Autism and ageing

It's an effort to mask. Think of all the work our brains have to do to fit-in to society adapted to non-autism. It's exhausting. As we get older, we have declining energy, and fugg spending it on masking.

The good news is that the cognitive decline of autistic people is slower than typical brains. (Saw a graph on this in a science paper, will post it if I find where I left that note ...)

You reminded me with the tills of something that used to frighten me as a child. In a few shops, small department stores I think. I don't think they had tills, but if you paid and needed change they put the money behind a little door and it disappeared, then when the change came back it suddenly shot down a shute and made me jump.

On the plus side, now quite a few people in my area have electric cars it is so much more pleasant when walking and they quietly pass me.

Have you got an Aldi near you? 8 or so self service tills constantly beeping and boinging and telling you what to do and what to  put where. One or two manned tills which are slightly less noisy, but still beep and then the card machine beeps at you until you've paid. The manned tills are nearest the exit and the alarms are often going off. It's all horrible!!! The assistants have earpieces in on top of all this. God knows how they cope!

I need more info to address this.

The world is way to noisy and continues to get only louder with every passing moment,  it would seem

Sadly, I find even silence deafening 

Actually a choice of apples is something I miss, we get around 4 or 5 here and none are my favourites. I used to live under the Heathrow flight path and we could hear concorde and its boom even when we couldn't see it, I've swapped that now for the sound of fighter jets training pilots and helicopters. I agree that the world has got more noisy, even my washing machine sings a little song when it finished. I wonder if car stereo's are as loud inside the car as they outside? One things I remember from childhood that dies seem to have got quieter or at least differently noisy are tills in shops. I remember when the assistant had to add everything up in her head and press keys like the ones on an old manual typewriter to ring up the correct amount. Woolworths at xmas was a barrage of noise, tills with buttons that worked like a adding machine were so much quieter.

I think the world is becoming less and less autism-friendly. So it's harder for us to deal with. E.g. when I was growing up you had to walk a mile to a phone box to make a call, I think I was nearly 10 before we got a phone in the house. Now a phone is a computer, TV, diary, camera.... permanently in your pocket, permanently contactable. Shops used to have little choice in the 70s and 80s, now there's about 10 types of apple, when we used to only have 'red' or 'green'. Too much choice is exhausting. The constant noise of people, traffic, car stereos, TV, aeroplanes, alarms, beeps, pings when the kettle boils, the microwave/washing machine/dishwasher is done.

TheCatWoman said:

I think its probably more likely to be because as we get older we feel less like not being our authentic selves,

Agreed.

I think we are born with a limited number of fuggs and as we get older and the number runs down we just stop wanting to give a fugg about some stuff - like masking for the benefit of others.

It is scientific fact. Allegedly.

Lol true.

That makes sense sometimes we aren't too certain or just don't know 

I kind of feel mine is getting worse lol but im not too sure. I was just recently diagnosed with high functioning autism even though we thought it was just a touch

I was only diagnosed in Feb this year at 49, reason being all the things I'd struggled with all my life seemed worse than ever. For many years i suspected I was autistic but never knew for certain.

Guess what I'm saying is that mine must have got worse and can't be because I was thinking about it, as I didn't know for sure I was....

I think its probably more likely to be because as we get older we feel less like not being our authentic selves, the world i getting more and more complicated too, so much tech to keep up with, different ways of doing things, even simple things are being complicated beyond reason. Asking a simple question of someone seems like filling in a multiple choice questionaire and then being shoved to FAQ's that don't answer anything and there's rarely a human to speak too.