Warning: r slurs in the follow ups in the thread.
https://twitter.com/puella_meiberu/status/1708621428327657816
my reactions are as follows: Even if thats true, which it isnt for every autistic person, the reality is right now is that jobs dont have accomodations for neurdivergent thinking so its irrelevant to say that. Like we can push for and advocate for more inclusive workplaces, but its not the reality autsitic people are dealing with rn.
Especially since like, there are jobs that autistic people can do well but most of them are not “entry level” jobs that anyone can get without qualifications. Retail and food service jobs are near impossible for most autistic people and those are the jobs you can get easy. Manual labor jobs arent much better. I’ve worked at an after school program but I only lasted as long as I did because my original boss let me get away with not “running activities” the reality is that even if you’re good with kids like me most jobs with kids have expectaitons that arent just “being good with kids” that arent good for autistic people. Idk about office stuff.
It reminds me of my ex-friend who claimed to be communist but had a lot of reactionairy attitudes. He always told me that if I ever called him on something and told him it was ableist he would take it seriously, and even called out others when they treated me abliestly. But one day when he posted on his Twitter shitting on Spoon Theory I texted him to call him on that and he started ranting all this shit about how you can “always push through” and talking about how his manual labor job cured his depression (and acting like that will be the case for everyone if they just push, and that manual labor is a cure all) and then started accusing me of wasting my life and making excuses and using my disability as a criticism shield. We no longer talk much lol.
The quote in the tweet is a distinction without a difference, for one.
It’s a bit like telling a permanent wheelchair user that they’re not too disabled to get out and about but if there are no accessible public transport services and they can’t use a car then, yeah, they are too disabled to get out and about.
The cause of the disability can be debated but the reality of the disability doesn’t care one bit for how you make that distinction, as you have already argued.
Secondly, autism is pretty well known for being a spectrum and you can’t universalise the experience of autism just because Ellie in IT is autistic and she copes just fine (Does she really though? Is she so burnt out that she has zero social contact outside of work? Is the rest of her life a complete disaster? Does she literally spend each weekend stuck in bed as she tries to recuperate enough for the coming work week? You can’t know what other people are going through unless you really know them.)
Third, autistic people have a high rate of catatonic episodes compared to most other populations. If you’re autistic and you experience catatonia then, unless your job is a one-in-a-million with regards to accommodations, you’re either going to be unemployable or you’re going to bounce from job to job as your resume looks increasingly poor and you lose references and you dig yourself deeper and deeper into burnout.
As for your friend who doesn’t believe in spoon theory that’s simply an expression of their own personal experience being universalised onto everyone. If you’ve ever experienced burnout or you’ve been through it yourself then it’s pretty obvious that you can push through but that it comes at a high cost and ultimately, at some point, you won’t be able to continue pushing through.
I experience pretty severe bouts of executive dysfunction (hooray for being autistic and ADHD, I guess?) and there’s a point where I get to that I just have to drop out of activities and recuperate. I can push through but I’ll start losing possessions like my cards, my wallet, my keys, and it can even get so bad that I struggle with basic directions and following simple instructions and I’ll forget to do things like locking things up, taking important things with me, or turning the oven or the stove off.
Can I push through? Of course.
Do the consequences of pushing through far outweigh the minimal benefits I might get from pushing through? Absolutely.
Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that it’s healthy, sustainable, positive, or that you should do it (and especially not on a regular basis.)
Can you go out drinking all night and then work the next day? Sure!
Can you do that every day of the week? Maybe…
Are you going to keep your job if you do that for longer than a week? Probably not.
I’d love to hear what the spoon theory-skeptic would have to say about “pushing through” on a week-long bender while trying to hold down a job. But that would probably come off as picking a fight so I doubt it would be worth the discussion.
Are you going to keep your job if you do that for longer than a week? Probably not.
neoliberal Japanese culture lol
The shit I see from Korean work culture (from an outsider perspective so grain of salt) is dreadful, going to drink shots of liquor with your boss after work sounds like torture to me.
No one really gave me shit for skipping after work when it comes up from time to time so small blessings
Great comment thanks! And yeah im never bringing up the topic with him again after the abuse he threw at me last time i did lol.
I’ve self diagnosed given some family history of autism and a bit of anecdotal symptoms I identify with. Similar story with ADHD. I have a ‘formal’ ADHD diagnosis now as an adult but have second guessed the self diagnosis of autism for a while due to my ability to function…alright…in the world but damn if your descriptions don’t describe most of my adult life after not being able to coast by as ‘the smart kid’.
I experience pretty severe bouts of executive dysfunction (hooray for being autistic and ADHD, I guess?) and there’s a point where I get to that I just have to drop out of activities and recuperate. I can push through but I’ll start losing possessions like my cards, my wallet, my keys, and it can even get so bad that I struggle with basic directions and following simple instructions and I’ll forget to do things like locking things up, taking important things with me, or turning the oven or the stove off.
Currently I’m the midst of burning out hard with many financial responsibilities preventing me from just walking away (would even have to pay my job back some…), and this offers some comfort knowing I’m not a complete fuck up for losing another pair of wireless headphones and constantly misreading emails at work and problems on tests at school (oh yeah I’m a full time student too, it’s awful, I hate every minute of it)
Third, autistic people have a high rate of catatonic episodes compared to most other populations. If you’re autistic and you experience catatonia then, unless your job is a one-in-a-million with regards to accommodations, you’re either going to be unemployable or you’re going to bounce from job to job as your resume looks increasingly poor and you lose references and you dig yourself deeper and deeper into burnout.
Kind of just assumed I was an emotionally detached person, especially when experiencing stress in my personal life like fights with loved ones, so again, thanks for making me feel less crazy. Fearing the continuously shrinking lengths of time I can stick around at a job for on my resume too. At least I’m financially obligated to stick around at this one, I’m sure I’ll have no negative consequences /s
I hate this living in a world like this
Currently I’m the midst of burning out hard with many financial responsibilities preventing me from just walking away (would even have to pay my job back some…), and this offers some comfort knowing I’m not a complete fuck up for losing another pair of wireless headphones and constantly misreading emails at work and problems on tests at school (oh yeah I’m a full time student too, it’s awful, I hate every minute of it)
You aren’t a fuck up.
Unsolicited advice, but I’d recommend making the time to do an audit of your life and responsibilities. See if there are any opportunities where you can cut back on the demands you have on yourself. Think about accommodations that you can afford for yourself and what you might be able to request from study and work. The more you persevere through burnout, the deeper the burnout gets and the longer it takes to recover.
An ounce of prevention is absolutely worth a pound of cure in this situation.
Kind of just assumed I was an emotionally detached person, especially when experiencing stress in my personal life like fights with loved ones, so again, thanks for making me feel less crazy. Fearing the continuously shrinking lengths of time I can stick around at a job for on my resume too.
It’s much easier said than done but try to find a job that you are capable of doing at 50-75% capacity, whether that’s psychological and emotional demand or required effort (or similar). If you can do the job at half capacity then you can probably stick at the job through the low points and come out the other end just fine. Be careful about taking on a job where you will be pushed to your limits because if you neeed to reduce your demands to prevent burnout then this means you will need to find areas in your personal life to cut back on demands which often leads to relationship breakdown, social isolation, loss of hobbies and interests, and a general erosion of the things that keep you happy and contribute to your overall wellbeing.
Worst case scenario in this situation is that you can find yourself trapped in a spiral of depression which will cause you to increasingly disengage from the things in your personal life that keep you well while you find yourself putting in extra effort at work to maintain the same level of productivity. No bueno.
On a different note, I am planning to make a post about autistic catatonia here soon because it really isn’t talked about very much and it can have a significant impact on autistic people’s lives. There are ways of treating and preventing it and the knowledge on this stuff is not widespread. I just need to catch myself on a better day than I’ve recently been having before I do it because I want to do the topic justice. Keep a lookout for when that post goes up!
Thanks for the support, it means a lot
losing another pair of wireless headphones
You can forgive yourself here, it’s just the ADHD tax
and talking about how his manual labor job cured his depression (and acting like that will be the case for everyone if they just push, and that manual labor is a cure all)
My manual labor job exacerbated my depression to the point of breakdown and an almost total collapse of my life. I need the capitalism drugs to keep me from jumping off the next tower I’m working on and this person thinks if I just push through I’ll feel better? Fuck off.
Sorry to take a small part of what you said and reply but I feel inadequate speaking on anything else in the post
You’re valid. Completly agree that he’s full of shit. He just internalized some shit and decided to spread it to everyone.
I’m not diagnosed with anything because I’m poor and my parents sucked but I’m so tired of this idea that disability is too easy to get on. Anyone that has gone through the dehumanizing process of applying for disability and actually ended up getting it and can find a way to live off less than poverty wages they give you should not feel the least bit bad about it, even if they could hypothetically work with enough accommodations. Because no one makes those accommodations, those hypothetica ljobs that you could do don’t exist, we’d need a radically different society than the one we do now where people are given assistance and have every accommodation. Until then, fuck anyone that says some people don’t deserve it.
i am “high functioning” in the sense that i can communicate effectively and don’t have any comorbid issues, but i am also “disabled” in the sense of getting so deeply burned out by my boss’s incompetence and the reality of living in a capitalist hellscape that i’ve been quasi-vegetative for years and unemployed since july, in the sense that i quit the phd program i was doing because i don’t care to write my dissertation and i don’t think i could tolerate having to behave in accordance with social norms in the vicinity of tech bros. so in conclusion, uh, fuck the person that made this tweet, they fucking suck. under capitalism, it is absolutely disabling to be autistic because the basic resources for survival are doled out on the basis of social whim. the entire take that they have presented is “someone told me that autistic people are lazy actually, and i’ve taken that as license to believe in nazi-tier eugenics and institutional ableism because i’m a psychopath.” that’s a
worthy attitudeLike i said in reply to bartermyth, i can understand where the tweeter is coming from in a pure frustration sense. I agree theyve come to a reactionairy conclusion, but i think its mostly venting and that nd people need to be able to vent sometimes. They encountered a toxic attitude and are lashing out and i sorta get it.
I came across this because of my friend who lives with a boyfriend and is forced to work and hates it.
maybe it’s because i only recently found out that my own social dysfunction was “just” autism, but i can’t imagine thinking that it would be good to have more ableism done to yourself. i want to minecraft people that want to do ableism at me, and the general social violence of capitalism makes me want to scream. it’s taken me until now to even think this could have been written by an autistic person because the sentiment is so deeply degrading to autistic people, not to mention historically without context.
I mean for me the first thing I’d like to point out is that the attitude they are reacting to here IS an ableist attitude to have. So they have had ableism done to them.
ok, yeah, but experiencing the ableism of “we just have to accommodate you better to fix everything” doesn’t make the response of “do more ableism to me please, motivate violence against me actually” any more valid or sane
The way I read it, which admittedly is a charitable reading, was more the “high fuctioning is when they ignore your needs, low functioning is when they ignore your abilities” dichotomy. Sometimes when your needs get ignored so much the grass seems greener. Like I said elsewhere I have at times considered acting out in public in more “Visibly disabled” ways in the hopes of being more accommodated.
puella_meiburu words it very harshly but I think does so out of frustration with the situation.
maybe i’m being uncharitable then, but in the context of what “demonizing autism” would refer to historically, that seems to me to be a very uncritical/privileged thing to express publicly. there have been as many ways of understanding autistic people as there are cultures, but treating it as a mortal curse is to me pretty obviously a capitalist invention that treats autistic people as fundamentally undeserving of good life. i understand being frustrated, but even i’m not categorically this self-hating, and i personally refuse to accept that framing as even remotely valid. i have a lot of problems with the way that visibly disabled autistic people are understood, almost always in exceedingly infantalized ways. so again, the comment comes across to me as aggressively and violently reactionary, and i am repulsed by it.
Yeah I understand that reaction.
I’m not autistic, but I’m schizophrenic. I’m able to function properly more than 95% of the time in modern society and even perform well in it. However, at my worst, my condition is such that a bad day at the wrong time could not only cost me my job but also real-life connections, which sucks. (I can also end up again in a closed facility, which is great fun.) This is why, apart from my close family and doctors, only one other person knows about my situation. I spiral really badly when it gets bad…which thankfully is extremely rare. But the threat of it hangs above me like a sword of Damocles.
Society as it currently exists isn’t really ready to handle people like me, and I’m pretty much dependent on Lady Luck.
“Accomodations” means “pay them less and deny them promotions because they don’t gladhand and kiss-ass like the normals do at the office.”
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I’d never be open about my politics at work. I’d like pretend to be a SocDem if it ever came up lol. Thats part of masking for me I guess.
That said, I almost feel like a library is probably a safer place to be a commie than a lot of other work places.
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Yeah I realize I’m saying this as someone who is… not really active offline and not a member of a party. If you’re actively doing direct action and shit that’d be different. I just meant workplace conversations.
the reality is right now is that jobs dont have accomodations for neurdivergent thinking so its irrelevant to say that
I feel like you’re coming at this a bit backwards, because you’re seeing it as a “jobs” problem rather than an “employment productive” problem.
At the end of the day, every job needs to be an assembly line, because that’s the only way Fordist minded employers are trained to think. If you can’t work the assembly line, you’re not sufficiently profitable. And that’s that.
No accommodation can be made in a Fordist model, because deviation from the norm is always viewed as an extra expense.
This is, at its root, an administrative problem. The role administrators are (ostensibly) supposed to solve is workplace cohesion. But the only thing administrators know how to do is to shove square pegs into round holes.
Yeah, that last bit was my old boss who ruined my old job for me’s problem. My first one was willing to work around my weaknesses and favor my strengths but the second one wanted to mold me into what was expected and refused to agknowledge my unique skills
Employment will be autistic friendly when it stops involving hierarchical social scripts whose entire purpose is to take forceful authority and dress it up like openness and vulnerability. “My door is always open” almost never means “my door is always open” and taking it literally will make people think you’re gunning for their position because they see you as playing the same hierarchy game as they are. Same reason people don’t like autistic people coming in, immediately identifying all the core issue with the organization, and disclosing them candidly. It’s seen as a threat to power because the assumption is that you’re trying to throw people under the bus for those problems existing. Absolutely none of this can be fixed through “accommodations”. A good mentor culture can help. But we need to find ways to scale up non-hierarchical organizations, which capitalism provides every incentive not to do.
Edit: Also, 10 hour work week when?
Work is the suffering through which we are expected to justify our existence, and it should be a major goal of society to reduce its necessity for all living beings as much as possible.
My reaction is that autism is indeed a disability
It reminds me of my ex-friend who claimed to be communist but had a lot of reactionairy attitudes. He always told me that if I ever called him on something and told him it was ableist he would take it seriously, and even called out others when they treated me abliestly. But one day when he posted on his Twitter shitting on Spoon Theory I texted him to call him on that and he started ranting all this shit about how you can “always push through” and talking about how his manual labor job cured his depression (and acting like that will be the case for everyone if they just push, and that manual labor is a cure all) and then started accusing me of wasting my life and making excuses and using my disability as a criticism shield. We no longer talk much lol.
Did we have the same ex-friend?
Did yours also claim to be a communist while having these opinions?
But yeah I mean “manual labour will cure your depression” is a weirdly common opinion, and youve met every flavor of bad person in the world I think so Im not surprised you’ve experienced it too.
Did yours also claim to be a communist while having these opinions?
No, mine was a “nonpolitical” with all that entailed.
But yeah I mean “manual labour will cure your depression” is a weirdly common opinion, and youve met every flavor of bad person in the world I think so Im not surprised you’ve experienced it too.
Not every flavor, but yeah, quite a few. Being related to a lot of them isn’t a good time either.
Not that its a competition but I almost think that the guy who kinda brought me over into being communist by being openly one betraying leftist values that severely is actually worse than an “apolitical” saying that shit. At least from the apolitical its expected.
I think you’re right. You got me beat there.
jobs hardly accommodate neurotypicals
Yeah work is hard for everyone but NDs experience extra struggles that NTs do not.
this is true, I was gonna say more and elaborate that point but then I just hit reply
Especially since like, there are jobs that autistic people can do well but most of them are not “entry level” jobs that anyone can get without qualifications.
This is a really good point. Entry paths into jobs that are autistic-friendly tend to be based on opaque social expectations. The way I got my first tech job was so roundabout that I considered it dumb luck for a long time. Now I see that most people I work with got hired through similar “dumb luck” scenarios and the systemic nature of how this works to gatekeep people based on race, class, and gender has become very apparent.
Yeah, I want to say it’s more probable than not that 1. the person advocating for less consideration for folks with ASD; 2. the person responding to the first person; 3. a health professional would all disagree with what accommodations look like.
I’d be willing to hear out provisions that a health professional might be willing to cede, perhaps in the longer term interest of the person or people with ASD. For 1. I don’t think history generally shows a good track record for people wanting to take away safeguards and protections for any group, let alone those with mental health issues (which might just be enough history on its own).
