I’m autistic, my quality of life would greatly improve if i had a button that both actually functioned to, and outwardly indicated to others ‘i am shutting off most external stimuli so as to focus on a very complex task’, and using this ‘mode’ occassionally/moderately was widely socially acceptable.
That would have allowed me to avoid a lot of autistic burnout episodes in my life.
Instead, I just have to physically, literally withdraw from basically everything, to an enviornment I control and makes no demands of me.
The best way that I can describe being autistic to a neurotypical is: imagine all or most of the subconscious decision making processes in your mind are actually extremely, explicitly conscious thought processes.
Something like how the DeepSeek LLM actually shows you its entire thought process for attempting to understand and answer a question.
Combine that with high functioning autistics seemingly having heightened external senses, hearing sounds that NTs often don’t, noticing visual patterns and details that NTs often don’t…
… And yeah, calling a ‘mode’ where you just shut down most external stimuli, to focus on a complex internal monologue… autistic seems like the correct word to use.
Apparently that was a quirk of translation. Autism in Japanese was known as “withdrawn syndrome” and they intended it for more to be “withdrawn mode”
Seems accurate to me?
I’m autistic, my quality of life would greatly improve if i had a button that both actually functioned to, and outwardly indicated to others ‘i am shutting off most external stimuli so as to focus on a very complex task’, and using this ‘mode’ occassionally/moderately was widely socially acceptable.
That would have allowed me to avoid a lot of autistic burnout episodes in my life.
Instead, I just have to physically, literally withdraw from basically everything, to an enviornment I control and makes no demands of me.
The best way that I can describe being autistic to a neurotypical is: imagine all or most of the subconscious decision making processes in your mind are actually extremely, explicitly conscious thought processes.
Something like how the DeepSeek LLM actually shows you its entire thought process for attempting to understand and answer a question.
Combine that with high functioning autistics seemingly having heightened external senses, hearing sounds that NTs often don’t, noticing visual patterns and details that NTs often don’t…
… And yeah, calling a ‘mode’ where you just shut down most external stimuli, to focus on a complex internal monologue… autistic seems like the correct word to use.