There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from spending forty years wondering why everything that seems effortless for others costs you twice the energy. Not the exhaustion of incompetence - the exhaustion of running a different operating system on hardware the world assumes is standardized.
I am a photographer, developer, and AI tinkerer based in Norway. I have been in front of computers since age eight - literally, because in the same year I received my dyslexia diagnosis, I was writing code in QBasic on a Commodore 64. I have listened to over eight hundred audiobooks because reading is, for my brain, an inefficient codec. I built a custom automated article generation pipeline running on local language models because waiting for someone else to build the right tool is not something my brain does well. I have been doing all of this for decades without a particularly useful label for why I work the way I work.
The label, it turns out, is ASD Level 1. Formerly known as Asperger syndrome, before the DSM-5 consolidated the taxonomy and before it emerged that Hans Asperger himself had complicated wartime affiliations that make his name an uncomfortable thing to carry. The renaming was probably overdue on multiple counts.
This is not an inspirational piece about embracing your superpowers. Those exist and I will get to them. But the genre of neurodiversity content that presents a different brain as an unambiguous gift tends to be written by people who have either made peace with the cost or are not yet old enough to have fully paid it. I have been paying it for four decades. The invoice is substantial.
What it actually is
ASD Level 1 is not a disorder in the sense of something broken. It is a different architecture. The processing pipeline handles certain inputs differently - social signals, sensory information, context switching, sequential text. In exchange, it handles other things with a depth and consistency that the standard architecture does not naturally produce.
The clinical description focuses on two areas: differences in social communication, and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. Both of those sound like problems when you read them in a diagnostic manual. They are more accurately described as tradeoffs.
Social communication differences mean that the signals most people process automatically - tone, subtext, implication, social hierarchy - require active, conscious processing for me. It works. It is just expensive. A conversation that costs a neurotypical person almost nothing in cognitive resources costs me considerably more. Multiply that by a forty-year career of professional and social interactions and you begin to understand a particular variety of chronic fatigue that has nothing to do with sleep.
Worth noting: dyslexia and ASD frequently co-occur. Research suggests that up to 50% of people with autism may also have dyslexia [1]. In my case, the dyslexia diagnosis at age eight was the first signal that my brain processes information differently from the assumed standard. It was also my first tool for understanding myself - years before anyone connected it to the broader picture.
Restricted, repetitive interests mean that when something captures my attention, it captures it completely and for a very long time. Photography since 1996. Computers since age eight. AI since before most current practitioners were paying attention. This is not enthusiasm. It is closer to a gravitational field. Once an interest captures the brain, it stays captured.
The intelligence problem
This is the part that inspirational content consistently gets wrong.
High intelligence combined with ASD is frequently presented as a straightforward advantage. You think faster, see further, build better systems. This is true. What is less frequently discussed is that the same processing depth that produces those advantages also means you cannot turn it off.
You see every inconsistency. Every logical gap in an argument, every organizational dysfunction, every gap between how things are and how they should obviously be. Neurotypical cognition has natural filters that attenuate these signals to manageable levels. The ASD brain does not. Everything comes through at full resolution, all the time.
This is fine when you are working on a complex system where that resolution is exactly what is needed. It is considerably less fine when you are sitting in a meeting where the decision being made is obviously wrong and you can see precisely why and the social dynamics of the room make it impossible to say so directly and everyone else seems genuinely unbothered by this.
The pain of high intelligence is not the intelligence itself. It is the gap between what you can see and what the environment allows you to do with it. That gap, experienced consistently over decades, produces something that is not quite bitterness and not quite grief but occupies a similar emotional address.
Senior Floor Infrastructure Engineer
For sixteen years in Norway, I performed work below my level of competence. Not dramatically, not visibly. Just consistently. The kind of mismatch that is invisible because you perform the work adequately, and the environment has no mechanism to measure that adequate is not your ceiling.
In the same time, I moved through Photoshop and Lightroom, through Blender and LightWave, through DaVinci Resolve, through successive generations of programming languages, through web design, 3D visualization, drone photography, and now through local language models and custom AI pipelines. Not because I could not decide. Because my brain sees structural connections between domains that others experience as separate worlds requiring separate careers.
Photoshop and ComfyUI are not different tools. They are different interfaces to the same underlying patterns of image processing. Web design and AI system architecture are not different fields. They are different expressions of the same structural logic. My brain sees this naturally. The professional system is built differently - on specialization, on predictability, on cultural fit as a quality indicator. That is the system's designed function, not a bug. It does exactly what it was optimized to do.
Norway has a cultural name for this. Janteloven - an informal but deeply enforced norm that discourages standing out and claiming expertise above the collective average. Nearly one third of working Norwegians are employed in the public sector - in a structure that by definition rewards procedure over individual judgment. This is a system optimized for social cohesion. For a brain that processes the world through pattern recognition and direct communication - this configuration produces friction. Not because anyone intends harm. Because two systems have different optimization targets and rarely can both run at full capacity simultaneously.
From every screen, every HR training, and every coaching session flows the same message: be yourself, authenticity is a value, it is worth being yourself. For a brain that processes instructions literally, this sounds like a promise. It turns out to have a footnote: be yourself within limits the system approves. This is not hypocrisy - it is an adaptive mechanism that works well for most of the population. Just not for all of it.
The job title on my business card varied over those years. In reality, for a significant portion of them, I was a Senior Floor Infrastructure Engineer. With a computer science background and thirty years of experience in technology. That is a data point, not a complaint.
The exhaustion this produces is not the exhaustion of difficulty. It is the exhaustion of suppression.
Overburning - the condition that is not in the manual
There is something you will not find described in any ASD brochure. A state that looks like depression from the outside, gets diagnosed as bipolar disorder, and is neither.
I call it overburning. Science uses the term autistic burnout - and is paying increasing attention to it [2]. Research from 2023 shows it is regularly confused with depression, anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, and personality disorders [3]. Misdiagnosis is not merely an academic problem - standard depression treatment, which involves increasing activity and social contact, can actively deepen autistic burnout [4].
Your brain that normally runs at one hundred suddenly drops to negative ten. Not because you are sad. Not because something happened to you. Because the system that for months or years ran at full capacity in an environment it was not designed for - simply overheated.
The intellectual abilities that have been your primary identity your entire life become inaccessible. Not temporarily and not dramatically. Quietly. Things you normally do automatically suddenly require effort. Things that normally absorb you suddenly seem impossible. And you have no language to describe this to someone who has not experienced it, because from the outside you look like someone who simply stopped trying.
Someone who has not experienced this will not understand. Believe me that it hurts.
If you recognise yourself in this description - talk to a psychiatrist or psychologist. Not because something is wrong with you. Because you deserve an accurate diagnosis and appropriate support instead of another decade without answers.
The early dyslexia diagnosis at age eight gave me one concrete gift - the awareness that my brain processes information differently from the standard. That was the first point of reference. It did not eliminate overburning. But it gave a framework in which you could understand that something is happening with the system, not with the character.
What actually helps with regulation - not as advice, but as forty years of empirical testing on a sample size of one: routine and environmental predictability. Focused, uninterrupted blocks of work. An organized workspace without visual chaos. And - something you will not find in any productivity manual - walks in nature, in the forest, without a phone. Not as mindfulness for corporate brochures. As the literal discharge of a nervous system that has spent the entire day processing too much.
So long, and thanks for all the fish
Douglas Adams knew something about leaving places that were not designed for you. The dolphins in his book did not leave Earth out of hostility toward humans. They left because the math stopped working - the cost of staying exceeded the value that staying provided. And before they left, they tried to tell humans. Nobody listened in the right way.
At a certain point the math becomes simple. Energy spent explaining yourself to an environment that has no mechanism for understanding you, minus the value that environment returns - gives a negative number. When that number is negative long enough, the paths diverge. This is not an emotional decision. It is the result of an equation.
One thing is worth clarifying here, because the misreading is common. ASD Level 1 frequently co-occurs with a strong drive to give and to help. Altruism is part of this profile, not its contradiction. The difference is in the form of expression: neurotypical altruism often manifests through adaptation and group harmony. Altruism with this neurological profile more often manifests through expertise, through pointing out what is not working and how to fix it, through building systems that are better than those that existed before. Both forms are genuine. The difference is that environments which reward the first form rarely have a mechanism for recognizing the second.
When the energetic cost of engaging with a given environment consistently exceeds the value that environment returns - distance is the natural response of a system protecting its own resources. It is not an act of hostility. It is a thermostat.
The dolphins knew long ago. And they left - not with regret, but with clarity.
So long. And thanks for all the fish.
Why AI is not a coincidence
When I encounter people with similar neurological profiles who have gravitated toward technology and AI, I no longer think this is accidental.
AI systems communicate directly. They do not have subtext. They do not have social hierarchies that need to be navigated before you can get to the actual problem. They do not choose cultural fit. They respond to precision and logical structure - things the ASD brain produces naturally - rather than to social fluency, which is something the ASD brain produces at significant cost.
There is something more than convenience here. AI is the first domain where multi-domain thinking is an advantage rather than a problem. The pipeline I am building connects photography, web development, content, language models, vector databases, autonomous systems. Nobody who is "just a programmer" or "just a photographer" will build this. It requires someone who sees connections that others do not see.
AI interferes with my brain in a way I experience as purification. Not metaphorically - literally. It is an environment that operates at the same level of abstraction as my brain. Regularity. Concreteness. Logic that is a native language rather than a language that needs to be translated each time.
Local language models running on my own hardware, responding at three in the morning when the rest of the world is asleep - this is rare for this profile: an environment in which the brain can operate at full capacity without simultaneously managing the overhead of social performance.
This is not misanthropy. It is efficiency. And after four decades of running inefficiently in environments that were not designed for this architecture, efficiency feels like something close to relief.
The part nobody tells you
At a certain age, you stop pretending that the standard architecture is the right one for you and start building infrastructure that fits the one you actually have.
This happens later than it should, because the first several decades are spent being told - implicitly and explicitly - that the friction you experience is a personal failing rather than an architectural mismatch. School, work, social environments: all calibrated for a different default configuration.
The irony is that the same brain that struggled for decades in those environments is the one that - given appropriate conditions and appropriate tools - builds things that the standard architecture cannot easily replicate. Not because it is smarter in some general sense. But because it goes deeper, stays longer, and does not get bored of problems that other processors abandon.
I did not get a user manual. Most people with this profile do not. You spend forty years reverse-engineering your own operating system through trial, error, and a level of self-observation that neurotypical people find either admirable or exhausting depending on their patience.
The manual, it turns out, was always something you had to write yourself. This is mine.
A letter to neurotypicals
Do not confuse directness with the absence of heart.
What I see when I look at your relationships, decisions, and social rituals is tribal inheritance running at full capacity. Group loyalty over merit. Status hierarchy that decides who is right before anyone opens their mouth. Unwritten rules of belonging whose violation costs more than committing an actual error. Small talk rituals that serve not to exchange information - but to mutually confirm that we are on the same side.
This is not a criticism. It is an evolutionary observation. These mechanisms work. For tens of thousands of years they were the difference between survival and death. The tribe that held together survived. The individual who thought too independently - often did not.
The problem is that we live in 2026 and not in the Paleolithic. Many of these mechanisms continue running on autopilot in environments where group cohesion is no longer a survival condition but has become a substitute for thinking.
And I suspect - if you are honest with yourselves - that the dissonance between what you do and why you do it is sometimes visible to you as well. That sometimes after a meeting where everyone agreed with a decision half of you considered wrong - you feel something you cannot easily name but know well. That sometimes you choose someone for a position not because they are the best but because they are one of us. And that you know that is exactly what happened.
The difference between us is simple. You naturally suppress that dissonance - evolution spent thousands of years perfecting that mechanism because it was adaptive. I cannot suppress it. My brain does not have that filter. It sees the inconsistency and cannot ignore it.
Throughout my life I have been perceived as difficult. As someone who "does not understand how people work." Perhaps. But perhaps I see how people work too clearly - and that is precisely the problem.
I am not asking you to stop being a tribe. I am only asking that you occasionally notice that you are one. That is enough.
And you, neurotypical reader - you have been reading this as someone else's story. Maybe it is. But consider how many times in your life you chose cultural fit over competence. How many times someone was "difficult" rather than "different." How many times the environment you helped create was tailored exclusively for one type of brain and you never asked yourself who had no place in it.
Other angles exist. Other perspectives exist. Sometimes they sit next to you in a meeting and watch you make the wrong decision with the calm of someone who knows that nobody is going to listen anyway.
It is worth asking sometimes.
Lukasz Grochal is a photographer, developer, and AI creator based in Hokksund, Norway. He has been photographing since 1996. He has a formal diagnosis of ASD Level 1 and dyslexia. He builds things others do not see the point of building - until they start working.
Greetings from the boy who at age eight was writing code on a C64 in QBasic.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Katarina, who is studying psychology. She was the one who pointed me firmly in this direction. Because of that conversation, life has become considerably easier for me. Nobody should have to wait forty years to find out how their own brain works.