We're All Aspie Now
Guys, watch this video. It’s extremely good. It’s less than 2 minutes long. And everything depends on it.
Alternatively, skip this post, it’s just a brain dump right now.
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This breaks my heart and makes me want to cry, but like… WTF? Doesn’t everyone do this? This must be a thing that everyone does, because otherwise it wouldn’t have gone viral. Absolutely everybody has to filter themselves all the time. It’s part of being human. It’s what we call “Executive Function.” I refuse to believe this isn’t the norm.
Because if it is then I can’t even.
During my Inner Peace/Universal Love period, I didn't play that game/wear the mask (as she describes it). It's the only time I haven't. Do normies just feel that wonderful all the time???!?!?!? If so, then why are so many of them so miserable?
(are they not actually miserable? maybe only the miserable ones make enough noise to be noticed, and so they seem to be all of them. It would definitely make sense that people experiencing Inner Peace don’t bother making a lot of noise and rising to attention…)
Is the majority of the human population just constantly experiencing Inner Peace?
I spent all of my childhood flipping between being alone, and briefly thinking I’d never be alone again. The only way to not be alone is to be liked by others. There are a number of inputs into being liked — producing value, being physically attractive, being pleasant to be around, among others.
Being Pleasant To Be Around is huge. That’s literally what this “masking” is for. You suppress the parts that aren’t pleasant to be around, and elevate the parts that are. The part that wants to say “omg I love your boobs, they are so pretty, I want to touch” is terrible, and will lose you many friends. The part that wants to say “This anecdote is boring, and your shirt is ugly” is pretty bad too. You replace them with “Your outfit is amazing, you are rocking it tonight!” or “Dude, I’ve been there too, remember the time that—”.
No one can live without doing that. To call this “masking” and stigmatizing it is legit awful IMO. The mask is literally the ego. Destroying the ego is not OK! Is this girl’s therapist in some sort of cult and trying to break her down? Is the therapist trying to get her to drive away all her friends so she’s easy prey?
Seriously though, if I find out that most people don’t wear masks and don’t intentionally choose their words/actions based on social context, I’m gonna lose my shit. How do they even have problems? Is this why so many of them have children??
As a software-guy and mostly-neurotypical partner of an ASD woman, a decent analogy for masking is the difference between running a process on a CPU vs a GPU.
For me, my self-censorship and adaptation to the people I’m interacting with seems to run mostly on a dedicated processor, like GPU handles graphics calculations, with conscious oversight taking maybe 5-10% of my CPU.
My partner reports masking can take between 10 and 60% of her computer power, depending on how interactive she has to be. Parties etc take a lot, talking to a friend much less.
The big difference is she doesn’t seem to be able to offload the cognitive work to a specialised module that does most of the work in the background. That brain module just isn’t there. She has to be hyper vigilant to consciously notice things like expression, body language, and tone of voice, in order to intellectually deduce subtext and deliberately react appropriately. It’s exhausting for her, and she will often be totally drained after a social event or work day.
All that being said, it’s always a great experience for me when I can totally be myself, but I think the conscious cognitive workload that I’m dropping when that happens is far less than when someone with ASD de-masks.
Consider that this girl's TikTok handle is "BorderlineAcademic". I suspect autism and masking are the least of her problems.
Also, there are three levels of enlightenment (not using that phrase in any specific religious sense, just analogizing to them in general).
Most normies are masked, but they've worn the mask so long and so studiously that they've forgotten it's a mask. They don't feel constant inner peace or whatever, they have a sense that Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong, but because that wrongness is connected to a mask they don't know they're wearing, they don't know where it comes from. They'll also vociferously deny wearing a mask.
At a certain level of systematizing, with a good enough therapist (hint: most therapists suck at this level of dealing with issues), or by deliberately and seriously reading the works of spiritual seekers like Buddha or Robin Hanson, you eventually realize "holy shit, I'm wearing a mask! I have been my whole life! Get this shit off of me!" This is the "make weepy TikToks" and "be a misanthropic nerd" stage. This is roughly analogous to the Buddhist Arising and Passing Away stage.
Then, you hit the stage you got to at Burning Man, where you finally manage to pry off that mask and breathe freely. Except for humans, masks are like shark's teeth. Lose one and another regrows to replace it. So you go through the cycle again starting at Arising and Passing Away. See Scott Alexander's review of "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha" for the more general form of the discussion. Also, be advised, I've been told that there are a lot of major cognitohazards which deliberate pursuit of the practices in MCTB, especially if you try to skip the boring stuff at the beginning and go straight to insight meditation, will expose you to.