Agree, breakfast slows me down, so I rarely eat it anymore and typically eat around midday to 1pm after morning work and exercise. I've fasted only once, it lasted 12 days and my energy level was almost overwhelming and electric. Boxing, running, etc. I gave up trying to understand why. And although it was an amazing experience, have not fasted again in the 5 years since.

For myself, I have low energy if I don't eat breakfast, but there is essentially no hunger signal for me in the morning. Over time I've settled on eating the plainest breakfast I can.

I think this has a lot to do with the 9–5 and my natural sleep cycle being delayed compared to that.

Same. If I have breakfast it seems to kickstart my metabolism or something idk. The result is, if I have breakfast, I’m distracted by hunger all morning. If I skip breakfast I can focus all morning and I don’t get hungry until lunchtime. Bodies are weird.

My lived experience is that high stress situations frequently make me feel like just going to sleep.

> It's an interesting concept though

Why? It's a multiple choice game with different outcomes. Hardly groundbreaking.

I can go about a full day before eating without noticing an energy drop. Everyone's different.

part of the challenge with autism is that nearly all it's features are shared partially or individually by ordinary people as pretty routine character traits (eg: socialising is energy draining for "regular" introverts).

It's (a) them being collectively combined and (b) the severity that creates the issue, but it's very hard for autistic people to explain and justify what's happening to them when everybody feels like they already experience these things and manage to just "deal" with it.

I haven't ate breakfast in 7+ years and I've never had an energy issue. I've ate OMAD (one meal a day) for over a year while running 5ks Monday to Friday and never had any energy issues either.

Typically, my first meal is at 11:45 (a plate of normal food + fruit), and then one at about 19 (the content varies from bread + cold cuts to soup).

When this changes in numbers, size or kind I do not feel any difference in energy.

When I bike to work I am particularly not hungry until 11:45.

[citation needed]

We're definitely reading too far into this, but the game does incorporate this concept, so I'll make the case.

You don't get to choose every option every day. Some days you're on, and you make (almost) all of the right choices for your wellbeing. But not every day is like that.

Optimized and tuned for what?

Try tuning your entire environment and then maintaining it all the time. Best I can do is get it into a failure mode that isn't a disaster.

Mapping anything into a perfect system fails. So I'm surrounded by half working shit that works well enough that the energy from the shittyness that it sucks from me is made up by the fact that it's good enough to not crash out over. But I will still stress. Because I do want to fix the Bluetooth but I also have 8000 other things at home to perfectly tune as well.

My shoes are a year and a half old. A little stained, a little green from mowing the lawn. I sure as fuck don't want to go to a shoe store and tell the poor young worker there that I don't need their help. I'm not buying shoes without trying them on, so internet is out. When the soles fall off and the social impact is great enough, I'll replace them.

I haven't cut my hair in a year and a half because the hair dresser lady that I went to for 15 years moved away. Staring into a mirror while someone talks to me and cuts my hair is a fucking nightmare. I know this makes me look unconventional, but worth it for now. I have to carefully wash, condition, dry, and brush my hair. It's more work. But it's optimized.

Did you play the game? If I'm understanding it correctly (a big if), every single time the author is forced to leave out edge cases when talking to management it is a form of masking. They have to suppress their natural urge[1] to list the edge cases, and come up with a more appropriate message based on a non-intuitive guess about the salient points their interlocutor wants to know.

That implies active work to mask that is almost certainly measured in hours per day, across nearly every domain of communication and human interaction.

How many hours a day does the average employee spend talking to coworkers about their sexual preference?

Edit:

1: An urge probably backed up by a good faith, well-reasoned, ethical understanding of the literal words that the manager spoke to them!

Then you’re like a closeted gay autistic person. Speaking for a friend.

> but for ND it's learned behaviour that costs energy and conscious effort to do. And they feel like they have to do it because society is used to people effortlessly doing it all the time, so if you don't you're considered off, or simply don't get to participate in society because you're weird/boring/scary.

And of course, every now and then you fail to do it right and people think you were acting really weird but won't explain why.

I'd like to elaborate a little more on why "autistic masking" is different from "neurotypicals' masking".

For neurotypicals, masking is to exhibit behaviors that you subconciously know how to do because they are part of your natural range of behaviors. When a neurotypical is masking being friendly and happy in a social occasion (when they actually don't feel like it), they draw on their previous experience of having been friendly and happy in another social occasion. They know what it feels like, they know how to behave instinctively whey they really are happy and friendly, and faking it is only the effort of drawing from prior experience. For actors, this is called "the Method".

For autists, masking is emulating behaviors they wouldn't normally exhibit on any such occasion. They don't know how to do it, not subconciously, not instinctively. So they explicitly have to observe others, emulate their behavior on that occasion. That leads to two kinds of problems: First, they need to have observed this behavior, learned and practiced it, and need to know how to reproduce it correctly. Second, they need to recognize the occasion correctly, and not misinterpret their surroundings, the feelings and moods of others. And since autists also do have problems even interpreting their own emotional state (they do have emotions, but no intuitive way to know what they are at the moment) and even more the emotional state of others, the effort is far higher. Imagine an actor who is asked to play a totally alien role without any frame of reference and without prior experience, no do-overs and all the other people around him are also directors and constantly judging his performance and measuring it against their effortless instinct what it should look like.

> Saying "This meeting is a bit unstructured and i feel if would be more productive to write out an agenda" is not breaking a mask or being an ass, it's focusing on getting shit done for everyone.

But in many cases, it will absolutely be interpreted as being an ass, and autistic people are less adept at spotting those contexts and communicating in ways which don't look like they're being an ass (also, autistic people are probably more likely to be irritated by the agenda of the rest of the meeting or next meeting being to discuss agendas...)

I agree with your wider point that everyone masks to some degree, but its obviously less consequential to non-junior neurotypical people in familiar environments who can reasonably accurately predict how everyone will react to them choosing to take the mask off and hint what they really think about the meeting. Sure, a lot of other stuff like requesting to talk in a quieter environment is usually something straightforward any reasonable person will accommodate, but it's not surprising people concerned that making too many requests perceived as "weird" might harm their career and not really sure what's "weird" or not default to just trying to avoid them.

Is this comment section part of the simulation?

> Like others said, skipping breakfast should not be that big of a deal for a reasonably healthy adult, we didn't evolve having 3 meals a day. Intermittent fasting is a thing too.

I haven’t played the simulator but I wonder if it’s also trying to account for more than just the physiological effects. A friend of mine has autism, and we were getting together one day. On the way over I suggested getting some food since it was close to dinner time. They agreed, gave me some items and I bought us some food. When I arrived they were amped up and excited to show me something. I set the food down, and I ate while they were showing me this thing that had them all excited. They ate some of the food too, but were clearly distracted and not all that hungry. No big deal. But a few hours later I noticed they’d gone real quiet and seemed down or anxious about something. Turned out they had been worrying for the last hour that they had offended me because they didn’t eat all the food and they knew they weren’t going to eat all the food because they were going through a phase where eating in general was just a difficult thing to want to do and so were eating just the minimums they needed to not have other problems.

The entire later half of their evening and their excitement over their new thing had been badly deflated all because of a decision / need to not eat all the food on offer. Never mind that this was nothing new for them. Never mind that I could easily see myself skipping food just for the excitement they were experiencing before factoring in any sensory phases. Never mind that it would be a truly shit thing for me to be offended because they only ate some of the greasy fast food I picked up for us. No this simple and normal act caused them an hour of stress and anxiety over worrying if they’d crossed some social line for doing something I didn’t even notice until they said something.

But it doesn’t matter whether I noticed. Their brain latched onto the “you did something abnormal, people might have noticed, now you need to analyze everything that’s happened to figure out what you next move should be” train of thought and it would not let go. So at least from what I’ve seen, choosing to eat or not can have impacts beyond just “hungry”

Autism has become a culturally dominant force that's displaced other kinds of neurodiversity almost completely. All kinds of people have to "mask" aspects of themselves to get along. Black people have to talk white, Asian people have to present themselves in a way white people think is assertive. Gay people have to stay closeted. Just try academia when you grew up in a working class family.

The "simulator" paradigm pretends to promote empathy but it actually does the opposite.

Not sure, it's just my experience and I was diagnosed autistic at an early age

Ya, I'm curious about this as well. I'm not a morning person, and certainly am always just-scraping-by until about 1 pm. But is this some mild autism? Or is this just how I am? Or is there even a sensible distinction between those two phrases?

Yup, getting up earlier only works if you go to sleep earlier, too. But that's not for everyone, some people are just night owls.