If you want to act and think less autistic...

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...you have to become more willing to sacrifice for your survival.

Social skills are to some degree basically a matter of being very willing to sacrifice for your survival.

Autistics basic problem is that they are less willing to sacrifice for their survival than what is considered normal.



Ask yourself, how important is your survival to you? How much are you willing to sacrifice in order for you to survive?

The less you answer "everything" to the last question, the more autistic are you thinking.


This can to some degree beat depression, anxiety and social discomfort.


Hope this could be helpful.

Comments more than welcome.

I think you had another post I responded to. A poll about people "correctly" thinking about their survival.

It would seem to some extent that you're preoccupation with the mechanisms of survival may actually be a manifestation of your autism. This is your current obsession and special interest, and you're intellectualizing it in ways that the average NT doesn't have to. So in some ways, this actually makes you "more autistic," not less.

If all roads lead to survival, then for the person with Asperger's/Autism, our behaviors and mechanisms and desire to question things are part of OUR form of survival. We are indeed at a disadvantage as we're outnumbered by NTs, whose methodology of surviving is different than our own, and moreover, flat out hostile towards ours.

What I would tell you, however, is that what you're advocating almost sounds like a form of self-delusion or wishaway. We are not NT. We will not magically become more NT. And too much sacrifice for the NT way of thinking may actually be a detriment to our own survival. At some point, if one is honest with himself, he may become more depressed and uncomfortable and downright bitter for having to appease the NT structure. NTs abide by it naturally, but for the autistic struggling to placate, it can get very ugly.

Of course, we don't have the ability to ignore the NT structure as they outnumber us, but I don't agree with this idea that more sacrifice to the NT system will beat depression in the long-run because it's counter to what is natural for us.

+1

This is interesting. I suppose what you mean is, the NT need to conform.

I am not willing to fundamentally deny who I am and my natural instincts just to fit in. I would prefer to take the ''This is me and if you don't like it, you can f**k right off'' attitude.
I'm working on it.

It's about confidence. Is it not possible to be a unique person and also garner respect??

I find trying to conform intolerable. It makes me more miserable than being seen as weird.

I think op is a little misguided but is on the right track.

Wanting to survive will not make you less of an aspie.

But it is a very pragmatic way of adapting to your autism.

Nt's have natural instincts for playing the evolutionary game that we simply lack.

If you wanna compete(reproduce) or function in our society it's very important I think for aspies to understand this aspect of nts. Without it your missing a crucial link to understanding aspie.

If you don't believe me I honestly think you may be lacking seriously important information to understand how the world works.

True. Otherwise I likely wouldn't attend this forum I think it is very interesting how humans interact. Gaining this knowledge has helped me a lot socialising better. It's gotten easier for me to talk to others and enjoy their company as a result of it! That's why I'm sharing the knowledge. I'm not saying you can become someone else. I'm suggesting how life can become easier being autistic. Nothing is really going to make you any more or less autistic. But you can learn to accept and enjoy the world better even when you have autism.




I know what you are saying. You should always be true to yourself. I agree.

But at the same time, you cannot escape the survival aspect of your life. It's a simple fact. That's the autistics' problem. The question is how to deal with that when you are autistic. Just sharing how the mechanisms work - I didn't know myself previously.





It's a matter of more sacrifice or more depression. You cannot escape both of them really. That's what I'm saying.



My post was no attack as you seem to perceive it. Only sharing to potentially help.

Last edited by qawer on 17 Mar 2013, 6:51 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Exactly. Stating my point here.




I agree.

Am I the only one who thinks that the OP could be reasonably interperted as suggesting that Aspies don't care about day to day life, and/or that AS is just some sort of delusion and/or emotional issue?

I'm hoping that's a misinterpertation caused by cultural/writing differences.

I didn't perceive your post as an attack, and am sorry you perceived me as perceiving it as an attack. Even on a forum like this, communication breakdown seems inevitable.

My point of contention was that while we certainly can't ignore the NT structure, I question how many NTs deliberately sacrifice, and how many of them do it naturally and unconsciously. For us, it will never come natural, and will always be taxing...which may actually work against our ability to survive. Plus, as someone else here mentioned, I personally find some of my struggle with surviving comes from trying to operate within the NT system, NOT from ignoring it, and its a system that wasn't built for me. Which is why in some ways, survival for us may be counter to what the NTs naturally do.

I wonder, and I may start a post about this, if NTs suddenly disappeared, would our ability to survive be easier? I don't think the planet would be a utopia by any means if everyone had AS, but:

---Does the human race need an NT majority to flourish? That's why it naturally is NT-majority? If everyone had AS, would humanity languish and go extinct?
OR
---If NTs didn't exist, would survival for us with AS greatly improve as the NT social structure (which is our biggest impediment) would no longer be there? Thus, we would be able to compete or cooperate on our own terms, the way the NT majority currently does?



I don't think anyone here disagrees with this. We all flat out acknowledged this. Hell, if it wasn't an issue for any of us, we probably wouldn't have looked into AS in the first place.

Or you just don't rely upon other people for your survival?

I think his argument is that those with AS find conformity and social sacrificing to the herd mentality to be counter to our nature. But that because NTs dominate, we have to appease them, and if we do, we'll be happier and better able to cope.

While this isn't totally incorrect, my worry was that sometimes, appeasing the NT herd mentality may actually be detrimental to us.

But I don't think he ever suggested we don't care about life and survival. It's funny, he thought I perceived his post as an attack, when I didn't. You think his post was dismissive towards aspies, when I don't think that was the case.

But see, it's good to ask and get clarification before assuming the worst. This is one of the key attributes which I think separate the AS from the NT, generally speaking.

You need to eat.
Food costs money.
To get money, you need a job.
Jobs are given by people.

I don't think it's necessarily about being willing. It's about lack of ability. Everyone who is familiar with my posting history here knows that I am very willing to bastardize myself to fit in in just about every bizarre way possible, yet I still have issues with fitting in. Therefore, it's about ability, too, not just about choice. Now, I think many aspies do claim they actually don't want to fit in. But I think a lot of this has to do with trying to cope with a lifetime of failure. They know they can't, so they save face by saying they won't. But the fact is, we can't unless we actually change the hardware.

Also, anxiety for a lot of us is borne of a Sensory Processing Disorder which often goes along with ASD. When you can't process your environment correctly, and you constantly trip into things and make embarrassing mistakes, anxiety is an instinctive response. I don't really think it's simply an error in thinking. Then, depression usually is borne out of anxiety.

The only way to truly heal autism, in my opinion, is to target the sensory and perceptual distortions and make actual chemical changes to heal broken parts of the brain (missing white matter connecting the two hemispheres being a prominent example of something broke in autistic people). Science has discovered things that help, but no one has found a complete solution at this time, and it is likely to be quite some time before one is found given the complications involved and the Republican Party standing in the way of science. If you haven't targeted the root cause, you just have a tenuous act that could come unraveled at any time.

I think you're confusing ability with willingness, and I think possibly misperceiving or misrepresenting autism as a psychological choice to be one way instead of another way, instead of it being a neurological disorder than impacts how one perceives and thinks in a rather pervasive and profound manner.

I also think you're trying a bit too hard to make survival instinct into some kind of "theory of everything," and your conclusions seem a bit forced to me. I am glad it works for you, but I do not think that it will necessarily work for everyone.

Thanks Verdandi, thats about what I was going to write. The day I think like an NT or less autistic will be the day I get a new brain, I or anyone else on the spectrim simply does not have the equipment to do it, simple is that and fakeing it only makes it worse in my view.

Faking NT will not help me survive. In fact, it could very well kill me.

I'm not NT, never will be. I need to keep that in mind and work with what I have to make a life I can live.

It's like a blind person trying to pretend he can see and riding a bike full-speed down the road. Far better to get off the bike, use his cane and get around safely.