>>298930You hit the nail on its head. Especially the point about slow but progressive cognitive decline after 30.
People in western civilizations live longer than ever, and are actually very scared to admit the human ape is old at 30+. The human prime is incredibly short.
For an autist who needs to mask, this is deadly. The more your cognitive function falters, the harder it becomes to emulate the neurotypical code in your brain (compiler) and execute it.
You start getting all sorts of runtime errors, memory leaks and lag. Normies start questioning you and finally see the weird you behind the mask, and they don't like what they see.
You're not a safe and relatable Windows 11 Home Edition with cute colorful icons and a sunny meadow wallpaper. You're a weird fucking Linux distro created by a Hungarian nerd which only has a command line interface and runs off direct Assembly instructions.
Instead of being socially exiled at age 14, it will happen at 38.