Yay, more Konsi!

I don’t know you or anything about you but what you said, but holy shit. If I was in your care, I would end up more traumatized than before.

Boundaries are a thing. If people refuse to accept boundaries, as some therapist and especially nurses like very much to do, they are toxic. If someone tells you they don’t want to be interrupted sometimes, respect that. Don’t go all “I know what’s best for you”, unless yop’re talking to a literal child - and even then think about whether you’re just telling the child what to do because you don’t think it should be doing what it wants or because it’s really better for the kid.

Some people need alone time. It’s called introversion. An international trip with constant blabbering sounds like a nightmare. I’m imagining they had booked a double room with no option for OP to withdraw. I would melt down in two days.

Not everyone is maladapted and blaming others. Some people have good reason for what you deem unreasonable demands. I don’t know if your client are full-blown adults or have a handicap where their judgement is impaired somewhat, but I want to encourage you to stop and think whether what you’re teaching them actually helps them and fits their individual needs or whether you you think you figured out a blanket approach that you try to get everyone to follow, no matter their mental needs.

Edit: I, too, have a relationship, a great circle of friends and a well-paying full-time job, if you want to claim authorities in something here. And I do set healthy boundaries like OP does. There is no one-size-fits-all.

I’m kinda frowning at the thought that you requiring time to yourself and taking care of yourself is avoiding demands. If my therapist told me that I’d rip him a new one. Thankfully he doesn’t and actually encourages me to remove myself from unhealthy situations.

My social battery isn’t endless. My processing ability isn’t endless. I recharge both by spending time alone in my thoughts and hopefully getting into a flow state with whatever I’m doing.

I’m lucky enough that I have a job where that happens - I’m partially able to offset the social and mental cost of a job by simply working. But other than that I allow myself to not be productive.

My awesome therapist once prescribed me to get bored. Sit on the couch, stare out the window and try not to do anything. My brain needs that time to process everything happening during the day. Scrolling the web, comics, news that interest me? Also helping to process and get lost in a flow state.

Once I started allowing myself that, I fell asleep much better, because the input throughout the day gets processed througout the day and not at night. If you always keep busy, try to always be productive, the whole input waiting to be processed builds up like water behind a dam. Once you lay down, the dam breaks and you can’t stop. It’s not a bad habit to break. It’s just a necessity for your brain to do.

If you’re anything like me, the only thing you’re doing “wrong” is not creating little islands of boredom and flow. If people refuse to accept that, they are the problem. They are crossing boundaries without a second thought. They may think they are helpful but they are not. To me it sounds like you are having your best interest in mind and acting on it despite this weird feeling of “but they love me, I should be grateful”.

Love is about a lot of things, and respect is a big one. If boundaries are ignored, these people are acting toxic. I know this feels unhelpful, because you want human connection, but imho these people most likely took more out of you than they gave you. Maybe your friend has his own issues that make him not able to shut up, but it can’t be you who pays the price. Maybe that girl thought you need someone to take care of you and who knows better than you and guide you through life, and that’s why she nagged.

Long story short: no matter the intention, not everyone who cares about you will be actually helpful. Not everything is your fault. Keep doing you, identify your needs, communicate them (it sounds like you already did that, which is huge) and then enforce them.

From what you mentioned, I actually think you’re doing great. Took me years of therapy to get to that point.

I always thought it was just not possible to measure the state without changing it, so we have no way of even guessing. Schrödinger’s Cat is actually a terrible analogy imho, I always liked to think of it like christmas presents - you don’t know what the inside looks like until you open it. It could be anything!

But then again, once we open it we know it has always been that. Maybe a chameleon in a box and we can’t know what color it had at a given time, even if we open it later? :::

TL,DR: I don’t see this as glorifying, but as a nuanced point of view. Autism is neither a fantastical thing nor is it necessarily the end of the world. It all depends on a lot of external factors, and the people around you (autistic or not) are a huge part of that.

For me this has nothing to do with supremacy and is just an explanation. Granted, I may be missing context, since I never heard anything about the account posting it, but on its own with no explanation I don’t see it.

Supremacy would be if they said “NTs are so dumb for just speaking one language”.

What I see there is NTs having the privilege that everyone around them understands them - similar to people in a rural area before the internet or mass media. They dont need to worry about being understood or think about how people could have other languages without necessarily being dumb - this is the difference between being smart and being educated.

Being educated is book knowledge that you have to acquire or be taught, but even without that you can be smart. And in my eyes it’s a fact that neurotypicals are not well educated about autism, because a lot of the current knowledge is quite recent.

Also, this statement is solely about the social aspect, not talking about sensory issues. There’s studies showing that autistic people among themselves communicate just as well as neurotypical people among themselves and issues show up when the neurotypes are mixed. I’m trying to remember names associated with it, but my memory fails me - I think it was a british study.

This study matches my personal experience though. And it’s the reason why I disclose at work (thankfully my country has good protections in place).

With other autistic/often also adhd people, communication is pretty smooth. With NTs, there’s hiccups, but they understand why and are patient because of that.

All this does not mean autism is a superpower or anything. Since I’m privileged enough to work in my special interest field, my hyperfocus kicks in quite a bit, so I can take advantage of that.

The sensory issues, on the other hand, can be quite debilitating at times, and I need accommodation for that. It’s not all rainbows and sunshine even if you take the social issues out (or manage to alleviate them as in my case). Autism is still a disability after all, but posts like this are still a good thing because it’s also not always doom and gloom. If you get the right environment, it can be manageable enough to have a decent life.

The stairs of ascension to experienced DM are being made out of dead PCs? X)

Dude, have you any idea how many doctors told me (professionally diagnosed) that I can’t be autistic, sure, this is a bit weird, but it’s probably just X, that weird thing is probably just Y and so on, telling me I have like ten other things when all these ten things are all explained by autism?

All because drumroll I can hold eye contact. Yes, I’ve been pressured into masking hard. It makes me suffer, and now you use it to deny me support?

Most doctors have not kept up with the development on diagnosing atypical autism and the ones that do you have almost no chance of scoring an appointment with.

And I am in a coultry where we at least do consider autism for females. There’s still lots of countries where high-functioning autists don’t get diagnosed.

Let people “self-diagnose” if it means they findcoping mechanisms and things that explain thwir behaviors. Allow them to say “fuck you” when someone tells them they’re not trying hard enough because they are just lazy, when in reality they are so overwhelmed they can barely function.

Don’t actively make people miserable, because they for whatever reason do not have a formal diagnosis. I encourage most peoble to get one, but I also heard of places that use an official diagnosis against them. I think I read someone from the UK claiming they had custody of their kids challenged because of a diagnosis.

Let people find their coping mechanisms. Even if in the end they don’t have autism, how does this affect you or me or any other autistic person?

My understanding of that article was that it was not necessarily about duplicated code, but duplicated data. If you have two places storing the same data, and different parts of your app go to each of it, you need to somehow keep them in sync, and that’s often a pain.

I’m trying to be very rigorous about avoiding that, duplicated code I’m a bit less rigorous about.

That’s the official version, but at least when I talk about some average dude it’s way too long and artificial, I don’t think the name Mustermann actually exists.

When I think of the most common name to use in casual conversation, I’d probably go for Müller (maybe Peter? Though the first name is probably heavily generation-dependent).

In older publication you may alse find references to “der deutsche Michel” (the german Michel, short for Michael) as a somewhat condescending reference to the average citizen who is very hesitant to adopt new concepts and tech and not always able or willing to understand complex concepts. Often used to remark that a product/idea will not have a chance on the market because “der deutsche Michel” doesn’t see the pointor would never pick it up.

Haven’t seen that in a while though, I guess Germans have become more open to new stuff :)

The most important thing is to start. Which language you pick is less important, once you grasp a concept you can just google how the syntax is for another language.

I made the mistake of being too brainy - thinking too much about how to start correctly and which language to pick. I ended up waffling around with some python here, some javascript there, and some c# as well. In hindsight I think just startingin any language and trying to |ake projects instead of looking for the perfect course and combination would have helped much more.

I personally like w3schools a lot, they have very concise courses for a lot of languages, and also a reference for most of them so if you don’t want to follow a course you can just look up things real quick and see what happens.

It will get better. Right after school I felt disoriented by the lack of structure and overwhelmed by the decisions to make. Once you work through that, you will be less overstimulated and able to tackle things again!

Agreed! A good meme will make me laugh even if I’ve seen it before, unless it was three times yesterday.

I’m not American, but I born and bred in the EU. Please don’t assume wildly :)

I still view it as a value issue: you are looking out for your own good above contributing to society. If everyone does that, it will be utterly impossible for society to actually give back, because you’re depriving society of the taxes it needs to move.

I’d rather contribute to society and the social security net we have. Any society will have people who are unable to work due to disability or sickness, and to me taking care of your weak links is a mark of civilization. We don’t have to leave disabled or injured members of society in the dust to die. We have the means to take care of them, and that’s what taxes are for.

But we kind of lost track of the original question, why the wages are lower in the EU than in the US. In my opinion it’s because with all the social security and insurance it is not necessary and the environment - the society - is providing part of what you get in monetary form in the US.

I guess it’s a difference in values, which affects your perspective. You can see it as robbing, or as contributing to society.

I’m trying to word it as neutral as possible, but it’s really hard in the values area. I think both sets of values are valid. I may not agree with yours, but that’s the thing with moral values - if you don’t share the same values, you will never see eye to eye or agree. Hard to be objective in such a situation.

Tl,dr: you value different things, which is not evil or bad, but completely valid. It’s just that I personally with my values don’t agree and see it negatively.

Maybe there already lies another reason for the lower salaries - if you are from a country which traditionally had your company actually appreciate their employees and make them feel valued, and historically you just had to land your job and could expect to stay with the company the rest of your life, you will not be actively looking unless you get laid off. Loyalty on both sides is still quite common where I live.

Social security. Strong protection against lay-offs. University without paying upfront - just because you don’t care for it as someone who didn’t grow up here, doesn’t mean it’s not a benefit for the majority. Healthcare at affordable prices. Public transport.

The thing is, you only see your own benefit. And I feel that’s a very typical way of looking at life in the US. The state is not here to rob you, but to provide you with a structure to live in that you couldn’t have in the same way on your own. Public transport may not be something you need, but what about the elderly? What about the people who can’t drive for whatever reason?

What if you have an accident that renders you unable to work? It doesn’t even need to be your fault. Someone might loose control over their car and you might get hit. People like that need strong social nets, and people who can work finance them. Elderly people need those. They are often sick (high health care costs) and not longer able to drive (public transport) and if their pension is not enough, the social security kicks in and supports them.

You personally may not be profiting from it right now, but there’s a ton of security built into the system for everyone that gets financed by everyone according to their means.

Isn’t the question rather “why do US companies do that” when they could get away with paying less?

I can only speak for myself but I’m not keen on constantly job-hunting like I see so many US engineer advise. I’m looking for a more stable situation where the company seeks to hire long-term, and often in those cases you get benefits that are not monetary. Free access to partnered places like fitness studios or swimming pools can’t really be rolled into your salary, but if you use those often you end up with a financial benefit too. Automatical raises when your child is born is another.

Maybe it’s just a different culture, but I’ll trade in some base salary for a work environment based on mutual trust and goodwill.

This right here. I’ll gladly take less pay in Europe than constantly having to worry about my health and whether or not that bit of pain you sometimes have in a weird area means a hospital bill you can’t afford. And even if I loose my job, I know I will not starve, because of our social security system. It will not be fun, but I won’t loose my house or worry about what to eat tomorrow just because I got unlucky and my company went under.

As someone with ASD, the difference it makes when you know your sensory issues and are able to get accommodation for it is insane.

I just started a new job where I am open about it and my officemates love that I love the “dark” spot away from the windows. Now they don’t have to sit there. For me, the peace and quiet of that place means my stress level is so low for the first time in my life that I struggle to go to sleep at night.

My “go to sleep” indicator has been mental stress, but my job allows my to hyperfocus, which is recharging my mental batteries. I’m left alone to do my thing unless there is a meeting that’s been announced way before or I reach out to others.

When I get home from work, I may be physically tired, but mentally I could just go on, because the basic level of stress that was at like 70% all my life is so much lower now. Now I have to learn how to recognize when I physically need to sleep - and fight my brain on it, because it just wants to play…

Long story short: my diagnosis for ASD changed my life, for the better. But there are many factors to consider (state of healthcare is a big one, accessibility of therapy, possible legal ramifications in your country, social acceptance, but alse how much it affects you).

For me, ASD helped me make sense of what was happening and allowed me to pushback when others were calling me lazy. But what helped me was mostly therapy work, and if you have a good therapist, you can just work on those issues separately. Imho you can get the help you need for ASD without a diagnosis, but in my situation the diagnosis was a massive help.

I mean, it controls us like having blonde or brown or black hair controls us. Trying to act as if you have another hair color requires immense effort and resources and might damage your hair - think of a dark brown-haired person trying to appear blonde and have nobody notice.

You have to continuously dye so people won’t see roots. That will damage your hair really badly. You will have to bleach your pubes. Either shave or bleach all your body hair. Your eye-brows. And even then: if you have darker skin, people will doubt blonde is your real hair color, because they know it’s a rare (or impossible) combination. Also, bleached hair never has the variety of color tones natural hair has. For blondes, single hairs can be reddish, light brown, really white blonde etc, and it’s the mix that makes blonde.

You can never pass as a natural blonde when you bleach your hair unless people are inattentive. Yet no one complains about someole being a brunette controling them…

I feel that is also true for being autistic. It requires enormous effort to appear NT, it will never be perfect or natural, and it is very damaging to your mental health.