> 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”