This just seems like "burnout" simulator. What makes it unique to having autism vs being overworked in a job you hate in an alienating urban environment not congenial to human thriving?

Everyone would rather be cozy on the couch under a warm blanket than wake up at 6:30AM every day before commuting to type meaningless stuff at a computer desk, be exposed to a sensory environment that is far from ideal, and converse with people they would never associate with if they didn't have to. The experience of the wage worker is a universally reviled existence that is far from a unique plight afflicting those with high-functioning autism.

Is the implication that someone without autism could deal with all these stressors effortlessly with no need to think or put any effort in?

I answered this as somebody with 20+ years in this industry. I burned out instantly.

I had my wife do it, as a stay at home wife. She still burned out and has no reason too. She made it 6 questions. She said she wouldn't have chosen half of the optional questions.

I'm burned out. She's burnt out from the quiz.

I'm going to take a PTO Friday.

Everyone's different. Some people genuinely thrive under the conditions you're describing, others don't like it but are able to put up with it no problem, and others can't stand it but are forced to.

The perspective I've found most useful is this. There is a constellation of correlated "autistic traits", which everyone has to a degree, but which like most traits become disabling if turned up too much. "Autism" is a term describing that state. So, it is much less a particular switch that can be turned on or off, not even a slider between "not autistic" and "very autistic", but more a blurry region at the outskirts of the multidimensional bell curve of the human experience.

People on the furthermost reaches of this space are seriously, unambiguously disabled, by any definition. They're what people traditionally imagine as "autistic". But the movement in psychiatry has been to loosen diagnostic criteria to better capture the grey areas. Whether this is a good or a bad thing is a social question, not a scientific one, in my opinion. Most of us want to live in a society that supports disabled people, but how many resources to allocate to that is a difficult question where our human instincts seem to clash with the reality of living in a modern society.

On your last paragraph: I think this is a serious problem with the discourse around neuroatypicality today. My opinion is that the important thing is that we become more accepting and aware of the diversity of the human experience, and that this is a necessary social force to balance the constant regression to the mean imposed by modernity. If that's the case, then drawing a border around any category of person, staking a territorial claim to a pattern of difficulty the group experiences, and refusing to accept that the pattern exists beyond it: it's just unfair, it's giving into defensiveness.

The key difference here is magnitude and mechanism. For autistic people, even "normal" sensory inputs or social interactions can cause physical discomfort, confusion

If the expectation of the job is to "type meaningless stuff at a computer desk", doesn't this point to a problem with the expectations of the role? I would submit that if the work is truly meaningless, and it often is in my experience, it doesn't need to be done. Of course anyone would choose a pleasurable activity over meaningless, mundane busy work - regardless of their unique expression of the autism spectrum.

I also think that there are many wage workers who do not revile that existence. My intuition says it is more common in "office jobs".

I think the implication is that someone without autism can recover from these stressors more easily. And they tend to be able to absorb these stressors with less of an impact on their mood. People without autism have more control over when their brain is engaged with something, and have to expend less effort when exerting that control. It's not just about physical energy.

The brain of a person dealing with these types of symptoms is kind of like an engine running near red-line 99% of the time. When someone is masking, for every thought they express, there were likely dozens you didn't hear or see expressed over the course of a short social interaction.

Other times, they are caught in mental loops. Reading the same line of text over and over, or replaying someone else's comment over and over, and not comprehending because of an auditory stimulus that is monopolizing the comprehension processes within the brain. When this happens, it's easy for them to miss important context or body language when working with others. That requires even more masking to cover up because it's a social faux pas to admit you missed something important. So then your brain goes into overdrive trying to derive the missed information from followup conversation.

Using sustained, intense thinking to overcome challenges that others don't encounter as often can become the default coping mechanism for this kind of thing. It's not something that is easily noticed, because it's part of masking, but it tends to be more draining than many people realize.