Re-adjusting to the need for lossy compressed communication
If I don't have the energy to communicate, then I need to relax and let things go.
This essay, and the other essay it points to, may help me with something I’m trying to adjust to.
My growing pattern
While my body was born in 1968, my “birth” as a confirmed Autistic person was in 2024.
There were signs throughout my life of Autism, but they were ignored. I dutifully translated my thoughts into the prescribed format, trimming most of the connections my brain would make to a lossy (inaccurate) flattened transmission protocol. I assumed that what I was taught about “human nature” was true and that all humans were doing the same thing, only some people were faster at that compression than I was.
After spending a decade deeply involved in technology law in the early 2000s, I became pessimistic and politically resigned in the 2010s, thinking there was no way to move forward on any of the problems I saw because “humanity” was stuck within a mindset that disallowed observing and moving out of specific patterns.
There was a liberating feeling in the 2020s as I allowed myself to notice larger patterns in the social structures I lived within, and recognized that the problems I observed were not universal across humanity – but narrowly within specific mindsets that are promoted within specific cultures. As a lifelong learning “Open Source” type person I wanted to share. The sharing regularly went poorly.
When I received confirmation in 2024 that I was Autistic, after finally learning what an Autistic Mask was in 2022, I then thought it would be appropriate for me to unmask: to be who I always was, and become happy with who I am.
Adjustments are needed
While there are some people who I can communicate with less loss than others, I need to remember that while I may have changed, nothing else did. If my communication is to have any meaning to another individual, or to a more public audience, it needs to be translated to their way of thinking (or the mainstream Canadian/Anglosphere/Western way of communicating) and not expressed directly in the way my mind works.
As I circle around the issue in other articles, I’m getting closer to accepting my need to adjust. In these articles, I thought about a purpose being to send out a “signal flare” to try to find other like-minded people.
Even though I have said that a few times, I still hit “reply” to other people who have expressed a very different way of thinking and have tried to create a thread to expand to the larger gestalt.
This is not received well.
I need to recognize that this should not surprise me as much as it does. As much as I am uncomfortable with having to be inaccurate and compress thoughts to communicate, other people won’t like having their ideas ripped out of their context and brought into a gestalt.
What does that have to do with “Why Adult GLPs Write So Differently”?
Before and during my career, I often had people who thanked me for being able to help them understand technology. I didn’t act like the IT priesthood who felt best when they had knowledge that nobody else had; instead, I went out of my way to translate so that everyone could understand at their level of comfort.
Without knowing what I was doing, I became great at that translation.
I could picture the interaction between Jaime Hoerricks and Jenn McRae happening with a younger version of myself, and readers thinking I was an analytic processor. I would have assumed the correctness of that language, as that is what I thought I was doing when I broke big thoughts into smaller thoughts to make progress in smaller steps.
What I didn’t realize is that other people were actually starting with the small pieces and incrementally building up the larger.
When I generate small, digestible steps, it isn’t because I started there, and that distinction matters.
The change I need to make
For me, the energy isn’t in building the large from the small, but separating the small out from the large. One of the things I did well in my career was to recognize there were finite resources, and to always factor in resource management. It is not possible with finite resources to do everything, and thus if someone presumes that everything is a priority then that means that nothing is a priority. I regularly had to convince managers to pick which of the projects they believed was a “priority” that they were willing to let fail (or best, not be allocated resources at all), otherwise failure would happen in an unmanaged way.
I am regularly inspired by what other people write. The change I need to make is that if I don’t have the resources to translate my inspiration into a more understandable format, I need to not hit “reply”. Just because I was excited by what was said (or written), doesn’t mean I have to interact if at that moment I lack the energy to translate communication to something decipherable by other people. If I interact without the energy, I will only generate negativity such as arguments, defensiveness, etc.
Two recent examples
I felt this article deeply, as I felt a deep resignation in the 2010s.
However, responding by sharing how I feel now would have been a mistake. From what I learned prior to the 2010s, I no longer see Canadian parliaments the way I did previously. I see the fixation on political parties and corporate market share (what people are talking about when they talk about “party popular vote”) not as an example of resistance, but as itself a form of resignation or acceptance of the status quo.
If I feel the need to comment, I should comment on my own site. Replying directly to that article would not have been helpful, and would only have distracted from the much larger mainstream Canadian audience that author is trying to attract to their writings.
I was extremely excited by this article: It articulated a pattern I have observed for a long time, of how Canada has cycled between seeing the USA as its greatest friend and ally, to recognizing it as its greatest threat (threat to the institutions of Canada, as well as global bully threat to the rest of the world).
While this specific story started the same year I was born, in 1968, I saw the pattern as existing for far longer than my lifetime, even longer than the USA or Canada have existed as internationally recognized governments.
1968 was also the year that P.E. Trudeau was elected for the first time. For some people, this article will set off thinking of policies during the terms of a series of Canadian Federal Prime Ministers: Trudeau Sr., Mulroney, Chrétien, Martin, Harper, Trudeau Jr., and now Carney. Maybe they will remember Turner, Clark and Campbell, but often with their short terms they get forgotten. They may even divide these into Progressive Conservative, Conservative vs Liberal governments, suggesting that “Conservatives” were closer to the USA and “Liberals” saw something “truthful”.
I don’t see this. When I became more mainstream politically active in the 1990s it was in opposition to Chrétien Liberal and Clinton Democrat policies. For a period of time I thought that this means I might be “Conservative”, and it took until experiences during the mid 2000s to finally move beyond the logical fallacy of the false binary of believing that if you dislike the policies of “Liberals” (Democrats, New or classic) or “Conservatives” (Republicans, Progressive Conservatives, Bloc, Reform), then you must be “for” the other one.
So… with all that in my head, I replied to someone making note of the compatibility between Canadian PM Mulroney and US President Reagan.
I asked a “why” question about the focus on those individuals, when I saw problems relating to resource extraction (such as the “oil” sector) as originating within the British North America Act 1867 (co-sovereignty of federal and provincial governments) and the creation of Alberta and Saskatchewan as provinces rather than territories in 1905. I didn’t use those exact words, but it was a question – why focus on Mulroney and Reagan, as if that closeness was any different than the closeness that followed between Chrétien and Clinton, or other times in the regularly repeating cycle of the pattern that Leni Spooner’s article discussed.
I should have recognized that replying would have been a failure. I didn’t have the energy to do the translation sufficiently, and posting without that translation was inevitably going to go wrong – as it did.