In early 2018, I had a run-in with, to put it vaguely, a Scary Dude—now a dead Scary Dude; cancer took a short break from its usual habit of picking the wrong people—who, while alive, had connections both into white supremacist groups and in Silicon Valley at a high level. We’re talking about the sort of person you don’t want as a friend or as an enemy. When I discovered something illegal one of his companies was doing, he tried to extort me into silence. While I didn’t agree to his demands, I decided to let the matter drop, and then he went away, and then nothing happened for about 16 months.
He found out, some point later, that I had applied for a job at a federally funded R&D center in northern Virginia. Some time between when I secured and accepted the offer and what was to be my first day, he reached out to them and shared his suspicion—a correct one—that I am neurodivergent. The job offer was rescinded; the news was delivered to me at 7:58 in the morning on the day I was due to start.
Is that legal? Well, no. So I took the case to a few law firms. The attorneys were honest with me and said that, given the particulars of the case, it would be difficult to collect a judgment that would offset the costs and the long-term risk to my reputation. The math made it clear that it would be a better use of my time and energy to move on and do something else. Punishing bad guys is a noble calling, but there are too many of them to get them all.
That was five years ago. I should be “over it” and, in the most basic way, I am. It doesn’t bother me that I missed out on one opportunity; there are more. On the other hand, the paranoia that follows a rescinded job offer is difficult to describe; once you see that the world is full of knives, you can never fully go back to being the person who didn’t know.
This past April, I read about Zoraya ter Beek, a 29-year-old Dutch woman who decided to pursue euthanasia for mental conditions including autism and treatment-resistant depression, and who died on May 22. I don’t know her, and so I have no personal opinion of whether her decision was the correct one, but it made me sad. Neurodivergent people are not known for having a high life expectancy.
Individuals are capable of loving, liking, ignoring, disliking, or hating us. I’ll readily admit that some people who dislike me, dislike me for good reasons—because of things I have done, not because I am neurodivergent. The whole spectrum of responses exists. Society, on the other hand, fucking hates us, and I’ll explain what I mean in detail below. It would function better on the terms it has chosen for its own self-assessment if we did not exist. Choosing not to die, for me, is an act of defiance—the choice to excel out of oppositional rage, to revel in being a thumb in society’s eye, and to continue inflicting upon the world my raw honesty and my contempt for hypocrisy—but I do not fault others who cannot sustain that energy. I wish this woman hadn’t died, but I’m sympathetic and I hope she’s in a better place.
Words evolve in meaning, and autism has traveled quite far from its inception as a label for severe childhood symptoms seen in some neurodivergent people. It was once thought that severely autistic children who became “high functioning” adults had been cured of their autism and that their milder adulthood social difficulties—when these occur without severe childhood impairment, it’s sometimes called “Asperger’s syndrome”—were merely results of an early social experience deficit. We now understand that autism is neurological, immutable, and far more common than once thought—about 5 percent of us are in the neurosocial minority (a less charged and nonmedical term for the same thing) and, while we can learn social skills and process other people’s cues, we do so in a different way, we do not usually achieve fluency until later in life, and we cannot sustain this fluency at a competitive level. There is, in truth, nothing wrong with us. We are treated badly not because of anything we do, but because we are the minority. The discomfort that many neurotypical people feel around us is something we feel all the time; they would consider it a nightmare to wake up in an alternate world where 95% of people are what is currently called autistic, putting them in the minority—that is our daily life.
This is, of course, a massive topic, and one that is mostly unexplored. It is common in our society to associate autism with social incompetence, but not all of us are socially inept and—trust me on this one—plenty of socially inept people who aren’t autistic. There are non-autistic neurodivergences, such as epilepsy and ADHD, that still face some of the same stigmas and also result in lowered life expectancies, often for overlapping reasons. It’s hard to find one autistic trait for which there isn’t a counterexample somewhere, but if I had to choose one tendency as “the” autistic signature, it’s monotactism or rank-blindness. It’s not that we don’t understand social status. It just another system, and we are good at dissecting those. We are unskilled, however, at discerning and manipulating social status in real time. This is a liability in the corporate world, where the work itself is usually very easy, but one’s success derives from one’s ability to efficiently and correctly, as determined by the organization, allocate emotional labor, which is simply impossible to get right unless one is attuned to fluctuations of individuals’ social status and managerial reach.
It’s not well hidden from the world that autistic people get screwed over by employers. The mechanisms of this are often left unexplored, as if it were just a thing society must accept. It’s worth asking, though, because these issues affect everyone to some degree: What does the process of exclusion look like? Is it autistic traits, or reaction by a pathological society, that causes these issues? Can fix this? Those who are new to this sort of analysis aren’t going to like the answer. That’s OK. I don’t like it either, and I’ve lived with it.
We live in a time of organizational decay, but it was perhaps always true that very few institutions serve any purpose but to uphold the status and maintain the incomes of their elites. This isn’t restricted to business, either; plenty of organizations that claim to be not-for-profit or that aspire to public legitimacy are run, in truth, for the benefit of the rich. To use fewer words, quite a large number of employers serve no purpose—they do things no one should be doing. Others serve a useful purpose but have antisocial functions—for example, dynamic pricing within an airline; obviously, air travel is useful—and are therefore at high risk (and, under capitalism, the probability of approaches one) of being dominated by cancerous factions. It would be false to say that no useful functions exist within our economy, though most could be delivered by some other socioeconomic system than corporate capitalism.
I joke-but-it’s-not-a-joke that hierarchy is the neurotypical special interest. Concerted efforts often require leaders—it is context-specific and it will not always be the same people who should lead—but it’s debatable whether permanent hierarchy serves much of a useful function, other than in the sense that neurotypicals seem to need it. The problem is that—as most neurotypicals, especially those who do not ascend the hierarchy, will agree—is that, in time, the organization’s true purpose converges on the maintenance of the hierarchy, rather than the need that may have required the hierarchy at one time.
In any case, collectives decide at some point that they need to rank people, and there are, broadly speaking, two ways of doing it: compete-to-excel and compete-to-suffer.
In a compete-to-excel regime, people rise if they are known to do things that are both not easy and important to the group. The issue here is that it’s nearly impossible to compare contributions that are genuinely excellent; it’s inherently subjective. Furthermore, opportunities to excel are usually in short supply. At the same time, companies generate lots of work that isn’t very important, won’t make a case for anyone’s promotion, but that still has to be done, sometimes for good and sometimes for not-so-good reasons. Since choice assignments (opportunities to excel) are rare, there will need to be some ranking system in place beforehand. This leads to discussion of the second, far more common, regime: competition-to-suffer. Almost everyone in an organization gets stuck here; in time, it becomes the predominant mechanism by which an organization ranks and tracks people for promotion, favor, stagnation, censure, demotion, and termination.
If you wondered why so many mediocre people end up taking high ranks in companies, there’s your answer.
Excellence is also easier to challenge. When someone does something well, they usually genuinely enjoy it, which allows rivals to make the case that their success isn’t really indicative of dedication or character, because that person was given the best assignments, and should be “tested” with a terrible one. Apparent suffering is, at least, more objective—there are those who stay in the office till 11:30 to correct executives’ mistakes or complete reports that probably will never be read, and there are others who don’t. Organizations, therefore, converge on an elimination contest in which they inflict suffering to see who lasts the longest. After a spell of overwork, tedium, and malign neglect, whose performance is last to drop? Who can take a humiliating assignment with a smile on his face?
The compete-to-suffer mentality thrives in corporate because it seems, on the surface, fair and objective. Whoever drops out last wins. It seems like people are being ranked on dedication, but what’s really happening is psychiatric attrition. Pointless tasks are added, toxic power relationships are introduced, and maltreatment is increasingly tolerated until some people (including most neurotypicals) can’t go on—the usually mild and transient but crippling emergence of mental illness once called “nervous breakdown” and today called “burnout”—leaving the survivors to be promoted, while the runners-up are told they’re lucky for being able to keep their jobs.
I am not of the opinion that all kinds of what we neurodivergent people call “masking” are bad. As a general rule, I try to avoid causing discomfort or doing things that others will perceive as hurtful, even if I do not mean them to be. The neurosocial majority language is not inferior to mine—it is just different. We all have to adapt to the people around us, and this is not inherently toxic.
Still, the cumulative task load of workplace masking—of emotional labor, since it is insufficient to do tedious and often pointless work; one must also pretend to enjoy it—reaches a level that even neurotypicals find to be internally corrosive. Furthermore, the outcomes of compete-to-suffer contests could theoretically be predicted in advance, because it’s always the same rank order that is generated.
Psychopaths tend to win the compete-to-suffer game because, while they may not be immune to all forms of anxiety and depression, they are resistant to the kinds induced by social circumstances. Most people find office politics enervating and disgusting, especially at the intensity level of 40 or 60 or 80 hours per week, but psychopaths revel in the mayhem, as if it were an endlessly fun video game. They outlast everyone else because the sadistic pleasure in watching others suffer energizes them. Is it any wonder that they climb effortlessly to the highest levels of law, finance, and entertainment?
Who tends to fill out the bottom, in compete-to-suffer games? Neurodivergent people, not because we aren’t dedicated or have low character, but simply because we are vulnerable, and because our lives are already difficult. Be honest: did you really think it would be anyone else?
The neurotypical middle destined for the 90 percent in-between show a mix of behaviors. Some of them—commendably—don’t try very hard, and instead focus on making people like them enough that they have decent job security, even if their efforts are moderate and they will never advance. Those who do want to climb the ladder, or who simply don’t have the social skills to play the likability game, are however going to have to enter the compete-to-suffer contest.
Is it possible for companies to find a different way to measure people? One should hope so. Saddling them with unimportant work (which businesses adeptly generate even without conscious effort) to evaluate them for “attitude” seems perverse. Still, I have my doubts. Firms don’t want to risk important work on people they consider not to have proven themselves, and they do not prevent resentments from building toward those perceived to underinvest in shared suffering. Also, while it is useful shorthand to speak of such organizational tendencies in psychological terms—as above, when I say “firms don’t want…”—it is important to understand that these things have no coherent will, only an interplay of personal interests, and are therefore extraordinarily slow (and imprecise) in the making up of a “mind.” If nothing else, while people wait for decisions to be made, firms seem destined to converge on a large number of people trying to play the same game where there are very few prizes. The competitive emotional labor continues until enough of the players drop out because their brains, after years of low-level adrenal assault, force them to do so.
I suspect every autistic person who has had the “good fortune”—I jest, but for us it is no small achievement—of spending five years in corporate employment has figured out that we are doomed to lose in these compete-to-suffer games. We might, if we really exert ourselves and are absolutely virtuosic at masking, get 7th place, but we’re never going to get the gold, and the runner-up prizes are usually so insulting that we’d rather just concede loss, when a compete-to-suffer contest starts, and get it over with. Alas, we’re never allowed to do that. Even if you’re destined to lose, you must race, and you must pretend you are running just as hard as those who have a real shot at winning. Why? Two reasons. First, you have to show gratitude toward the people who went through the effort to set the contest up—neurotypicals are weird. Second, it makes the winners look better to win within a larger pool.
This all said, I’ve learned to adapt. I’m a very analytical person, and analysis like complaint to most people, but I’ve also had a lot of things go shockingly well in my life—I never expected to see 40—and would probably be regarded as (and, in truth, be) very privileged if I were born as a neurotypical version of the same person. I voice this because a lot of people are feeling it; they’re afraid to be tagged as whiners for expressing it. I’m not. I’ve been called a lot worse and I’ll continue to be called worse.
Corporate capitalism cannot adjust to the existence of people like me, and let me explain why. You can’t exempt autistic people from unhealthy masking and compete-to-suffer dynamics and emotional labor without also addressing the fact that neurotypicals also hate that shit, too. They shouldn’t have to do it either. Most of the considerations we autistic people require to thrive at work are things that everyone, not just us, should have. Yes, I do deserve a quiet, respectful work environment. So does everybody else.
During the giving-up-I-mean-end of the pandemic, we observed something interesting and unflattering to corporate bosses with the return-to-office (“RTO”) orders that proliferated despise ample evidence that most of the work can be done from home. Most corporate policies that seem stupid and adverse are, in fact, not irrational maneuvers in a context of collective punishment. Upper management knows that workers don’t actually care as much about the company (meaning: executives’ paychecks and careers) as the executives do, although they pretend to, and this infuriates them. Executives know how bad it is to be a worker (that’s why they became executives) and they know that slackers exist somewhere, but they don’t know where, and it’s hard to do a proper witch hunt—not to say they won’t use one, as “low performer initiatives” and stack ranking are exactly that—without damaging morale. Increasingly frequent status meetings, excessive justification requests, and onerous work environments all exist to collectively punish teams where it is suspected that, somewhere, low performance exists. The objective in making the whole team suffer—of setting policies based on the lowest-performing people—is to get them to turn out their slackers, or at least give management someone to blame. It’s risky to fire someone if you’re not absolutely sure that he’s the problem, but it’s easy to require everyone to account for the prior day’s work, down to the hour, until the team gets fed up enough to sacrifice someone to the gods.
It’s also worth noting that these “low performer initiatives” and stack ranking—firing the bottom 5 or 10 percent, regardless of business circumstances—techniques actually have very little to do with the real low performers. No one cares either way about them. Bosses aren’t stupid; they know there will always be a bottom 10 percent who don’t do much at all. The purpose of this stuff is to scare the performance middle classes, the people whose work does matter to the company’s functioning, but who are not high enough on the heap to get promoted, and who therefore have little incentive not to slack. The fact that strong performers sometimes get “killed by the dice” during these witch hunts is a feature, not a bug.
The corporate system is innately pathological. It cannot accommodate the neurosocial minority, even though it is required by law to do so, because it is also pretty damn hostile to the neurosocial majority. If we were exempted from the competition to suffer, we would do some really great work; however, it would be unfair not to let everyone else benefit from a similar exemption. When we quietly seek personal accommodations, we are “working the system,” but when we openly advocate for everyone having a better work environment, we are “rabble rousers.” In this way, we can’t win. Our existence is a threat to the logical premises on which the system rests. Namely, we refute the implicit belief of corporate society that dedication as measured by participation in emotional labor, something that exhausts us three times as quickly for neurological reasons that have nothing to do with character, is a valid measure of human worth.
I’ve had job offers rescinded when employers discovered my neurodiversity. I’ve been fired for it, and I’ve seen the entire spectrum (pun intended) of carefulness in the other side’s covering up of the real reason for the decision. In one case, I was shifted to undesirable projects after it was discovered, told my manager I was aware of being “gimp tracked,” and was brought in to a conversation with HR over the use of the word “gimp”—for myself. I wasn’t disruptive at any of these companies; often, I did nothing wrong. It was clear, at all times, that these people didn’t think—don’t think, if they think of me at all, which they probably don’t—I deserve to be alive. Keeping on is something I do to spite them; the fight itself is a source of purpose.
I recently got around to watching a Black Mirror episode you recommended in a blog post 10+ years ago ("15 Million Merits" - https://www.netflix.com/watch/70264858?trackId=14170286 ). I couldn't help thinking of it while reading.
I also share your morbid fascination with death. (While presently very happy with life, I suspect I'll prefer to go out on my own terms in a few decades rather than wither away when I'm old.) Here are two notes by people who later committed suicide over health concerns (in 2008 and 2022, respectively) which have haunted me, and which you might find of value as well.
"Two Arms and a Head" by Clayton Schwartz - https://www.2arms1head.com/
"On the Subject of My Suicide" by Norah Vincent - https://lithub.com/on-the-subject-of-my-suicide/
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that there are 8+ billion of us, and most of us hate each other for stupid reasons, so there simply aren't enough resources and political will to give everyone a good life. Especially in a capitalist system. As resources dwindle, we'll just see more and more people shut out of the economic musical chairs. Permanent pointless labor, Black Mirror style, is probably inevitable (and to a large extent already here).
I'm just happy to be old and lucky enough to have mostly escaped that fate. AI/geopolitical instability are presently ruining social media, which was my main remaining way of interacting with people and learning from others. Twitter/Reddit/Facebook are already largely unusable, and once these platforms fully die, no replacements seem to be coming. So I'm consigned to simply retreating offline in the near future and quasi-retiring. (Maybe I'll take up golf.)
I often find myself wondering what the whole point of humanity was. It's like we're all set up to be unhappy. Endless competition, hostility, and deception, with the winners mostly already chosen at birth. It's all such a mess.