You've got to restore the suspension of disbelief which resulted from your burnout.
If you have enough money to take some time off, do so.
The world is a shitty place ;
The world doesn't care about what you can offer ;
The world doesn't care for you ;
The world doesn't even care for itself ;
The world just doesn't care
The world won't be fine but that's not your fault.
The alternatives are either cynicism or escapism.
Protect yourself from toxic environment, grow inward, enjoy the beauty in life that you can find.
It can be your environment, some places are designed by people who don't care. Some places even are adversarial.
It can be you, either from lack of something (sleep, magnesium, ...). It can be you missing some understanding. Or you just don't getting that most people either don't have your attention to details, don't care, or don't want to do anything to improve their environment. It can be you not being the intended audience. It can be you not putting yourself into the intended usage.
But either way, you can choose to accept it or change it and be proactive about it and don't whine as it reinforce learned helplessness. Pick your battles. The environment is dynamic. For example try littering and see what happens. Or you can make some improvements to it. Or you can point and shame on the internet.
Giving feedback in the real world is quite easy. You can carry a pen and a stack of stickers, or a spray paint can to mark things. For example you see ambiguous handles just mark one red sticker/dot on the handle which is closed and a green dot on the handle which is open, (or do the opposite and set-up a live twitch :) )
You can write letters to the mayor. You can also notice the positive small details left by people who care, and reward them.
@teekert I was mainly putting myself on lookathrwaway level, to hopefully provide advice to a fellow Aspie.
The beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as one say. I perceive that there are plenty of different axes to look at things. But I refuse not to see the broken vase as a whole, no matter how beautifully you frame the shiny pieces.
Most people have been broken one way or an other. Some even celebrate it ; I find it quite sad and would rather avoid it, but who am I to know ?
I used to have things I didn't get at all like music, until the day it clicked. Even though I won't ever reach the level of masters in the art, I have enough to find it interesting. But more importantly that was an enlightening and humbling experiment that there are things you don't get until you do.
I enjoy the state of mind model, where to learn a new thing you try to search the state of mind where this thing comes naturally.
Once you get the right state of mind some things become easy , and some other things harder, but communication with a person in the same state of mind flows easily.
Often meeting different people and understanding how they deal with things can help acquire a new state of mind.
>How would you feel being judged as several levels below me?
As an aspie that as been judged stupider than I am most of my life, I have grown past it.
There are usually interesting experiences I can pick with anyone, although the ratio effort/reward depends a lot on our relative paths. I get that life sometimes put you in shitty situations and I don't judge people. As much as I enjoy the occasional serendipity that the chaos of life can bring, I enjoy creating my own path more.
There are different levels though. There is complexity and tremendous ingenuity at any levels. It's just that the greater the level difference between two people, the less the interaction is fruitful for the both of them.
Poverty might mean that a smart one may spend most of its brain power to make rent, instead of getting a PHD. Omnipresent marketing might have ingrained some ideas and dreams.
People tend to stay in their level as long as they find it entertaining. Which can be very long because when you do thing inefficiently you get to face new problems that you can once more treat inefficiently until you are crushed by an inextricable mess of superficial things.
Like you said people are pretty good at pettiness when noticing the attitude, and then close the door even further on sharing anything potentially interesting.
When you are more than a few levels above, it's your role to find the way to make the interaction between the two of you, meaningful, positive and interesting for the both of you. Very often it will require some attention to details.
Unrelated : In this article double f, like in "affected" are rendered with the second f bigger than the first (both on firefox and chromium). I looked inside the css editor and the font seems to be ("Libre Baskerville", Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif).
I guess this is probably to improve readability but it doesn't do this for other pairs of repeated letters.
It kind of sent me into a rabbit hole as I thought font were defined for a single letter only. I did a quick search and I couldn't find the rules which defined fonts. Is there some pattern matching for sequence of characters ? More importantly, when trying a new font how do we know that there aren't special cases like this ugly "ff" ?
I get the point of checklist for critical process. But I think it's counterproductive to drone your life away following task lists full of feature creep.
First with a little training you can put mental reminders in your mind, trusting yourself that they will show up when needed. It also helps with keeping your brain and memory in good working condition, and force you to stay in mental clarity and not being so overworked and tired that you have to rely on external list.
Second it's not robust to rely 100% on a task list being completed, sometimes forgetting something means that it's not that important. It's more important to rely on situational awareness to know what's need to be done and in what priority. The logic behind is pick something from the hot mess and make the whole better.
Third we can automate and delegate more easily now, quite often if you need to use a checklist, a script would be even better.
I'm not quite sure if I have it or not. I visualize mostly in 3d but without a specific viewpoint, or more exactly I get a feel from how it would look from various viewpoints simultaneously. I find it easier to mentally see as a 2d picture, something I saw in photo, or on a screen.
If I specifically force myself to imagine how it would look if I was at a specific position looking in a specific direction (i.e. do the 2d projection), I can in-paint in my mind starting from a black canvas, focusing sequentially my attention on a part of the canvas making details appear at the center of attention. I scan the canvas a few times in-painting details, and then I try to mentally take a step back visualize all those various details in a unique coherent picture, by un-focusing attention. It kinda work, but it needs to get into it. It's easier to imagine looking at a photo from the scene I'm trying to visualize.
I noticed my eyes do some REM when I do this. Color and illumination comes last. Closing eyes helps.
I can mentally do a "street-view" experience of my home, moving inside and answer question about details, but I need to focus my attention first on the relevant area.
Those mental exercises are quite funny, not sure how useful they are though. Once you add some moving objects (like pendulums) in the scene in your mind, it gets even harder to make something coherent. Then you can add animals and people, wind. Noises, music. I guess when you add complexity, you must relax your attention to make a coherent global picture, then you get into a flow-like state, and it becomes more similar to a lucid dream.
On the other hand of the spectrum, I'm not quite sure about auras too. It's kind like of synesthesia but for people instead of numbers. I guess the brain hallucinate colors around object/people to make it faster to process. I find it quite unnecessary to hallucinate rather than having a specific feel about the person. And I feel it's quite reductive/intolerant to put/interact with people into a category based on subconscious perception. But I guess that if I was a bouncer, I'll probably be seeing colors around people too.
To conclude this already too long post, I think aphantasia is probably very correlated with hyper-attention.
If you have enough money to take some time off, do so.
The world is a shitty place ; The world doesn't care about what you can offer ; The world doesn't care for you ; The world doesn't even care for itself ; The world just doesn't care
The world won't be fine but that's not your fault.
The alternatives are either cynicism or escapism.
Protect yourself from toxic environment, grow inward, enjoy the beauty in life that you can find.