The trap of "I am not an extrovert"

as someone else put it: there are sides in office politics, and by choosing not to play you are picking a side by default, which is often the losing side.

"you can't be neutral on a moving train"

Depending on the person having it, autism isn't all bad, especially not high functioning autism. Some high functioning autistic people actually excel in society, but compared to other autistic people, they seem to be in the minority. The same seems true for high functioning ADHD (again a small minority).

So I don't really see the stigma when someone on HN is called autistic. Given that they are undiagnosed, the likelihood of them falling into the small minority is really high as their problems are mild enough (also, one could be subclinical). At the level of being high functioning, it simply suggests that they process things in a different way.

> In order to become more likable I’ve had to adopt an extremely perceptive and self critical mental framework to analyze every thing I could be doing wrong to annoy or offend people. It has worked, and people seem to like me more, but the mental exhaustion it induces has led to me often yearning for alone time.

I get why he stated that he might be autistic. When I look at the autistic people I know that are socially well-liked, most of them would say a similar thing. The other route I know that some autistic people have taken is mindfulness meditation.

If OP is autistic, I personally would recommend mindfulness meditation as there's a chance his insula is smaller [1]. And mindfulness meditation targets it [2].

Background: did a bachelor in psychology, have studied it informally way before that and I happen to know many autistic people. It's a biased sample, but it paints a picture nonetheless. I'm subclinical myself, according to my therapist I don't hit all the criteria but I have some of them. The biggest one I'm missing is that my life actually goes quite well (friends, married, healthy, I have a job, etc.). If it didn't, there'd probably enough reason to classify me as autistic (e.g. no friends or severe difficulties in finding a partner).

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02785...

[2] There are scientific sources of it, but I find the comment that Cheetah House has made to be more insightful. They research the adverse side effects of meditation and help people with it.

They said: Britton explained to me that it’s likely that my meditation practice, specifically the constant attention directed toward the sensations of the body, may have increased the activation and size of a part of the brain called the insula cortex. “Activation of the insula cortex is related to systemic arousal,” she said. “If you keep amping up your body awareness, there is a point where it becomes too much and the body tries to limit excessive arousal by shutting down the limbic system. That’s why you have an oscillation between intense fear and dissociation.” - See also: https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad

And then you do the same thing in the next line...