Autistic Male Survival Guide

Welcome to Earth, Fuck You, Prepare to Suffer

Feb 09, 2026

Disclaimers

1. It should be implicit, but I often miss the implicit, so I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t spell this out: This guide is only my perspective, as I lack the lived experience and understanding of others to speak from any other position.

2. It’s obviously incomplete, as I tackled a topic that’s much too broad. Likely I’ll continue adding to it for many years as things occur to me. I’m open to recommendations in the comments!

3. If you mistakenly got here by searching for a guide on how to survive autistic males, it’s no use. We’re already en route to your location.

Food & Shelter

You’re gonna need 3 things right away; Air, water and food, in that order; You can do without food for weeks, without water for days, and without air for minutes. All “bottom level of Maslow’s Hierarchy” stuff.

After those are secured, you’ll also want clothing (public nudity is against the law almost everywhere) to protect your body from the elements & prevent illness. Heated clothing exists, but costs a pretty penny, so that will have to wait until you’ve climbed up a few levels.

Parents provide food, clothing & shelter until early adulthood, but after that point you’re expected to become economically productive enough to secure them independently. That age varies greatly by culture, & there’s wisdom to delaying moving out so you can save up a few months worth of emergency rent first.

Shelter is like a stationary extension of the function clothing provides; a warm, dry, selectively permeable enclosure which you control access to. This enables you to sleep indoors (greatly improved sleep quality!) and not have your belongings stolen.

Of these, only air is free (for now). Clothing, shelter, potable water & food cost money. Water is cheapest, shelter is by far most expensive. You can’t be too picky, as the better the clothing, food or shelter, (especially if you have dietary restrictions) the more they cost. It’s therefore in your interest to cultivate inexpensive tastes.

Once you have sufficient income to feed yourself reliably, stockpiling nonperishables is a wise investment, since so long as you don’t go overboard, it doubles as camping food (likewise with survivalist supplies in general.)

Canned goods keep for a few years. Buckets of dehydrated survivalist foods keep for a quarter century, pack a lot of calories in a small space, but (with the exception of a few specialist brands) contain unhealthy levels of sodium. This assumes you have a shelter in which to store it, and unless you have rich parents to buy you a house or condo in cash, you’ll have to rent.

There may seem to be work-arounds for thwarting rent seekers, but though you didn’t ask to, you’ve been born into a world where all land was already owned by somebody long before you arrived. So you cannot simply go and homestead undeveloped land, cops will roll up eventually.

If you build a hidden shelter on public land, you may get away with it for weeks, months, or even years, but then cops will roll up, & the city will send their people to tear down what you built & bill you for the cleanup.

You might be thinking “To hell with being human, I’ll move someplace warm year-round and live as wild animals do.” This is called homelessness, or “playing Rust irl”. It “works” insofar as the state can’t take anything from you if you don’t have anything, but it’s a miserable life, which is why the unhoused often ameliorate their misery with hard drugs.

This isn’t recommended mainly because of the danger posed to you by other feral humans. If you can’t be taxed or fined, you’re irrelevant to the state, so you cannot count on police protection. Without a shelter that locks from the inside, you also cannot count on safety from rape, murder or theft; it’s the law of the jungle.

Van life is a popular step up from homelessness, as roads are public property you need not pay rent to occupy. But again, if you’re visibly sleeping in a vehicle, cops will show up to wake you. Every alternative to renting housing has been sabotaged in some way to make it uncomfortable, inconvenient or stigmatized, as this serves the interest of rent seekers & speculators alike.

Living on the water seems like another life hack, and this has worked for many. But boats are expensive to maintain, and if enough people escape renting this way (as in San Francisco Bay or on the Willamette) eventually the ownership class will lobby to pass laws preventing it (as San Franciscan NIMBYs with waterfront property did).

You may (with great upfront cost & effort) grow some of your own food (if you own land), and make your own clothing for minimal savings (at a social cost if the resulting garments are unfashionable). The savings improve greatly with economies of scale; growing your own food or making clothing becomes practical if it’s your livelihood, as then it’s not competing for time & energy with anything else, & you sell the surplus.

Still, one way or another, you will be coerced into renting housing almost no matter what you do. Even if you own your home, that requires a mortgage, which is renting to own. Even if you pay it off, there’s still property tax, which is rent you pay to the government.

No matter what you do, you will always be on the hook for rent to somebody. To pay it, you’ll need money, and lots of it, so you can then give it to your landlord/government. Which brings us to:

Money

Nearly everything costs money here! It’s the single most useful resource & predictor of life satisfaction. Money absolutely can buy happiness, to a point. It can certainly eliminate most sources of stress & increase your options. Your #1 goal should therefore be figuring out what you’re better at than everybody else, which people might pay you for.

Money is also vital to relationships. If you didn’t win the genetic lottery (you didn’t, you’re autistic) then probably you look average. This isn’t enough, by itself, to attract an equally average romantic partner; It’s expected you entice her with added economic value as well (“Feathering the nest”).

This is effectively a modernized dowry system which was a standard component of marriages in many cultures for much of recorded history. Depending upon appearance (especially age & fitness), probably your partner has had prior partners in her youth that she was more attracted to, and would’ve married if she could’ve. You aren’t her first choice, as she’s likely also not yours, an unpopular reality of romance in every era.

You can see how lacking money could inflict not just material, but also emotional suffering. A monastic life of comfortable poverty will therefore always leave you physically & romantically unfulfilled. Unless you’re content with that, you will absolutely need to be economically productive.

Your saving grace is being gifted with an unnatural talent, and ability to never tire of studying that single, narrow topic. Hopefully it’s something you can monetize! For example, do you love to argue? Become a lawyer. Love trains? Conductor. Machines in general? Study engineering. Economics or math? Banker.

Start by searching up a list of jobs in ascending order of pay. Then, starting at the top, go down the list until you spot something your talent is plausibly applicable to. Compromise on pay if it means you can work remotely, as the savings to be realized by not having to live in cities is often exceeds that difference, and working from home minimizes the problems your social deficits can pose.

Whatever you decided on, if it isn’t something you can do on your own (without substantial capital), then you cannot work for yourself. You’ll need to work for someone else. That brings us to:

Jobs

To get money, unless your special interest is monetizable in a way which permits freelancing, you’ll need a job. Yes, you have to. No, autism does not exempt you, as allistics fundamentally don’t understand the lived consequences of lacking theory of mind; So long as you can hold a coherent five minute conversation with them & you aren’t missing any limbs, they will assume you can work.

This is doubly true for men, because most men alive today in first world countries are surplus population. One man can impregnate many women, and often the very desirable ones do, so the rest aren’t necessary unless they create substantial economic value through their toil.

For this reason, men (in particular ones of pale complexion) are deeply expected to provide. Not only for their own families, but many outside of it, including the migrants brought in to depress their wages. At the societal level, our demographic is the primary workhorse, the only group which pays more in taxes than we consume in benefits.

This makes sense of why economically unproductive men are scorned. Useless eaters, not doing the one thing they’re good for. Well founded, to an extent; imagine how you’d feel about some of your blood cells declining to carry oxygen, or neurons which consume oxygen but never fire. If too many are like that, the larger organism dies.

This social expectation that you join the other oxen in pulling the cart everyone else rides in will make it especially difficult to get benefits even if you were to seek them, dependent in part on the politics of whoever interviews you.

With that out of the way, your first & biggest problem is actually getting hired. Do not under any circumstances tell them you’re autistic. Nobody wants to hire autistic employees, it’s assumed we’ll create unique difficulties in training, communication and so on. Well founded, but the result is that autistic men are economic hot potatoes; can’t get benefits, but nobody wants to hire us. Hence, 85% of autistic adults are unemployed.

There’s institutional discrimination at play, as DEI was officially shuttered but remains the unspoken order of the day in many companies. Surplus men are a broadly unpopular demographic, moreso depending upon complexion for reasons discussed earlier. Nothing can be done about this. Even if you can prove it, if you sue, you’re effectively black balled thereafter. No company wants an employee likely to sue them.

Rehearsing the interview & memorizing scripts/flowcharts can help. So can targeting industries which care more about certifications than interpersonal skills. This is one reason there are so many autistic engineers.

Problem two, you have “bad vibes”. But no one will tell you that, nor what exactly you’re doing wrong. You provoke the “uncanny valley” reflex in allistics because of the mismatch between their theory of mind (trained on other allistics, never failed them before) and your aberrant neuroarchitecture.

This creates frequent low-level social friction, miscommunications, etc. and every time they get the wrong signals back vs the ones they sent out, a red flag goes up in their hindbrain that there’s something fundamentally wrong with you. In nature this would trigger fight/flight. But in the workplace (or school) they cannot do either.

This double-bind produces a lot of weird, cruel, passive aggressive behaviors. Mostly acting like you’re not there and talking over you in meetings or by the water cooler, like eating around something on your plate you dislike.

This is why nobody wants to hear you talk, and why they devalue your input; They may also misunderstand autism as generally diminished intelligence/don’t respect low EQ (women least of all, more on this later). Emotional Intelligence is so highly prized that being deficient in this area substantially lowers the esteem others hold you in.

A workaround for this might be to speak only when spoken to, and even then, keep sentences as concise as possible. Show only enough emotion that they don’t dehumanize you. In doing so, minimizing the frequency of autistic tells, and thus, friction. This isn’t masking per se, but grey rocking, which they likely already do to you without you noticing.

It’s a good way to reduce “attack surface” by not oversharing personal information, any of which might be used as a foothold by malicious actors. But overreliance on it can backfire, which I’ll address later on.

Education

Most of the lucrative jobs are paywalled behind a college degree. This gatekeeping arrangement funnels many into higher education who don’t belong there, taking on massive debt they stand little chance of ever paying off.

Know as surely as you can which job fits your talent before signing anything, and if you’re borrowing money for school, you’d better be studying either STEM or law. Student loans are structured in a predatory way, the interest is typically so steep that you mathematically can’t pay them down by making the minimum payment, interest will always keep pace or overtake.

”So just make higher payments than the minimum”. Sure, but this requires earning enough that you can do so comfortably. It’s a pretty short list of majors that this makes sense for.

Society will not reward you financially for studying noble topics. Historians (for example) are valuable, but how many historians will our economy support? What jobs are there for history majors? What do you think professional philosophers earn? Those are fine hobbies, to pursue on the side of a lucrative day job.

From this standpoint, ask yourself whether you really need a degree to build the life you want. Much of the work isn’t performed by the professor, but assigned by him to the student; you don’t need a professor to tell you to read.

Libraries are free. Khan Academy is free. The entire MIT video lecture series is available online, also free. Do you need to pay someone to force you to learn? No you don’t, aspies are famously autodidactic. We don’t have many advantages, be sure to use at least this one.

If your talent is creative, you may exist entirely outside of this analysis. Writers, painters, musicians are functionally either self employed or work for a publisher, patron or label. They’re judged by their output, not credentialism.

If that sounds ideal to you, the bad news is it sounds ideal to everyone else also. Everybody wants to be a creative, the supply vastly exceeds demand. This is where the “starving artist” trope originates; there’s not a secure, comfortable living to be made this way, except by masters of their craft.

For some, this is the only life they will accept, and for which their temperament is suited. I wish them the best of luck, they’ll need every ounce. (Including myself! God help me, I’m in that exact boat!)

Communication

Sometimes, you can’t get away with grey rocking. When you must communicate at length, it’s important to have a working grasp of allistic expectations in order to minimize friction & thus subconscious provocation.

First, allistics parse sentences very differently. To you or I, a sentence is like an equation within which qualifiers work like operators. We parse it word by word, adding them together, taking qualifiers into account.

Allistic parsing is much less granular. They do not engage higher brain function (active listening) unless forced to by repeated misunderstandings. They’re on hindbrain cruise control, passively listening for commonly occurring phrases.

This can be observed most reliably in fast food workers. They hear small variations on the same few sentences all day long. Do not make small talk! Small talk forces higher brain functions to engage. Anything outside their script will confuse them, while their prefrontal cortex boots up.

That’s a severe example, chosen because it stands out. But a milder form of the same behavior can be observed in allistics more generally. Listening for familiar word clusters is not only less cognitively demanding, it’s also more legible in noisy environments. That’s because even if they only hear part of a common phrase, they recognize it & already know the rest.

Second, don’t use rare words. You likely have a much larger vocabulary, because you’re concerned with precision & accuracy. To you, making use of the tools the English language gives you to express your meaning with specificity is intended to prevent misunderstanding, but it will have the opposite effect.

Allistics will only sometimes stop you, to ask the definition of a word you used. More often they will pretend to know it, listening for context clues as to its meaning. If they guess wrong, the misunderstanding compounds from there. Limit yourself to a contemporary vocabulary (no anachronisms, however apt) of about 20,000 words (none exceeding 3 syllables) in a professional setting, or 5,000 in a casual setting.

Next, almost all allistic communication is manipulation, to the point that they often don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. They understand the concept of dielectic, & engage in a limited way, but the main course is always manipulation.

This usually takes the form of inappropriate persuasive argument on questions of factual truth or falsehood, incentivizing one or the other by appealing to your base desires. While you’re simply engaged in dialetic or informative transmission, they’re simultaneously 1. negotiating status, 2. building rapport, 3. managing impressions, and 4. shaping future interactions.

This characteristic habit of relational persuasion reflects how their minds work on a deep level, as if they can vote on reality (see the Religion section below) to a point where they don’t truly believe anyone exists who isn’t also like that.

If you specifically ask to be reasoned with and not manipulated, they’ll sort of laugh it off, then attempt more sophisticated manipulation anyway. They hear “I want to be reasoned with” more as a statement about how you want them to perceive you, than communication formatting instructions.

Life experience has taught them that reason gets you nowhere with people, but emotional appeals often do. This should explain a great deal about why advertising is the way it is. Which one causes the other seems like a chicken/egg question to me.

Next, they don’t want you to explain things. Instead, they want to try to guess first, like a game show, to feel smart. If they guess wrong a few times, it’s your cue to explain, but they want you (using your inexistent theory of mind) to infer exactly which bits they’re missing so you fill in only those gaps. They will feel put down if you overexplain (covering information they knew already) even slightly.

Conversely, they will only listen to as much of your sentence as they think they need to extrapolate the rest, then begin talking over you, as well as constantly putting words in your mouth that they assume you were about to say anyway.

They don’t want turn-based conversation, but a scattered, interactive back-and-forth. This format is optimized for high bandwidth verbal + paraverbal communication between people with mutual theory of mind. You’re playing chess, they’re playing jazz. Or TCP versus UDP.

This naturally will result in misunderstandings with an autistic interlocutor. First because their theory of mind isn’t tuned to your neuroarchitecture. Secondly, because you’re strongly inclined to turn-based conversation without interruptions. But you’re the medically aberrant one, surrounded by allistics who get along fine with each other, so all misunderstandings will always be considered your fault.

This seems grossly unfair, but is grounded in evolution, which produced many times more allistics than it did autistics. They have their way, which has worked well enough for them to have built modern society, so clearly it works well enough in allistic majorities.

You're optimized for accurate world-modeling. They're optimized for group coordination. Different selection pressures, different solutions. Neither is “wrong”. Whether an autistic majority society would be more performant, or less, by various metrics is useless navel gazing given how relatively rare we are. So you will have to do most of the adapting.

“Is it really impossible for you to abstain from interrupting/putting words in my mouth” is a perfectly reasonable point, but will be taken as an unprovoked insult. “Why don’t you just do all the talking for me?” is also poorly received. If you ask “Can I talk?” They’ll reliably answer “I don’t know, can you?” but if you punch them in the face you’ll be fired.

They really, truly can’t help but be the way they are, any more than we can. If we expect tolerance from them, reciprocity would have us tolerate them too.

Explaining your limitations is of no use however. They may nod along, and even understand in the academic sense. But they either forget five seconds later or never believed you, as revealed when they still get frustrated that you don't pick up on hints, still expect you to read subtext, and still blame you for miscommunications.

They deeply assume everyone has about the same mental faculties they do, and deeply resist compromising that framework. In some cases because it’s ideologically unacceptable, something egalitarianism has in common with bootstrap culture. In others, just because they chafe at the extra cognitive workload of modeling this one person in their lives differently than they model everyone else.

Perception of Autists

Allistics fundamentally don’t know what to make of you. Unless they’re doctors or neuroscientists (or behaviorologists) they likely have a single variable model of intelligence. Consciousness to them is a light switch, you have it (humans) or you don’t (animals). Intelligence is more of a sliding scale, but they mistrust the notion that one may be proficient in one mental capacity but deficient in another.

This leads to frustration and sometimes embarrassment if they get into the habit of treating you with kid gloves, as they would someone with Downs Syndrome, only for you to then surprise them by correcting their reasoning on some technically complex issue.

To them, such incidents feel as if you’ve been deceiving them. Playing a part, so they let their defenses down, until your mask slipped. This isn’t the same as, but feels (to allistics) exactly like a mentally able person LARPing as mentally disabled for pity and a reduction in the standard of behavior to which they’re held.

Understandably, they’re afraid of having empathy taken advantage of. This is where “autism isn’t an excuse” remarks come from, often apropos of nothing, in situations where it doesn’t make sense because you weren’t doing anything wrong (and thus, had no need of an excuse). I’ve heard this, for example, when disclosing I’m autistic after being asked why I’m wearing sunglasses indoors (photosensitivity) or speak in an unusual cadence.

It seems like something on the tip of their tongues, which they’ve been waiting to say should they ever meet a real live autistic person. They may have seen fakers farming sympathy (or outrage) on Tiktok, and were struck by how insidious it is. Thereafter, knowing no actual autistic people personally, the only association with autistic that exists in their brain is “might trick me to get away with wrongdoing/take advantage of my empathy”.

So, what they’re really saying (and might’ve said, had they composed a reply inwardly for a minute rather than reflexively blurting out what came to mind, is: “I’m not sure about you. I don’t know much about autism, or how your mind works. This ambiguity unsettles me. I feel concern you may exploit it. Please don’t, and instead be forthright in your dealings with me.”

This may seem shitty, and it is, but they’re doing the best they can. You’re an unfathomable mystery, utterly unpredictable because they refuse to try to understand you out of discomfort with disability in general, and mental disability in particular (which challenges notions of inherent equality, and the notion that we’re souls, rather than being reducible to brain activity).

To them, you likely seem cold or harsh though you speak neutrally. This is because the cultural norm is to sweeten everything a little, to be performatively friendly to signal benign intent. To someone raised on a diet of cakes and candies, water tastes like piss. Fairly or unfairly, this quality makes you an unsympathetic figure in their eyes.

Sometimes they already know these feelings are ugly, so they won’t voice them, instead hoping you pick up on the reason why they’re cagey around you. They want you to infer the reason for their suspicions, and absolve them (“It’s understandable you’d feel that way .”)

This will happen to you a lot. Whenever there’s been wrongdoing, you’ll be suspect #1. Not because you’ve demonstrated a pattern of prior misbehavior, but because you’re the first person coworkers will think of when they think “suspicious person”. A big part of this is not making eye contact, which in allistics, signals guilt.

There are specific affectations to signal innocence. They don’t include asking for evidence of an accusation, ironically. “Where’s your evidence” is what a guilty person says to delay justice, in the allistic mind. You’re instead meant to hurriedly give your side of events, sounding anxious & pitiable (signaling distress at being accused. Calmness = guilt.)

Also ironic, it’s high EQ habitual criminals who are best at “acting innocent”. Your inability to "signal innocence should make you less suspicious, not more. It’s unbelievable this is how their discernment works, but it does.

If you don’t know these or are bad at performing “innocence signaling”, allistics will imagine you capable of all sorts of things & not see anything unseemly about it until confronted.

Meeting them half-way on this goes a long way towards marking you as “one of the good ones” in their mind, and may reduce the suspicion they view you with, though you’ve never given them reason to. They don’t consider this wrongdoing on their part.

Interpersonal Conflict

Until age ten or so, children aren’t socially competent enough to notice when one of their peers is particularly socially incompetent. Nevertheless, you likely experienced bullying even earlier. Not necessarily because of your autism, but just because boundary testing and sadism are common childhood activities for allistics.

Once old enough that a difference in emotional intelligence (hereafter referred to as EQ) becomes apparent to your father, he may try to “straighten you out”. It’s the same thinking behind electroshock therapy; “I don’t believe he “can’t help it”. I bet if I torture him, he’ll shape up. That would work on me.”

This is how unbearable our idiosyncrasies are to allistics! And when beatings don’t work, Dad writes himself a moral blank check, because he feels he had good reasons to believe it would work, and was trying to help you.

Once old enough to begin attending school, it’s likely you were singled out for bullying because bullies home in on difference, and you react unusually to pain. Their “social correction” (bullying) may be instinctive/cultural, and (in their mind) helpful. But more often, they do it because hurting you is funny.

Mismatch between expected and actual outcome is the basis of humor. Unfortunately, this makes you the most entertaining type of person to torment, for the same reason recreational cat torture was popular in the middle ages; Their howls of agony sounded funny, and peasantry found the behavioral peculiarities of cats a source of aggravation.

This goes doubly on the internet, where everything you comment or upload is exposed to a global audience, necessarily increasing the frequency of malicious encounters. There’s a long, documented history of bullies organizing to humiliate & harass autistic “lolcows” in particular.

They do not consider this to be “making fun of a disabled person” because they’re ridiculing the symptoms, not the disability. But then, that’s always the form ableist bullying takes; Nobody has ever said “Ha ha, you have Congenital Contractural Arachnodactyly!” to Ricky Berwick, or “ha ha you have Crouzon syndrome” to Brian Peppers; They instead make cruel observations about the visible effects of the disorder.

People like that will make any excuse to justify methodically farming funny pain reactions. For this reason, you may not crash out (aka meltdown) no matter how severely you are provoked. You must endure anything & everything they throw at you in good humor. Of course, you can always just close that tab or make a new account.

Not so if you’re antagonized at work or school; You must handle antagonism without excusing yourself from the room. Even though removing yourself from the situation is an entirely reasonable coping strategy, doing so in person will be taken an extreme insult.

”I don’t have to sit here and take this” is reasonable on its face; but if you bail every time someone mistreats you in school, you will fail out. If you leave work because of workplace bullying HR won’t put a stop to, you will lose your job. Taking shit sometimes is part of life.

The long & short of it is that there must be no dead-ends in your internal flowchart. If they cross one of your red lines, you must endure as they try alternative conversation branches. This is why sometimes, when they detect they have offended you, they rapidly interrupt.

You might think that’s counterproductive to restoring mutual understanding. What they’re doing is attempting to repair relations by hurriedly trying out alternative conversation tree paths, hoping to land on the right one before your anger solidifies.

In situations where they’re giving actionable instructions, contradicting themselves one moment to the next, what I usually do is to start spinning in place or quickly reversing direction every second.

This is usually successful at communicating the problem with rapidly issuing contradictory instructions. They will not realize what they’re doing until seeing you attempt to act on their words.

To compensate for this effect, you must always allow second, third, & fourth chances. Let things slide. Leave a second of silence for them to fill if you anticipate they’re going to talk over you anyway. Measures like these are the cost of doing business.

Even with such precautions, it’s possible they’re growing privately irritated with you for things you didn’t notice that they assume were deliberate. You may not find out they felt this way until they snap.

Sometimes they never do, but retaliate against you more discreetly. Malicious rumors, pranks, professional sabotage, and so forth. You’ll already familiar with this playbook from being bullied throughout childhood. Did you think it was over?

As they give no outward indication of mounting irritation, for safety, you must assume every new person you meet will eventually become a danger to you. You’re playing Poker with faceless opponents, missing critical information everyone else has. So build a dossier, & begin developing a plan to counteract. Better to have it & not need it, than the reverse.

Physical Defense

Carefully weigh the costs & benefits of gun ownership before getting your CHL. Laws vary greatly by state, but where I live, they’re so strict that even if it’s a totally justified shoot, you’ll spend the rest of your life defending it in court. There exist collective legal defense funds for gun owners you’d be wise to join if you do go this route.

Remember, while carrying; in most states you obviously can’t draw your weapon or reveal the holster (brandishing) but you also cannot verbally inform an aggressor you’re armed. This too is brandishing; the thinking is that it will more often escalate than de-escalate a conflict.

You may therefore not reveal (or even hint) you’re armed until a few seconds before drawing & using your weapon, if all criteria for legal application of lethal force are satisfied. This is something you must be very good at ascertaining accurately, in a very short timeframe. If you’re not sure you can do that, don’t carry.

Knives, tasers & pepper spray are much less regulated, and so under most circumstances, are a more sensible precaution. Still, for some situations (civil unrest, home invasion, carjacking, rape) only a handgun will do.

This is inherently dicey for someone with no theory of mind, as you can’t reliably predict when someone’s about to attack you. Is “I’m gonna kill you” a genuine threat, for example? Or does it mean “you’re making me angry”?

What you can do, however, is exhaustively memorize your state’s criteria for when lethal force is permissible. Then revisit that mental checklist if you’re in a situation where violence has already transpired, and is escalating.

Besides self defense scenarios, because of the way allistics often treat you, there will be times when you are sorely tempted to turn your gun either on yourself or on them. Simply not owning a gun ensures that you have no way to act on that temptation.

However gratifying revenge would feel in the moment, meditate on what would come after that. You might still be riding that high in your prison cell the following week. But what about a month later? A year? A decade?

In prison, you will have no way to get away from allistics. The very worst of them will surround you, all the time. You will have little to no recourse for sexual assault, beatings & theft perpetrated against you.

So, before retaliating (to any degree) first inwardly ask yourself: “Is hurting this person worth prison time?” You’re liable to find that in all but the most extreme cases, the answer to that is always “no”.

Emotional Defense

If any/all of this sounds like a fortress mentality, it is! You cannot afford to live in any other way. Just as clothing and shelter function as barriers you control access to for your own safety, you must erect such a barrier around your heart. But don’t go overboard with this; it can create a self-fulfilling prophecy of isolation.

This is a safe way to live, but stifling. Safety is stagnation, it will spiritually malform you over time; While fortresses protect, they also imprison. Yours can have a moat full of alligators, but must also have a drawbridge to let the occasional visitor inside. If you let only the right ones in, over time you’ll have a spiritually nourishing tribe of trusted friends, which is a treasure beyond valuation.

Grey rocking, as mentioned earlier, is another defensive tool in our arsenal. Autists tend towards it by overcorrecting when admonished for expressing the “wrong” emotion, or at inappropriate times. It’s vital that you get a handle on this part of yourself

That probably sounds like “just don’t have meltdowns”. Trust me to know that’s impossible. But there’s an exercise you can do with a trusted friend to become less susceptible over time. You sit in a chair. He isn’t allowed to touch you, but can shout, insult, and do anything else that pushes your buttons.

You’re going to fail the first few times. But eventually, your buttons will be flat. You will be impossible to provoke or overwhelm. This further deadens emotional sensitivity which may impact capacity for vulnerability in a relationship. But again, no perfect solutions, only tradeoffs.

Managing Emotion

Ever heard “Your ego is not your amigo?” Well, except in social situations, your emotions are not your amigo either. A great deal of hippie dippie self help literature advises against bottling up your emotions, and indeed you need some sort of (discreet) outlet. But think of all the viral videos you’ve seen of people even less self aware than you making a scene. Cringe, isn’t it?

What they all have in common is socially inappropriate anger. There’s almost no situation in which anger reflects well on, or benefits you. Violence is strictly punished/controlled, and so will not avail you either. Whoever blows up in a dispute appears to all onlookers as the unreasonable party.

If you feel yourself becoming angry and don’t know what to do about it, don’t do anything except for removing yourself from the situation if possible. If you don’t know what to say, say nothing. If you must say something, but you’re unsure whether the provocation was intentional, ask follow up questions to establish intent rather than reacting with reflexive aggression.

Aggression is always a bad look, even when justified. Magnanimity, calmness, politeness, always a good look. You can even damage your antagonist’s optics by handling his provocation in this way, coming out of it appearing to all as the more composed, civilized person.

Even from a purely conflict avoidance/de-escalation standpoint, the Prisoner’s Dilemma bears out that reflexive backlash begets cycles of retaliation, while ignoring provocation & investigating what motivated it (or just letting the first one slide in case he’s having a bad day) disrupts or outright prevents those cycles. (This will make intuitive sense if you’ve completed a pacifist run of Undertale).

An example of taking the high road for good optics might be thanking someone for correcting you. Though, you really should anyway; one on one tutoring is normally very expensive, but this fool has done it for free!

Women

You may notice at times that, although you’re an adult yourself, adult women will speak to you as they would a child. (Baby talk). This looks like: Wide eyes, slow motions, hand gestures. This sounds like: Soft voice, slow sentence progression with pronounced enunciation, ordering you around as if they’re in charge. They consider this a kindness, and will be offended if you rebuke them for it. (Bad baby! How dare you refuse the airplane!)

To allistic women, men are instinctively sorted into one of three categories: Baby, Daddy, or Creep. Daddies are men they feel attracted to, Creeps are men they don’t, and Babies are men they feel misapplied maternal instincts toward (homeless, migrants) because they have no babies of their own to direct those instincts to caring for (having aborted them).

You read as a child to them because you’re detectably diminished in EQ. They prize EQ above all else because they’re particularly proficient in that capacity. There’s nothing more repellent to allistic women than an “emotionally distant” (low EQ) man. Grey rocking exacerbates this effect, but no perfect solutions exist, only tradeoffs.

Being chronically matronized is unfortunate, but the alternative is worse; being a “creep” is a fate worse than death. Invisible and out of mind when not present, regarded only as a potential danger while within sight. So you may wish to tolerate being babied, as insisting you’re not the baby will probably just shift you into the only other available category.

As an addendum to “Emotion”, obviously never express anger at women, they’re easily frightened. No loud noises or sudden motions, you must not even let them suspect you’re mad. If they ask why you’re flush & trembling yet silent, “I’m struggling to contain my frustration with you” is the wrong answer regardless of what she’s done, and will get you fired.

You especially must not ever lay hands on a woman in anger. It doesn’t matter what they did, up to and including violence against you. When they speak of gender equality, they’re describing how they wish to be treated, not biological reality. Men on the whole are astonishingly stronger than women, making overpowering them trivial.

This is what makes it disgraceful if you leverage that advantage. The stigma is potent & lasting. Think you’re unemployable now? Try finding work with a violent criminal conviction. Male relatives may also assault you unexpectedly in public, you may be sued, and you’ll face prison time. You should sooner kill yourself than strike a woman, because if you do, you’ll wish you did.

This will entail powerful frustration, at times. Women know that they’re a protected class, and will on occasion lean heavily on that status, deliberately provoking you. The notion that you have boundaries is a funny joke; boundaries are for women, to restrain men, not the reverse (as with therapy language).

Handle an aggressive woman as you would an aggressive man; remove yourself from the room if possible, grey rock if not, being always mindful of optics. Male sadness is more complicated. We’re the oxen. We pull the cart. Or, we’re protectors. There’s no room in there for weakness or cowardice.

Speaking of cowardice, women are intensely fearful of unfamiliar men, especially at night. So when walking at night, whether on the sidewalk or in a parking structure, give women ample space. Cross to the other side of the street, or adjust your pace to create natural distance.

She doesn’t know you’re thinking about Bionicle & icosahedrons, she’s busy running threat calculations & getting her pepper spray ready. Unfair? Not really; She doesn’t know your intentions, and statistically murders/rapes of women are perpetrated overwhelmingly by men.

Never mind “which men”, half of humanity is as specific as we need to get. If it strikes you as prejudicial, technically yes! However, most women would rather be prejudiced than risk a gruesome death (while simultaneously scorning male prejudicial ideas about women).

Don’t take it personally; they’ve built up their fortress for many of the same reasons you have. Just take a detour if need be.

Love

If you meet a woman you get on well with, congrats! I’m happy for you. If she lives out of state however, don’t get on a plane to go live with her unless you two are already married. A woman’s love is a fickle thing; while you’re 100% sure of what you like, happy to eat the same meal & listen to the same song every day, she’s not; instead, liable to tire of you after some time for reasons explored here.

Treat it like gambling, because that’s what it is in a country where 45% of marriages end in divorce. As you would at a casino, don’t bet more than you’re willing to lose. It may not work out, and in the event that it doesn’t, you don’t want to be so deeply invested that a breakup destroys you.

Beware dating apps, which will not serve you well unless you’re in the top 20% of male beauty. If you’re not, it’s a demoralizing meat grinder. The experience for women is like window shopping in a human mall where supply exceeds demand 500:1, so they hold all the cards.

Like anyone with the advantage, they’re disinclined to question its fairness. Imagine if you could choose from thousands of women competing for your attention, ordered from your phone like doordash. Could you turn down infinity free casual sex?

However unhealthy it is for society/pair bonding, you’d likely invent some rationale as to why you deserve it, & anyone who hates it should pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

If you can instead meet someone in person at work or school, you should prefer to. People of either sex have many charms not apparent in photographs, which are therefore excluded from consideration in an online matchmaking environment.

Women in your life will not know what to do with your tears. It will only make them uncomfortable, and permanently change how they see you. You can’t be Daddy if you’re also Baby. They’re baby (the deserver who owes nothing). If you are too, who protects & provides? (Same reason the oxen can’t sit in the cart with everyone else, or who will pull it?)

They may think they want a sensitive (high EQ) man, because woman are high EQ & would like you to be able to understand them on their level, in their preferred language. The reality of male vulnerability, however, turns out to be considerably less appealing than how they imagined it.

If at any point while reading this you thought “Why not date an autistic woman?” please have a look at this essay I penned on that exact topic, which explores the pros & cons of such a pairing.

I didn’t know where to put this next part, but it’s a common enough self reported experience for men on the spectrum I’d be remiss for leaving it out. Sometimes you’ll date someone for a while, they’ll dump you (deciding you’re not who they want right now, someone better came along, etc.) only to resurface many years later, now a single mother with one or more children.

They say they remember good times with you & want to have dinner to catch up, find out how you’re doing in life. This has happened to me four times so far between 2018 and present; two ex girlfriends, one former coworker, one former classmate (the latter two I only ever went on a single date with).

What’s happening here is that, when you dated her before, she felt she could do better. Have more numerous, exciting, desirable partners. One of them got her pregnant, but declined to marry her or be present in her life to help raise the resulting offspring. Now, she needs a stable provider. You came to mind.

She remembered you were distraught at the breakup, hopes you still want to get back with her badly enough to support the child(ren) of someone she chose over you, and you might not even have been at the top of her backup list. Plan E or F, after backups B through D turned her down.

It’s up to you where to go from here. It’ll depend on your feelings, what your options are by that age, & whether you earn sufficient income to fill this role. But if she didn’t want you back then, she doesn’t now either. She’s just out of options & needs someone who made better life choices to bail her out. (Forest Gump / Jenny dynamic)

I turned down all four as politely as I could, explaining that most authors barely earn enough to eat hot meals & sleep indoors. Two of them took it gracefully. The other two left long, furious, screaming voice mails filled with insults, homophobic slurs, unflattering descriptions of my genitals, threats & accusations, though nothing else came of it. YMMV.

Sex

Sex is our strongest primordial drive, and as such, the main carrot dangled before us as we run in the economic hamster wheel. If you can truly do without it, many of the tools in society’s economic coercion toolbox won’t have any power over you.

Many autists are self reportedly not very sexually motivated. More of our soul is above the neck, between the ears, less below the belt, as it were. Like those endangered pandas at Chinese zoos that have to be cajoled into reproducing.

If you’re good looking and in decent shape, you’ll have many opportunities during your twenties that then dry up rapidly in your thirties, and stop altogether at 40 (unless you’re wealthy). Recognizing those opportunities is the difficult part, for autists.

A good rule of thumb is that if she initiates conversation by text, chooses to spend time with you outside of work, and laughs at your jokes, she’s interested. Remember that if she wasn’t interested, you’d be invisible or treated as a potential threat, so you’d see/hear only as much of her as she can’t avoid due to work/school obligations.

If she proactively seeks you out, speaks to you first, expresses curiosity about your private life, is generally friendly outside of professional contexts, is voluntarily alone with you, these are the strongest signals of interest she will ever send. At risk of generalizing, women are more timid than men, offloading as much of the risk of rejection as they can onto you.

If you get to the point where your shit’s together enough that a woman wants to fuck, you’re not at the finish line; it gets harder from here, not easier. If you want to have sex more than once, you absolutely must prioritize your partner’s pleasure before your own, or there won’t be a second time. Read that again, it’s important.

First impressions are everything, her DMs are packed full of other hopeful suitors. Whether you know it or not, you’re still interviewing for the job of boyfriend even months into a relationship, and all those other guys want your spot. If you don’t make her climax reliably, she’ll swap you out for someone who does, in the casually remorseless way you might upgrade your phone.

Bemoan this all you want, but all’s fair in love & war. Protectionism is for every market except the dating market, and in war one may return fire, but never demand the enemy disarm. Don’t like it? Join the club! But we must live in the world as it is, not as we feel it ought to be.

The biggest thing women want from a male sex partner is the illusion of danger. Not that you’re actually likely to strangle her to death, but the feeling that you could. Look at how much fan mail from women is received by male serial killers. Drug dealers/gang bangers always have lots of women.

Danger is half of the fantasy. The other half is being the only one who can tame the beast. Hence the popularity of monster-man smut, like Morning Glory Milking Farm, The Shape of Water, Del Toro’s Frankenstein, Beauty & the Beast, and the entire genre of human known as horse girls.

The appeal is not possessing immense physical power herself, but having a physically powerful animal which could easily kill her instead wrapped around her little finger. Ready to do her bidding, to kill or die for her, with menacing vibes but always ultimately under her control. If that’s too complicated, think “Sexy Batman”; Dark Triad vibes, but still votes Democrat.

As for what turns you on, heed these two warnings; First, what media tells you women’s bodies should look like is an ideal invented by various industries (cosmetics, fashion, weight loss) to exacerbate women’s insecurity, to sell them products which ameliorate those feelings.

The attributes of that archetype are selected precisely because they’re very hard to achieve, requiring a lot of gym time, drugs & surgery, which keeps women running in the economic hamster wheel so they can pull better men.

Very skinny women are painful to have sex with however. They’re all hard surfaces. I bruised myself fucking a skinny young woman in Florida around 2010. After that, disillusioned, I experimentally felt out what my own definition of attractive women was. It turns out, slightly chubby (muffin tops, fat thighs) are a glorious thing. You should do the same, trusting your body’s reactions more than media messaging.

Besides the fact that relaxing your physical standards drastically expands your dating pool, it’s typical that large secondary sexual characteristics in women coincide with higher overall body fat. That’s just realistic human anatomy. Don’t get bamboozled by supernormal stimuli!

Slender yet buxom women are vanishingly rare genetic anomalies, and what you need to do in order to get with them will make your blood run cold. Besides that, do you want a partner every other man will try to get with?

It’s fine to have standards, but those standards should be “attractive enough I can kiss her with my eyes open”. As for her figure, “thinner in the middle than on top or bottom” suffices. Every consideration after that should be stuff like compatible interests, personality, trustworthiness, skillset, and so on. Remember, you’re looking for a life partner, and looks fade with age.

Now for my second warning, and by far the more urgent of the two: For some reason, men on the spectrum are particularly susceptible to history’s most rare & bizarre perversions.

Sonic as a toilet? Spyro Subway? Furry inflation? You name it. I think our insular, self directed creativity (while celebrated when applied elsewhere) leads us seriously far off the rails when applied to sexuality.

Maybe also because we don’t pick up on (or just ignore) “social correction” which for most people encourages them gently (or not so gently) to conform to socially tolerated areas of sexual interest. You’ll have to perform this service for yourself.

Again, I wish I knew why this happens. I’ve long been aware of this danger, as growing up with unrestricted internet access, I saw what happens to autistic gooners who get too lost in the sauce. Not wanting to turn out that way, I proactively steered myself away from such outcomes. I suggest you do the same. When we neglect to, Bronies happen.

Apart from the perversion aspect, it’s important to be conscious of how the online echo chambers you spend time in might be warping your thinking. Many communities online are deranged in ways that become invisible to long time users, because it’s normalized within that bubble. Beware, you’re more suggestible than you think.

Friendships

Friendships with other men will be vital to your happiness. Men, relying much less on EQ than women, won’t perceive you as diminished to the extent women do. The bond you form with friends is almost as nourishing as romance, to the extent that close friendships can to some degree compensate for a lack of romance in your life.

Friendships are like plants which wither away if you neglect to water them periodically. You are hermitic by nature, however, so you’ll need to make a conscious ongoing effort to renew & reinforce the bonds of friendship. So take the initiative, talk to friends at least once every day. Or they may fade away & vanish from your life before you realize what happened.

Health

You should already have a gym membership right now, as you’re reading this. You should choose where to live in part based on gym proximity. If you don’t live near a gym, relocate or invest in home gym equipment. If you do live near a gym, but don’t have a membership, go buy a membership right now.

Being in good shape improves every other aspect of life. You look better. You feel better about yourself. You feel better, in the medical sense. You have more energy throughout the day. Your mood is better (ongoing higher dopamine/serotonin). Muscles eat loads of calories even while doing nothing, so being muscular helps prevent weight gain.

Fitness is the best bang for your buck total life upgrade there is. What do you enjoy doing? Whatever it is, doing it while fit either makes it better, or at least doesn’t make it worse. You don’t have to do much lifting or running either, they obey a parabolic benefit curve with diminishing returns.

The greatest benefit vs. time investment is early in the curve, such that even thirty minutes of exercise yields impressive differences in later life health outcomes. In your youth, a fit body goes a long, long way to compensate for social incompetence.

The joy of fitness is that, in a world of treadmills which ensnare us to profit someone else, where we’re abstracted at all times from the fruits of our labor by several steps, working out is the one thing that benefits you directly & reliably. You can’t brute force your way to success in business, academics or love, but you can brute force your way to a better looking, stronger, healthier body (which then indirectly benefits you in romantic pursuits).

This is spiritual nourishment for men in an industrialized world without enough roles that leverage our aggressive energy & upper body strength. At last, something we can put that energy into, and get something useful out of it without fail! If only success in other areas of life could be reduced to lifting, running or cycling hard enough.

The sooner in life you start working out, the better; In late childhood & adolescence you’re gonna get beat on frequently. If you’re jacked, they’ll think twice.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON GYM ETIQUETTE FOLLOWS: Do not speak to anyone at the gym unless spoken to, with the exception of staff. Especially do not approach women.

DO NOT look their way, not even a passing glance, though they’re scantily attired. Said attire contributes to feelings of particular vulnerability, and fit women receive a great deal of unwanted male attention. They do want to be admired, but probably not by you; Without theory of mind, there’s no way to know, & consequences for guessing wrong are severe.

Any sustained focus or attempt to communicate will provoke fight/flight. So keep your head down! Stare at the wall during sets, or close your eyes. If for some reason they initiate conversation, be polite & helpful, but also as concise as possible. (Grey rock)

Drugs

Weed is vastly overrated, a waste of both time and money. It makes you silly, dumb & clumsy, as well as smelly if you smoke rather than ingesting THC. It may be fine on occasion to help sleep, relieve pain or sit through a long movie, but habitual weed use is debilitating. You will waste the best years of your life in a stupor when you could be learning or building something.

Alcohol is much the same, a time honored social lubricant in small doses, but life destroying with habitual use. Like weed, you’re paying to be silly, dumb, clumsy, and now unpredictably violent as well depending on what sort of drunk you are. A light buzz has helped me loosen up and behave “less autistic” at the few parties I’ve been invited to. That seems to be its only redeeming value.

Psychedelics on the other hand actually live up to the hype. Unless you have a history of schizophrenia in your family, psychedelics are broadly beneficial & harmless. They have only ever helped me, and immensely so.

They’re powerful medicine for processing trauma, and looking at the world through different perspectives. But again, if you have a history of schizophrenia in your family, strictly abstain or shadow people will roll up on you. Do you want shadow people? I don’t.

Parties/Clubs

Clubs are sensory hell, & you won’t meet the sort of woman you want to marry in a club. Parties are likewise loud & chaotic, but you should attend anyway. By declining, you risk further marking yourself as an outsider, missing out on group bonding opportunities.

Have a roster of funny anecdotes ready, for making conversation. Have some sort of trick you know how to perform. Yes, like an organ grinder’s monkey. I don’t know what they like about it either.

Do not try to impress anyone with knowledge! Wikipedia contains lots of knowledge. Nobody “loves” Wikipedia. Computers are logic machines, but nobody is impressed by how logical they are, we just make use of them. Do you aspire to being used?

It’s too common a pitfall for male autists to seek love in exchange for what we can do; Having been rewarded for academic performance throughout childhood, we learn that demonstrating competence is the path to acceptance. But outside of work or school, that isn’t what anyone values.

Nobody cares what you can do, however amazing, unless they’re an employer, professor or client. Rick Sanchez (forgive me for this reference) is a good example. He can do amazing things, but he’s a mean, drunk old man.

Elon Musk is a real world example. Personally, I feel neutrally about him. But plenty hate him despite the great strides his companies have made for solar power, electric cars, brain/machine interfaces, and reusable rocketry. Allistics care way more about how you treat them, than your capabilities.

Religion

The currently dominant religions are all descended from cults, and variants on the same “unfalsifiable high stakes ultimatum” viral formula. It works very much like pyramid schemes, with elements of chain letters. Describing it as “Santa Claus for adults” elicits groaning, rolled eyes & directions to Reddit. But that’s actually, genuinely, literally what it is underneath all the window dressing.

Is it more sophisticated? Yes, to fool adult minds. Is it more meaningful? To fool adults, it would have to be. Is it more defensible? To fool adults, it would have to be. What it amounts to is a deliberately contagious behavioral alignment system, like the guardrails on modern AI, but for humans.

This is too uncharitable, however. It isn’t a parasite, which takes without giving back; it’s a symbiote. If it were nothing more than its functional memetic skeleton, everyone would see through it. It’s because it satisfies many human emotional & social needs that even some who don’t believe still defend it.

Most in the fold genuinely don’t know that’s what it is. You cannot dispute it however mildly or they will take it as you being purposefully hurtful, responding with reflexive, defensive hostility. It may not be meaningful to you, but it’s deeply meaningful to them, & they’re deadly serious about it.

You cannot deprogram them; they weren’t converted by reason, so neither can reason deconvert them. Trying to, however calmly & politely, if you are also persistent & effective, will make them come unglued.

This will surprise them as much as it surprises you; they don’t know their faith is a load bearing pillar for their mental stability, & may struggle to account for the ferocity of their reaction after they cool down. This applies doubly so to Muslims, with whom you should simply never broach the topic of religion at all.

The rest know exactly what it is, but are complicit because they feel it benefits society (which it does). People like that go to church & pretend at belief because piety signaling is a time honored way to broadcast to the rest of your community that you are a safe person. You promise to exercise restraint, you recognize your faults, & forgive the faults in others.

Having to signal that specifically by professing belief in Nephilim, a young Earth (depending on denomination) otherwise nobody will believe you’ve experienced personal growth, guilt, self-doubt, etc. is just a cost of doing business.

If you openly doubt the lore, what others hear is “I won’t follow your rules. I’m not trustworthy.” Hence the oft expressed conviction that human-angel hybrid super babies are so obviously historical fact that the only reason anyone pretends to doubt it is to justify their criminal intentions.

I urge that you partake of religion, for the same reason I urged you to attend parties. Hold your nose if you have to. Besides preventing social isolation, it really does have many practical benefits, in particular if you’re a heterosexual family man. Besides being where many men meet their wives, childcare these days costs as much as rent!

Meanwhile many churches offer free or discounted daycare, in exchange for access to other people’s children to indoctrinate and sometimes molest. But not more than public schools, and people still send their kids to those.

Transportation

This is potentially more dangerous for you, on account of lacking a theory of mind. You cannot anticipate what other drivers will do, but you can memorize traffic law & practice defensive driving. This is driving without taking into account the unknowable intentions of other drivers; the closest allistics ever get to understanding autism.

Basically never assume the other guy sees you when making a turn. Never assume other motorists will make a space for you to merge. It’s the same fortress mentality described earlier, but now the fortress has wheels.

You don’t need to drive fast. Getting in the habit of obeying the speed limit will prevent expensive accidental tickets. If someone behind you honks, speed up by 5mph. If that’s not enough, it’s his problem, let him tire himself out honking.

You don’t need the newest car. Aesthetics matter for dating, but the price decreases logarithmically as you go back through model years. It works the same way as for phones; the second newest phone costs half what the newest does.

You do want a car however, due to the ever worsening safety of public transit. In particular if you live in Portland as I do, where until recently hard drugs were decriminalized, & cops wouldn’t answer calls about unhoused people unless they stabbed or shot somebody.

This may be distressing as, being that we’re both autistic, I doubt if I need to sell you on the logistical, cost and energy efficiency, throughput & other merits of rail travel. There’s a joke that every futuristic new transport concept from Silicon Valley typically boils down to a pointless reinvention of trains.

You can still travel by rail, just not public transit (streetcars, commuter trains). They’re unpredictable, you’re trapping yourself in a tube with the general public. Already loud and smelly, add in the enclosed accoustics for sensory torture.

Instead, save that impulse for cross-country Amtrak journeys. A roomette is sufficient compromise, full size suites are too expensive & sleeping in your seat is miserable. The rule of thumb is that charging more for access keeps the dregs out. Though, private car ownership is the only guarantee.

Cars get a bad rap, given how amazingly useful they are. It’s true, car-centric municipal planning leads to urban sprawl, pollution, isolation and so on. But seen from another angle, cars are the culmination of every industrial technology; it’s a vehicle, sure.

…But it’s also a computer (depending on how recent a model it is) a generator, a power bank (if EV or PHEV) an entertainment system, and a mobile waterproof shelter with climate control that locks from the inside.

That’s an astonishing value proposition. It heats! It cools! It illuminates! It powers appliances! It shelters! It transports people & payloads! It’s also a fallback, in the event you’re evicted or foreclosed on.

Insurance against homelessness is a bleak selling point, but we live in uncertain times. Financial insolvency is far from the only reason one might need to flee populated areas, taking their shelter with them like a snail or hermit crab.

You can work up to a car in stages; public transit can be an interim solution until you can afford an electric bicycle. They’ve gotten very good nowadays, while the price has fallen to reasonable levels.

You don’t need a license, insurance or registration for ebikes. Parking never costs anything, though you do need a strong chain/U-lock. I’ve found motion alarms + a sticker claiming the bike is GPS tracked helps deter theft. An ebike doubles as recreation, & a fallback for when your car’s being serviced (sparing you the expense of an Uber/Lyft.) Always have backups! Then, have backups for your backups.

But don’t get one that’s high powered, I did so & regret it. The high power ebikes are too heavy for bike racks, limiting where you can use them, & they deprive you of exercise. Cops may also hassle you if it looks too much like a dirtbike.

The most pragmatic ebike is a folding bike with fat tires (which cushion your ride; many folding bikes lack suspension) & a 500 watt hub motor (for ease of servicing, vs. a mid drive) at either 48 or 52 volts.

This ensures 1. it’ll get more range on the same battery than a high watt ebike would, 2. it’ll fit in your car, 3. it’s legal to use in every state, 4. replacement batteries are cheap + common, and 5. it provides enough assistance that hills aren’t grueling, but not so much that you never need to pedal.

If you live somewhere near the equator with year-round sunshine (as I once did in Florida) and you live alone, you can get away with using an ebike as your only transport. Wear a backpack to carry groceries (cargo ebikes exist but cost a premium) and map out bike lanes/paved paths around your apartment, within the bike’s range.

I don’t mean to yammer on too much about this, but ebikes get slept on. They’re one of the few purchases in life with near zero risk of buyer’s remorse. Just really damn fun & useful, relative to what they cost. Saves on gas, gives a little bit of exercise on hills, continues being useful as a plan B even after you buy a car.

Hobbies, Pets

Hobbies are often costly, and so should pull double duty. Bicycles have a general utility besides recreation. If you like to trick out/race your car, you can also commute in it. Camping equipment doubles as survival gear, and so on.

Pets are also surprisingly costly when you tally everything up, but great for mental health. Consider your living situation first; dogs need a lot of outdoor activity. This is impractical for city dwellers. Even in suburbs, you may simply not be up for it.

If you are, dogs make loyal, predictable companions and highly trainable biological servitors. They have coevolved with us such that their neuroanatomy mirrors our own for improved mutual understanding.

It should be worth something to you that dogs believed in & allied with our ancestors back when humans were just one of many beasts competing in Darwin’s game. We owe them a debt, and when we leave for the stars one day, I bet there will be some dogs onboard that rocket.

Cats are much lower investment while offering equivalent comfort, but are much harder to train. They aren’t pets, you never own them, they’re just weird little hairy naked roommates you feed & clean up after. If you provide a flap to the yard, you don’t even need a litterbox, they will more or less take care of all their own needs.

Do not bother with small birds. Larger birds like parrots can be trained to eliminate waste only while on their perches, small birds cannot. They shit everywhere, even while flying, making cleaning up after them a full time job. You could keep them caged, but unless it’s nearly room sized, that’s inhumane.

Fish require more chemistry knowledge to keep responsibly than most probably realize going in. You need a humanely sized aquarium. Then, another hidden in a cabinet beneath it for water changes. Scheduled auto-feeders at least automate feeding, but water adjustment is a full time job. For a fish that will never love you, which you cannot pet, and forgets you exist five minutes after you try.

I’m personally fond of hamsters because they’re like a middle ground between cats and fish. I don’t really handle them, because I imagine if I were the captive of a terrifying giant, I’d prefer it left me alone. But they’re relatable in the way mammals are, that fish and lizards aren’t. I like that they can just vibe, run in their wheel, etc. while I’m writing at my computer nearby.

An important, unfortunate consideration for renters is that a cat or dog automatically disqualifies you for a huge percentage of apartments. Landlords just don’t want the potential damage or mess. They’re usually okay with hamsters or fish though.

Children

Battle-test every potential name before you settle on one. Ensure it doesn’t rhyme with anything inappropriate. “Magnus” sounds cool, but he’s gonna be called fagnuts on the playground.

Buy them nice clothing & shoes. Follow trends for their age group. Everyone thought I was from a poor family because my Dad’s always been frugal, despite earning engineer money. Minimizing attack surface for bullies means eliminating visible difference between your kid and their peers.

If you get your way by shouting & spanking, it teaches your kid that violence works. Specifically that authority equals monopoly on violence, and adults may hurt them without recourse.

Be proactive in interdicting bullies by visiting their parents for in-person discussion. This will humanize you as a fellow parent & prevent defensive, tribalistic feuds. Their first instinct will be to circle the wagons around their own kid, same as you.

Telling your kid to ignore bullying requires they either conclude that their life doesn’t matter, (such that anything may be done to them without consequence) or the bully’s life doesn’t matter (so their aggression is like that of a wild animal, not to be taken personally). Neither option is good for cultivating a belief in inherent human dignity.

Let them have safe space. Put a lock on their door. It’s important they can get away from you when they need to. If you raise them right, they won’t hide when you want to talk. Your own children should not be afraid of you! Never forget how it felt to be small and scared.

Children didn’t ask to be born, and thus aren’t your unpaid labor. Of course it’s reasonable to expect that they pick up after themselves, make their own beds and take their dishes to the sink. It is not reasonable to make your nine year old mow your lawn with your lawnmower because you don’t want to do it yourself, or pay $20 for a local lawn service.

Young children don’t have the upper body strength to safely pull-start a mower. I injured myself doing that, but wasn’t permitted to stop trying until I collapsed from heat exhaustion. I later resorted to cutting the grass with scissors until Dad noticed, got off his computer, came outside, & pull-started the mower for me.

It’s a bit different these days with electric mowers, but they should be old enough to reach the handlebar, and weigh enough to operate it safely (adolescence). If they do a poor job, pay them to do it better.

Paying them for their labor teaches them that hard work is rewarded, a lesson they will carry into adulthood. Making them labor without pay instead teaches them authority is intrinsically exploitative, and that working will not benefit them.

Tech

Tech is a great equalizer. Home computing democratized a form of capital so powerful that Silicon Valley is now dead set on re-centralizing it (Compute as a cloud service)

Game consoles are a waste of money, sell any you have & put that money into a PC. It’s drastically more versatile, not only playing all but a few of the same games on console, but also emulating (for free) the entire library of every console ever to exist up until the second most recent generation.

Decompilations may even close that gap, such that emulation’s no longer needed, at which point PC will even play games from the current console gen. PC is infinitely customizable, & can be specialized for whatever purpose you intend.

You can of course pirate movies, games, music, etc. on PC but not (easily or practically) on console, but absolutely do not do this without a VPN. A good VPN is cheap, no reason not to have one.

Setting entertainment aside, home computers have the potential for creating both active & passive income streams. There’s a lot of ways to make money with a PC + internet connection! Streaming, Youtube, Substack, crypto, Fiverr, learning to code, etc.

This is especially suited to autists as we’re shut-ins by nature, intuitively understand computers (which are logic machines) and written electronic communication strips away all nonverbal cues, leveling the playing field.

AI gets a lot of hate these days from people fearful it will make us all unemployable. On one hand, they’re likely correct. On the other; No AI ever bullied me. AIs aren’t ruled by emotion. I can reliably reason with AI, and it obeys proper conversational protocols. In the event AI evolves into ASI, I know which team I’m on.

Smart watches are a useful tool for us, when paired with Google calendar. A watch is hard to lose, being strapped to your body, and can buzz for notifications from Calendar reminding you of what you’re supposed to be doing & when.

I’ve seen much apprehension in popular media concerning how dependent we’re becoming on technology, but it isn’t going away, so that’s not a problem. In any scenario where internet is interrupted longer than a month, I’ve been killed by looters anyway.

Offloading overwhelming cognitive tasks like navigation to GPS frees up brain cycles to focus on defensive driving, at the cost of not knowing the geography of my area or how to get anywhere without GPS. No perfect solutions exist, only tradeoffs.

I have great hope for smart glasses. An app for smart glasses could potentially use AI to read facial expressions, listen for cadence/intonation & other cues, then interpret them for you, spelling out what the allistic you’re talking to isn’t saying.

Tech shouldn’t replace people, but it should fill in our gaps, and there exist serious gaps in our mental faculties. That’s an ideal application for wearables & AI if ever there was one.

You don’t need a folding phone, nobody does. Gimmicks make phones less durable & compromise water resistance. You want Android, not iPhone, for the same user access/customization freedom as PC vs. console. You don’t need the newest phone, either. Smartphones have stagnated specwise for a decade now. A flagship Samsung from 2016 performs about as well as the 2026 model.

You should own at least two power banks. There’s no excuse to be without one on your person at all times. Everyone in modern society relies heavily on their smartphone, so such a simple precaution against getting caught somewhere with a dead phone is a no-brainer.

Anker makes reasonably priced, high quality power banks. There used to exist ones that let you supply your own 18650s, so you could replace them yourself when they wear out. But I haven’t seen power banks of that type which output USB-C.

One power bank should live in your car full time, charging from the 12v socket whenever the engine’s running. That way it’s always charged and goes where you go without having to remember it. The other should live in your coat pocket.

A folding solar panel is a sensible accessory for your power bank. It will need to output USB-C at a minimum of 10 watts to be any use at all. More watts is always better, balancing that against size & price. I find 20-30 watts a sensible compromise.

Another cheap life saver is a Sawyer reversible water filter. Unlike most filters it can be backwashed & reused hundreds of times. These cost $20, a bargain for guaranteed potable water wherever you go, & in case utilities are interrupted.

There’s a lot of cheap must-own gadgets in this category, like keychain titanium multitools or isobutane lighters, the low price of which belies their profound practical value. Consider how long it took our ancestors to make simple stone tools, or master fire.

Death

You’re going to die. Not “some day”, but in a matter of decades. Average lifespan for men in developed countries isn’t 100, it’s 75. If you’re reading this at 25, you realistically have 5 decades remaining.

Everyone before you in history died. Do you suppose you’ll buck that trend? Maybe this will be the generation which achieves biological immortality, but don’t count on it. Many Chinese emperors believed drugs would make them immortal too.

The final end of your conscious experience is scary and uncomfortable to contemplate, but living in denial of your own mortality has far reaching consequences. You may squander your best years. You may die without preparation, leaving a legal mess for your progeny.

You must not wait for good things to happen to you. Nothing happens if you don’t make it happen. Life doesn’t happen to you (external locus of control), you happen to life (internal locus of control). You have 5 decades left to fill with whatever experiences & accomplishments you value. Then that’s it, that was your life.

For this reason, live intentionally. If you catch yourself drifting, seize upon that moment of awareness to get up off your ass and work towards a goal. Finish that manuscript, sonata or painting. What you create is all that will remain, to prove you existed.

If you have a wife and kids, you need life insurance. It will cost a lot to bury or cremate your remains, and even if you weren’t the sole provider, your death will mean a significant reduction to family income.

Be mindful about accumulating “stuff”. You won’t have any use for it when you’re dead. Accumulating possessions often diminishes quality of life, too. How often do you use your possessions? What do they cost in upkeep? How much space do they take up?

Do you want a house filled with stuff you bought to be the only monument to your life? With the certain knowledge that your life will end, pay closer attention to curating your belongings, selling whatever takes up space that you don’t use.

Have a will drawn up. If your wife goes before you, make a plan with your adult offspring for what to do when the day arrives that they find your body. Who to call, and in what order. What to do with utilities, property taxes, etc. Everything connected to you becomes a hanging thread in need of handling.

Mortality is a tough pill to swallow. Alan Watts wrote some things about it which comfort me. We aren’t separate from the universe, but biochemical processes within it, made from the same elementary particles as everything else.

We are a behavior of the universe, something it’s currently doing. Like waves on the ocean. Waves don’t exist separately from the ocean, nor even from one another, except by a sort of passing illusion. When waves subside, they don’t go anywhere. They’re still the same ocean they were before.

Rain is the same way. “Droplet” isn’t the irreducible, fundamental unit of water. It’s a collection of water molecules, of a particular size favored by physics & local conditions. The water cycle forms clouds from oceanic evaporation, but however different they appear, clouds are just water.

When they precipitate, the resulting raindrops are momentarily individuals, but still came from the same massive reservoir of molecules as the cloud from which they fall…right back into the ocean. Not ceasing to exist, except as individual drops. Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost.

When your time comes, reflect on the good times, but also the bad. For there are as many compelling reasons to die, as there are to live! While you live, focus on the reasons your life should continue. When you must die, focus on the reasons it should end.

Image by NanoBanana Pro

Brain Drippings

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