The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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The first time I googled the phrase "autistic burnout", one of the top results was an article titled "Help, I'm getting more autistic!" I was kind of pleasantly surprised to see that other people experienced it this way--as literally "getting more autistic" when burnt out--because perceiving it as such but not thinking that was possible or typical had me kind of feeling like I was just going crazy. This was in ~2019, shortly after the scales first fell from my eyes and I realized that relating to my (long-diagnosed Asperger's) brother but being able to route around the same inclinations so that I didn't act quite like he does was not the same thing as not being autistic. It's funny to me though, that the common opinion chalks burnout up to psychological factors. As someone with co-occurring chronic fatigue etc. type of issues, it's long been obvious to me that my social function worsens when my physical health worsens, even before the autism possibility had entered my brain. Burnout, in my opinion, is as much an energy or at least medical issue as it is a psychological one.
I live in vicious merry-go-round cycles like this: I overextend myself, live inauthentically to fit in, don't take care of myself because my needs (both in terms of health issues and in terms of autism) are weird, fake, made-up, just be normal bro--and I ruin my health, burn out, withdraw, and struggle to recover until I burn every bridge so I can start over finally listening to my own instincts/intuition again about what my needs are. However, as I get older, I seem to maybe be making strides at leveraging smaller epicycles to lessen the dramatic swings of the mega cycles. The net result, at the moment, is that I have made good strides on my physical health recently* without having indulged in the formerly-prerequisite "complete social withdrawal" step. And I'm feeling pretty rapidly quite a bit more socially functional. And feeling quite a bit of whiplash.
Anyway, the reason I bring this to The Motte: I'm curious if anyone else goes through times in your lives where you are more socio-culturally-politically more "normie" and times when you are more "extreme", outlier, believe things that could get you cancelled, etc? I feel like the one-way-street is the default: you start out normie and something "radicalizes" you (lol). Has anyone else swung back and forth?
We're not in COVID times anymore: I leave my house and interact with a variety of people. I can't maintain the same psychological/social quarantine I used to that made it less stressful to hold would-make-everyone-think-I'm-a-bad-person opinions. As a result, I can feel this go-along-to-get-along opinion-normifying happening to me, and I think most people would tell me that's normal and good for me. I know for myself it is not. I will think it's fine while the dissonance eats at my subconscious until it wrecks me again at some later date. Does anyone else experience this? What do you do to hold onto things? Is this why everyone is going to church now? I would love to talk to anyone who relates at all to being in this boat.
My journey feels like it is mostly unidirectional and I haven’t noticed the cycles. For me it was:
Okay, I deleted my post before any comments showed up for me because I decided it was too long for anyone to engage with and I would try again when I had time to make it shorter. Whoops.
I am curious how social you are in your current life, and what portion of your social interaction is in-person vs online?
I’m not very social, but I’m mostly content with that. I go to a weekly online book club about spirituality, but most other online content I just consume without engaging with (like listening to long-form podcasts).
In-person I go to a weekly men’s group and meet with a close friend or family about once a month. I also do my exposure therapy at a bar 2-3 times a month. My hobbies are mostly solitary: bicycling, working out, reading, and video games.
I used to attempt to be more social by going to things like Meetups, but I felt like the best outcome I could get was to be tolerated and it was very exhausting being around people I didn’t know in loud environments when I was sober. If I'm not in the right environment (quiet with a structure that encourages going beyond small talk) it feels very hard for me to succeed.
I get frustrated sometimes that I have so much social drive considering my social difficulty. I think I need to remember to pace myself and keep a good amount of my "social" craving getting met online, via podcasts, etc. even when I'm feeling more up to attempting charm. I definitely have the same experience at meetup type groups where the best case scenario is to be tolerated and maybe find one person who partly likes partly tolerates me. Though I'm sometimes reminded when interacting with people IRL for other reasons that there is a bias to the type of person likely to show up at a Meetup group, so that they're more likely to be people I have a hard time clicking with. Throw me in with a group of gamers and I have a fighting chance, though again, that is online...
I'd be curious to hear more about your exposure therapy if you're inclined (I'm moderately into nootropic/biohacking stuff), but no stress if not.
I was just thinking earlier about how much of an easier time I had in college, where socializing meant going deeper into conversation about the day's class discussion for a couple hours with the other biggest nerd in the class before heading back home into a homework hole.
Mind saying more about this? What's this type of person like? And how do those "meetups for the purpose of meeting people" actually play out? I haven't tried them, but I started considering it lately.
In my experience when someone struggles with socializing people often suggests that person should try meetup. So, the bias is that people that go to meetup often struggle with social skills. Generally, I notice it more with groups that are for a specific age demographic, or that mostly do happy hour type events. When the meetup is around some niche hobby that requires commitment and effort the people tend to have better social skills.
To put it more plainly the meetup pattern I noticed is something like this: meetup tends to attract the possibly on the autism spectrum types that need practice at socializing because they didn't fully learn social skills at an earlier stage in life. Then the people with the worst social skills drive away the people with better social skills by doing things like hitting on multiple girls, or saying some really cringe things. There isn't really a polite/viable way to keep the people with underdeveloped social skills out of the Meetups so people with better social skills avoid them in favor of invite only friend groups. If the social skills level of a meetup drops too low then you end up with a bunch of people that are trying to learn social skills, but the other people in the meetup have the same deficit so it is hard for anyone to help each other. It is kind of a tragedy because you've got a bunch of people who recognized their social flaws and are making an effort to fix that, but are in a setting that often reinforces their social anxiety. They need something more structured with a role model/leader to help them develop social skills and give them feedback - but society doesn't really have a free version of that if you don't already have a social network.
Are you referring to Meetup.com in specific, or to the concept of "meetups" in general?
I was referring to Meetup.com specifically.
I have attended at least 100 meetups over the course of 10 years and the pattern I observed was that the 'cool' socially adjusted people would usually stop attending after a few meetups due to their frustration with other people being socially awkward (but this doesn't happen as often in groups dedicated to niche hobbies).
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