The Workplace System Failure
Leviticus: If you view the modern workplace as a high-fidelity simulation of “productivity,” then autistic burnout is what happens when that simulation requires more power than your hardware can generate. It’s not rocket appliances—if you’re spending 80% of your energy just parsing the social cues of your manager, you only have 20% left for the actual job.
Riot: And that 20% isn’t enough to keep you from getting fired or losing your mind! Workplace burnout is a trap. You’re trying to play a game where the rules are invisible and the difficulty is set to “Impossible.”
1. Recognizing the Workplace Redline
Leviticus: We measure the failure through data, not emotions.
- The Meeting Lag: If it takes you 4 hours to recover from a 30-minute Zoom call, your signal-to-noise ratio is critical. You’re wasting metabolic throughput on non-essential data processing.
- Executive Function Drift: Tasks that used to take 10 minutes now take 3 hours because your brain is stuck in a logic loop.
- The Sunday Dread Error: If your system starts throwing 500 errors on Sunday night, it’s because it knows the Monday simulation is unsafe.
2. The Strategic Withdrawal (Riot)
Riot: When the machine is smoking, you don’t keep feeding it coal. You extract.
- The Medical Leave Maneuver: If you have the data (a diagnosis or a doctor’s note), use it. This isn’t “taking a vacation”; it’s a hardware maintenance cycle.
- The Quiet Quitting Protocol: Stop doing the “extra” social labor. No more happy hours. No more “casual Fridays.” Do the job, then extract.
- Armor Up in the Office: Wear your noise-canceling headphones. If they ask why, tell them it’s for “deep work.” Transmute their confusion into your privacy.
3. Re-Engineering the Career Logic (Leviticus)
Leviticus: If the current simulation is broken, you cannot “fix” it by staying. You have to change the parameters of the game.
- Asynchronous Only: Move towards roles that don’t require real-time social parsing. Email. Jira. Slack. No more “quick syncs.”
- The Alchemist Pivot: Can you transmute your hyper-focus into a role that the simulation needs but doesn’t understand? Be the person who sees the invisible mechanics that everyone else misses.
- Location Independence: If the office sensory noise is the primary drain, the only solution is to delete the office. Work from your bunker.
4. The Exit Signal
Riot: Don’t let the corporate NPCs tell you that your burnout is a “performance issue.” It’s a placement issue. You’re a high-fidelity player in a low-resolution room.
Leviticus: Get to the point or get out of the way. If the job doesn’t work for your hardware, the job is irrelevant.
Work Data:
- Masking ROI: Negative.
- Withdrawal Effectiveness: 70% energy preservation.
- Career Stability: Requires a specialized OS.