes me feel like someone different or unique but I'm not going to say it helps me
Nearly outing related to a hobby I thought I liked...made me enjoy that hobby less afterwards, even alone. It's like seeing myself in a mirror. I questioned who I was outside of my work, never found a satisfactory answer, and just didn't want to keep going in the end.
For now I have accepted that the reason I keep getting roiled up about people talking about having trouble making friends is because we had to make friends or form communities to survive as a species. It's the human condition. So I keep coming back to the thought like a mutt in heat. My mind is wired to care at some level even if there's a veneer I can't scrape off. And infall outside the grain. But I don't see anything wrong with it. Hell, in another life if I cared about going out more I could have been an actual socialpath singularly focused on getting what I wanted out of people, and had I been any more charismatic in this life I sincerely believe that might just have come true
I found one of the best parts of travelling to a country where I don't speak the language is that I can keep to myself without feeling obligated to bother anyone, and after a few days I can just scurry away without being seen or cared about. It's a liberating feeling when I keep feeling pressured to perform correctly in my home country and I've been continually shunned or ostracized for not fitting in at X or Y social club, exactly like I expected from the start. Its also why when I learn a language (Japanese) it's like an "emotional blunting" to consume media in that language. even though I understand the meaning of the words/sentences perfectly it's like there's no "weight" to them. It puts distance between me and people who speak my native tongue. I don't get emotionally attached like if I read the same story in English, because I have no real connection to Japanese besides side interest.I can live within these texts that all others around me can't understand. And at times it feels like a metaphor for my life
There are two problems I see with just saying this
- "working on yourself" is left unclearly defined
- the assumption that you have to "work on yourself" before you can get in front of other people (apologies if that wasn't what you were insinuating but I've been given this advice by others)
Addressing the first the most obvious way that society deems "working on yourself" if I had to guess is going to therapy. Well I have troubles going to therapy because evidently some part of my brain related to forming any sort of human relationship (romantic friendly business or therapeutic) is stunted. For me the interest you speak of and work ethic for dealing with humans over objects just fades. They can be as enthusiastic as possible and I can completely forget they exist after a week if they aren't physically in front of my face by then. And there are plenty of states of apathy in between. So therapy doesn't work out that well. I go back to those people who recommended therapy for advice. They say "well go to therapy again, wrong therapist." At that point Im willing to believe theyre telling me that because they have no idea how to deal with me and want me out of their sights asap so a professional can take the brunt of my miasma. And that is a legitimate tactic when dealing with severely depressed people, see "codependence", it is just the truth. At that point I cant bear to be around them any more
Addressing the second, I think that would contribute to more alone time for someone seeking self help, whereas experience by doing is better for learning. Though, by now Ive learned the hard way that dragging my clearance-shelf mind into someone elses good time feels like it would be selfish to them and unfulfilling for me, but thats me personally
So my new idea of working on myself is just trying to stay employed as a single living thing and hoping I can retire without any more mental defects forming. Sometimes I feel empty. Maybe I got the wrong idea.
I once read that the Outsider (as defined by Colin Wilson) lives their live in the pursuit of truth. I think that may partially explain why such a tactic is so ineffective for those people. They are concerned with what they think is the truth behind the words above what the words makes them feel, when the latter is supposed to be more important to the speaker of the words. The words are a tool to get someone to clean up their act, get off the couch and get employed again, and after they're said they've served their purpose they're forgotten about. The Outsider seeks that obvious admittance that never comes
I can understand the purpose of self-help statements like "if it frightens you then do it." The point is for the consumer of the help to do things they wouldn't. But I'm tempted to say "I'm frightened of punching people out of the blue, vividly imagine myself doing so out in public every day and have to constantly repress my urge to do so." The author says "thats not what I meant." Then I'd say "then say what you mean." But the point has been lost in a mishmash of semantics. And in the end I'm still frightened of punching people
Im in the habit of peeling back the ulterior motives behind such tactics. Its more concerned with what the people are trying to get me to do if they're making a subjective statement more than the content of the statement. I call that kind of act 'positive gaslighting'. The term gaslighting is almost a universally negative connotation but nobody really talks about the flip side, when you have to look to faith instead of working with truth to feel better. Honestly Id let myself be stoned to death than accept such words uncritically just because it makes me "feel better". I have to twist them into a narrative that makes sense with my worldview
(The irony is that blackpilled incel culture is just another tribe that you can't cross with the wrong words ("maybe I have a chance") or youll get decapitated, I want to remain outside of any tribe for the rest of my life if it kills me)
> Being the cause of, and the sufferer of a "broken heart" is a formative experience. There's nothing like healing a broken heart to teach you that actually things get better, and it wasn't right anyway.
I've never understood this, when I was a teen I had fallings out with a person who was a friend but I couldnt read her social signals, I was nowhere near dating her in hindsight and she was too shy tell me what she actually thought of me until it was too late. Combined with a subsequent brutal fallings out with my family lasting for months that caused me to give up any idea of talking to a woman for more than one day
It took 5 more years for me to be diagnosed as autistic. By that point I figured that had been a death sentence for my social life. Lack of success with male counterparts after the social skills sessions and years of therapy solidified that no amount of help would allow me to look past it
Im now going into my thirties and have no friends, still I guess I'm posting on some guys Hn submission about being single so that counts for something, sounds more appropriate a comment on Tumblr though. I'd be willing to believe the only thing keeping me coming back at this point is hormones and the results of evolution. I reject any advance from all genders so nothing is logically inconsistent. I get what I put in. I just want to live a constructed narrative. Some days I wish I could just burn out all my mirror neurons and stop anguishing over it all if I'm really not going to go back again. But even now I guess I still want someone to hear me rant, just so I don't turn insane, its been my one real worry recently
> She’s working essentially three jobs and is extremely tired - is that really autistic burnout, or just regular exhaustion?
> At what point are we going to say that expecting people to do so much is not realistic
The problem from my standpoint is that some autistic people just want to do so much, they have a variety of very intense interests that simply override basic things like personal health, and there is no conscious awareness of those things, that requires someone outside the loop to intervene
I was trapped in the exact same situation for years, being an autistic and constantly hyperfocusing on what made me happy, during all that time the most I cared about was my own hobbies and nearly everything I thought about somehow led back to a new idea I could apply to one of them, the whole time anything about sleep exhaustion or eating properly was just not in my headspace. It was like I was blind to those things
And the hardest thing? We are led to believe that some things in life are "one's calling", that they fulfill us or make us the happiest, etc. I got into the state of believing that for my hobbies to the point that they overtook me. With my kind of focus there's no such thing as guard rails, Ill look up after "two hours of work" and it will actually be 4:00AM and I wouldn't have even realized it
Its really the definition of "too much of a good thing", it got to the point where I was asking my parents or my therapists to help keep me accountable by gently reminding me to go to bed at a certain time, but all they offered me was the equivalent of "well you're a grown adult so you're going to have to learn to deal with basic life needs by yourself, good luck." It was no less than two minutes of their time a day yet it was seen as so trivial that those people believed I had no choice but to understand what I could not understand if left to my own devices
That is the kind of thing that is misunderstood about autistic people I think, others underestimate the support that they will need to function at the same level as normal people, but when offered the idea of keeping them accountable they overestimate the supposed burden it places on them, when its really not that much in my eyes
It was a reasonable amount of corporate work combined with way too many intense interests. I wanted to pursue them all alone despite having the work shared by community members being typical (OSS)
Its like the feeling of wanting to embrace burnout just because the things you pursue are that fulfilling and make you that much happier, and that was despite me knowing I would not find happiness as a corpo and deliberately working less hours whenever I could.
Now there is a constant film of tiredness, I sleep 10 hours a day and wake up exhausted, for a while I was worried I was doing permanent damage to my brain with how terrible my short-term memory was.
At least its reassuring the condition has a name, I always assumed autistic burnout was just the same as regular burnout, well I stand corrected.
I also tried ketamine but didn't react well to it so the doc didn't let me sign up for more sessions.
Yeah I agree, the frustration is real. You can't really joke about "serious" addictions like heroin or binge eating like you can with porn, and it results in your concerns being taken less seriously. Sexual humor is validated everywhere and it entraps those with less self control
And one thing I haven't seen mentioned a whole lot, the release of Stable Diffusion has made my problem way, way worse. I've been magnetized to the screen for weeks on end reading up on machine learning concepts and training on dozens of datasets, just to fuel my addiction and the inner weaknesses that prop it up
I sometimes wonder if this is the future, if this kind of irresistible, infinite ultra-personalization is here to stay, and the paper writers will continue to keep their "Ethics" sections to a maximum of five sentences each buried in the back
I have the same problem. In the sex education course I was given we were taught about abstinence and such, and there wasn't anything controversial as I recall. However I asked the counselor giving the lecture if it were possible to get an STD by masturbating. He said "no." For my adolescent brain, that was all the validation I needed to become addicted to this day.
Many factors have conspired to keep things this way:
- The only prerequisite to becoming addicted is having a body that is intact.
- There is practically nothing to prevent a curious teenager from masturbating at a young age, and the current literature regards this as normal, despite the fact that it can lead to addiction if it's not addressed. But teenagers are not about to let something that embarrassing be addressed by their family, especially for one as reticent as I was.
- Because the addiction is behavioral there is no physical substance to seek out and no seedy culture to involve oneself in, so there's no exposure that could lead to outside forces wanting to change you. You can obtain a limitless amount of porn anywhere for free and nobody would ever know.
- The physical consequences of using are mostly fatigue the next day, which can be mistaken as the result of anything. Mentioning sexual topics is taboo in comparison to admitting you are alcoholic, so nobody is going to guess correctly and intervene based on your appearance. It's an invisible addiction.
- When it's to the point that people online question if addiction to masturbation is even a thing, or if it's a puritanical argument in opposition to sexual freedom, it greatly diminishes the stances of people who actually have the condition and can't control themselves. Many are trying to decrease the shame around sexual things while the people that can't help themselves are left behind adding those movements to an ever-growing list of rationalizations.
- Being addicted to masturbating and/or porn is not as severe as being addicted to hard drugs or even alcohol. It gives you a sense that this is the "right" addiction to have if you're going to have an addiction at all, and makes quitting all but hopeless once it's taken hold.
- Admitting to this publicly opens yourself up to ridicule with the way the culture is set up. It's unlikely many would react positively to jokes about heroin users or binging alcoholics. Sexual humor on the other hand is practically embedded into every sitcom and countless memes and dick jokes. Addiction to masturbation is never going to be taken as seriously or at as large a scale as most other addictions.
The only good part is that the addiction is manageable for the most part and my lack of sociality has prevented me from going as far as casual sex. But I'm starting to have erectile dysfunction and a loss of satisfaction from physical overuse.
A part of me thinks that the way masturbation is meant to be a totally private activity closed off all routes for anyone to help me from a young age. It makes me wonder if trying to avoid all addictions would have been a hopeless endeavor from the start. Every time I admitted it to a counselor or therapist they either wouldn't take it seriously or didn't offer any routines that stuck.
Still, even though it is a rationalization for my own addiction, I am still glad I did not get addicted to alcohol or cigarettes or eating instead. It gives me pause to think how easily I could have started down that path with just a bit more openness to experience than I once had.
EDIT: And of course to prove my point about stigma I've been hellbanned for making this very post.
Personally I would think so. Some people don't want to be bothered, but if they aren't bothered then they don't become statistics. It's interesting to think that no matter what TikTok advocacy movements appear, there could be a subset of individuals for whom the advocacy would never reach, and it's supposed to be that way. Hardly anyone thinks of the invisible, mainly what is passed in front of their eyes.
If letting their conditions be heard for the purpose of having them fit in only serves to exacerbate the problem, given that the problem is the perception of needing to conform to have any chance of acceptance from the outside, then I can imagine an advocacy movement for such a demographic wouldn't be able to sustain itself.
It has been shown that the perception of preferential choices like those of sexual orientation can be changed if the cultural timing is right. Behavioral advocacy stemming from immutable brain structure could be harder, if not infeasible in some cases, especially if you'd be advocating for people who wouldn't want to interact with you after putting in all that work advocating for them.
For me it's more the nature of the therapeutic relationship that gives me pause. I already don't find social experiences rewarding in any sense. My explorations with several therapists in trying to change or manage this failed, from what I think was the flawed hypothesis that I could be made to care about something that I didn't want to care about. And in fact, the nature of social experiences extends to the socialization necessary when interacting with a therapist. I don't know if most therapists are capable of addressing that issue.
This in fact seems to be a common issue with those who are diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder - that they are unable to develop a strong enough relationship with a therapist to see results, possibly because of a lack of social or related interest.
I can only hope that I don't permanently lose interest in working for money as well, for in that case I could be materially damaged for life.
And depression for me comes back when I'm reminded by others that they think I am depressed and need help. It is what well-meaning people and medical professionals cannot resist bringing up now that the subject of depression is less taboo than in the past. And yet, for me it's every little implication by the outside world that I could be in more trouble than I think I am that causes me the most anguish. As a result, I would prefer not to bring up depression if it's not so blatantly obvious that it can't not be discussed. They even could be right in reading my state of mind, but that same issue could also explain why therapy hasn't been successful for me.
Also, when I think about psychotherapy, I tend to remember this passage from Thinking Fast and Slow, a book that dozens of HN users have recommended, that resonated with me in precisely the wrong way:
"You will from time to time meet a patient who shares a disturbing tale of multiple mistakes in his previous treatment. He has been seen by several clinicians, and all failed him. The patient can lucidly describe how his therapists misunderstood him, but he has quickly perceived that you are different. You share the same feeling, are convinced that you understand him, and will able to help. [...] Do not even think of taking on this patient! Throw him out of the office! He is most likely a psychopath and you will not be able to help him."
Many years later I learned that the teacher had warned us against psychopathic charm, and the leading authority in the study of psychopathy confirmed that the teacher’s advice was sound.
I know that I was already biased when I reached this passage, but it single-handedly turned me off of the idea of pop-psych. This was exactly what I had done to the past few therapists I had seen, and I wasn't trying to be disagreeable or charming or anything. I had simply stated what was my own reality: that I felt that my previous therapists didn't understand me. The fact that Kahneman's idea of a well-trained psychotherapist is someone who ought to kick me out of their office instilled a lot of self-doubt about trying therapy again that I don't think I'll be able to explore with another party for a long time. Or, at the very least, that I should do my own research instead of taking the words of popular authors at face value.
I have placed myself in therapy dozens of times up until now. Ultimately nothing has ever worked out up to now. There was always something that prevented further introspection, like the author describes. I am not sure that it is surmountable. Past therapists have told me that my relationship with them was not viable.
At some point I only went to therapy on someone else's insistence. At some other point I realized that I was only ever in therapy because I was terrified of those other people's eyes on me, insisting that I go or I can't reasonably integrate with their company based on becoming a person changed to their expectations. When I realized that, I lost interest entirely. I also reported my experiences with therapy to the other party, and predictably, they shunned me.
So there were two conclusions I could make: that maybe therapy isn't ever going to be as effective with me than with an average person, and that if someone's acceptance of me depends on my acceptance of therapy, then they are a lost cause.
At the same time, I can understand such a response. There are probably hundreds of comments on this site directed towards depressed engineers and others where the advice essentially amounts to "go to therapy." What would those people say if your response was "no, it doesn't work?" But the fact is, it doesn't work. At the same time, common sense surrounding therapy is too strong a force to be reckoned with on an average advice thread, and the culture is not going to overturn it. So your only option is to stay quiet, and be left alone.
This I think is one example of the "boundary" that the author describes, in trying to address that boundary with action.
I was formally diagnosed in the past with an autism spectrum disorder, although I am high-functioning. Now I am beginning to suspect I also carry symptoms of schizoid personality disorder, although this would be a self-diagnosis.
I have never liked interacting with people. This is less of a problem stemming from a lack of social skills than a lack of interest in anyone in my vicinity who could be a social target, and I don't think there's a pill one can take to make other people interesting to one's psyche in perpetuity. It's not a thing for people to criticize what others are interested in, like picking gardening over weightlifting, so I never understood why not being interested in human interaction was any different. That is what being myself feels like. Of course, because interacting with humans is necessary due to how humans underpin critical services like healthcare, there are downsides to not wanting to interact with humans. Despite this, I feel happier alone.
When my family gets close to disowning me outright or people I used to know told me I'm weird to my face, somehow I always come out the other end unfazed, as if I had come to expect it all along and didn't care that I had lost another social link. If someone isn't going to accept that I don't care about socializing with them (and maybe can't, at a neurological level), then there's nothing more I can do.
The fact is, I don't know what else I could do except subjecting myself to what amounts to propaganda (if not therapeutic propaganda) in an effort to convince me I'm something I'm not, for the ultimate outcome of a higher quality of life, regarding a life that is no longer mine. Study authors feel the need to separate people like me out from the average population, as if the condition is an inbuilt part of us. Maybe I have to accept that my brain is different, and not in a way that happens to be more socially acceptable like not identifying as heterosexual. At least in that domain the issue concerns which kinds of people you're interested in, not whether or not you're interested in humanity at all. I have become disillusioned too many times from subversive messaging from individuals who advertise themselves in that way, accepting "everyone", whereas while I tilt my head up and down in superficial understanding in their direction, I can only ever wonder what they're selling.
Also, therapy has never worked for me, the simplest reason being that I don't care about building a relationship with a therapist, especially with the knowledge that the relationship is based on my ability to pay the other party. Nobody I've ever met has understood this, and I have begun to get incredibly suspicious when someone recommends me to start therapy for the 14th time regardless (or even in spite of my own protests), as if it were their off-hand token of sympathy for anyone that matches my general profile.
At the same time I can recognize that the people offering those tokens are not trained to deal with me. Even so, my last therapist said that she couldn't address my concerns because she "was only human."
To answer your original question, I cope with the loneliness that does occur by not recognizing it as loneliness. It isn't advice for you, because my belief is that this is just the pathology of my supposed disorder, and not something that arrived from any personal train of thought. From reading the literature (R.D. Laing, etc.), some believe that the schizoid condition (not necessarily yours, I'm only mentioning this in case it's somehow enlightening) is a contradictory struggle of wanting acceptance from others while rejecting excessive influence and expectations.
I treat the idea of "friends" as "eternal vacation wherever I feel like." They would be nice to have if things worked out, but they don't, so I have to be content living without them. But the problem with the word "friend" is its usage is too vague in my mind. It doesn't encapsulate the expectations the person places on you, which I want none of. It doesn't specify what gated requirements are needed to prevent the relationship from imploding for a reason you interpret as petty or part of a social contagion you do not believe in. As a result, I am not interested in what a neurotypical would refer to when they say the word "friend". My social interest, if any, would be about something else entirely, but which encapsulates the same need for contact/acceptance which is gotten at.
I'm not sure if any of that is helpful. It feels like I'm just venting myself without addressing the question. I seem to have a sort of protagonist syndrome, owing to the "disordered artist" stereotype that is perpetuated, and that fear of being outed as an "I am special"-type prevents me from talking about this earnestly with anyone in real life, especially not on the internet under a recognizable handle. Then again, I don't expect to maintain a vulnerable relationship for the rest of my life at this point, and I'm not even 30.
I'd like to think I'm in a similar position to the author, although that is a huge generalization. But in spite of the similarities, I don't think we'd ever get along if we met in person. I sometimes think that the only people who can empathize with my situation are the same people who won't try to connect further. Everyone else has no clue what I'm on about, and tries to interpret my life with the tools they were given, pressing me to connect with others with elaborate "life is about" platitudes I'm tired of trying to comprehend. It's the nature of the mindset, it's foreign to so many people that don't understand.
I feel the world outside trying to swallow me whole every time I speak up somewhere. If there was a way to know that people were listening to me without the connotations of words such as "like" and the baggage of being obligated to participate in an ensuing conversation, I would take that for what it is and move on. My belief is that that my place in the world, however flawed, and I wish that the fulfillment I get from living that life every day was better understood.
Yeah this is pretty much me. After being diagnosed every social falling out for my entire life in education made sense, but it depressed me because I was essentially a pig in a cage with no appropriate strategy of coping. But even after that I kept being awkward and made too many mistakes with too many people I thought were my friends, and it just got to the point where I closed my applications for friendship for the near (?) future.
Now I only have the heart to treat the social goings-out like a hobby such as video games. I can't stand huge swathes of traditional video games except adventure ones; they frustrate me and send me to sleep irritated, and I don't want to drag myself back to them again for no real benefit day after day. I keep thinking that why should trying to make friends in a world not meant for me be any different? I'm generally happier now than when I hit my lowest lows from rejection by people that I thought I got along with for years until it was all over in the span of a few hours.
I firmly believe my only hope to find companionship is through the identification of mutual suffering in another autistic or schizoid individual, but that does not seem likely with how invisible I am on the internet and in public. Read all the posts about how communication online destroys everything and everyone, etc. (HN is not immune to this either.)
By the way: something that I've rarely seen people discuss is that this pathological inability to be interested in people extends to therapists as well. Therapists are people, too. I feel truly satisfied in life by telling my therapist over and over again how this companionship hobby never works out instead of trying to get better. I even explained this exact positive association to her face in the hopes that she would catch on. Her response: she couldn't help me, because she "was only human". I guess that means I require a superhuman to get through to me. In fact, by then I had already suspected as much. That was the moment I lost all hope in the profession.
From now on I'm more likely to think that someone that recommends me to go back into therapy after 11 years of failed attempts is some kind of delusional. I think I am just an incomprehensible person, genetically or otherwise. The therapeutic outcomes for psychopathy are widely pessimistic; why wouldn't the same apply to someone like me?
I'm thinking that since finances and such are pushing me to the end of my rope my only option is menial work for the time being. I think I am depressed. Even if I got another screen and passed I don't know if I'd be capable of the work any longer. It's all hideously demoralizing and it's as if there's no light at the end of the tunnel. I was at a reasonably large company for five years previous, I guess there's only so much that can do in a zero-sum situation like now.
But again, I'm not sure if you'd have worse luck getting any sort of interview for an IC position at least. If burnout at work is that much of a concern and you're confident it makes less sense to go with "keep the job." But I certainly would have regretted leaving (if I had any control over the matter), knowing the job search has now turned into its own job for me, a mentally exhausting unpaid job with no guarantee of positive prospects and an endless stream of employers that reject you every week for no identifiable reason.