Everything I enjoy eventually becomes a rigid system

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I was wondering whether this was a symptom of Aspergers or common on the autistic spectrum, but it's something that I've had all my life. Whenever there was a task I enjoyed I would eventually develop some sort of a rigid system for performing that activity.

Sometimes, when I go to restaurants, I'll order whatever has the most calories. It's easier than being spontaneous and choosing what to eat. Even if the meal with the most calories doesn't look particularly delicious.

Every week, I go to the movies and watch the highest grossing movie of the week, even if I don't really think it looks super interesting, or even if another movie I kinda wanted to see didn't make as much money (every once in a while, I'll see the interesting movie too, just because).

When I play Pokemon, rather than spontaneously catch whatever Pokemon I kinda like, on a whim, I have a rigid and very complex system based on catching whatever available Pokemon of the same level is best fit to counter each Pokemon from each non-optional enemy trainer. A lot of times the system sends me on wild goose chases, makes me spend forever training a Pokemon that I'll only use once, or makes me waste a TM. But I do it anyway.

Come to think of it, almost every time I've ever played a video game, it's turned into a rigid system of some kind. What gun I use to kill people on Halo. What cards I use on YuGiOh. What order I get the stars in on Mario. What

I used to listen to albums I didn't really care for because the songs from them did well on the Hot 100.

This isn't really a PROBLEM for me. Of all the things that cause me grief in my life, this has never ever been one of them. It's something that I chose to do and I'm happy with doing, even though it causes me to do things very differently than the way other people do things. Even though I sometimes run into complications that make it seem like I'm doing something in a roundabout way, it's FUN for me to follow a system.

To me, this seems to be sort of a sub-symptom of organizing blocks in specific patterns, type of thing.

I was just wondering whether any of you could relate, or whether this is a well documented behavior pattern among people with Autism, Aspergers, or some sort of spectrum.

I have read research which concludes that about 30% of people on the ASD spectrum also have OCD. Personally, I think it may be higher than that, though the Asperger's form of OCD may not take the "conventionally understood" pathway of symptoms like handwashing and checking whether things are turned off; it seems to me that the Asperger's form is to escalate personal interests in a way that can turn leisure and other activities into a set of obsessive demands on the self, often mixed with perfectionist tendencies, like raising the bar on performance in something higher and higher, which then becomes a new source of anxiety.

Managing anxiety is one of the biggest challenges many of us seem to face, and sometimes the very things that relieve that for us - a new interest that pleases us - can transmute into a new set of self-demands that drain us. We aren't that great at pacing ourselves either, sometimes, and all or nothing patterns seem to be common to many here. However obsessive interest isn't all bad, many discoveries of genius depended on that kind of focused attention..

Not all that uncommon for the spectrum. Routines that are similar to assembly lines of operation, when performed accurately, are actually optimum for Aspies. The only time it might hinder otherwise optimum progress is when a routine is chosen that is not optimised for the most efficient return on time-investment. Just like in your examples, for video-games, you might do skill-ups for a group of skills that yield gradual increase in DPS, such that the first ten days of playing get you strong enough to be able to clear ten repetitions of a particular mission in one day, but switching/adapting to another route/routine may have resulted in a more rapid-increase in DPS, allowing for the possibility of clearing 30 repetitions of that same mission after the tenth day.

Then there are those like me who say to hell with sitting in front of the screen all day, just to get a virtual reward, then get a bunch of computers and laptops, running either multiple games or multiple accounts of a particular game in order to make my own progress through automated auto-clicking macros that spam-run the missions for me so that I can re-organise the clutter that has followed me around for so many years in the form of processing the office-work (things like separating out receipts into categories of envelopes, marked by time/category/store/etc., shredding what I don't need to keep, recycling various products that I may have used, etc).

Wow, I don't think have ever seen someone else write or talk about this. You described the problems I used to have. I have gotten more flexible (which seems more like laziness to me) in later years and this doesn't happen as much.

Perhaps a fundamental difference (?) between "Asperger OCD-ness" and "NT-OCD-ness" revolves around anxiety: I can see in my own life, for example, how I have used obsessiveness as a technique (sometimes quite consciously) to reduce anxiety - the OCD tendencies are calming ones.

I have never observed this to be true of the NT type of OCD: the mere presence of their compulsions is a source of anxiety.

Bearing in mind that the conceptualisations regarding NT forms of anything get projected onto ASD people - we are expected to live in the same ways, think in the same ways, respond to distress in the same ways, communicate in the same ways. The tyranny of normal... so we are routinely assumed, by the arbiters of psychological conditions, to experience OCD in the same way, and few "experts" appear to look beyond or even identify that hidden imposition of conformity. It's a pity they don't, because it encapsulates the intrinisic lack of respect for difference.

If I may take this thread a little off-topic for a moment (though this is tangetially relative):

I wonder also about the Asperger's reality of depression CF the neurotypical stereotype of signs and effect - again the assumption of sameness absolutely dominates (and therefore treatment models are applied as if there were no differences. This may greatly hamper and intensify depressive episodes for us).

For example, the common signs of depression are usually conceptualised by identifiers as things like: withdrawing from social relationships, where social relationships are ascribed such value by the assumptions of the NT world as to be a paramount sign of 'normal' functioning. However, if this prioritised attachment to social relationships has never been a value nor priority for an ASD person, then that withdrawal is not a reliable nor valid sign of depression at all; what may happen instead in the ASD forms of depression is an abandonment of self..

Another classic common signifier is feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. Again, the yardstick used to measure this is intrinsically an NT-biased one. To a greater or lesser extent, it seems to me, ASD hopelessness often stems from the frustration and burnout of trying to fit their round selves into square NT structures and expectations; why this is so little recognised by the helping industry is a source of concern to me.

The same might be said also of three more commonly held depression signifiers: irritability, loss of energy and self-loathing. For ASD people these may be more related to the hurtful experience of manifest and multiple forms of cultural exclusion (and the related stigmatisation simply for being who they intrinsically are).

One theme you see all the time on WP is the expression of felt powerlessness, of being overwhelmed and excluded by the structure of normative shoulds. Yet to live in a culture so diminishing of difference, as well as we do, perhaps testifies to far more resilience in the ASD self than the arbiters of normal (ie NT) function can recognise. It may be a willful blindness, though I think it operates more on a subconscious level, the level of 'schemas'.. people perceive things through a filter they don't even realise is there... and if they are part of a dominant culture and benefit most from it, there is no incentive to search for that filter (perhaps).

Same here. Like when I play video games, sometimes I make decisions that I realize are probably bad ones, but I make them over and over again anyway because it turns into a system.

I feel like I can't make decisions for myself; I need to invent a specific routine to follow every time I do something because it makes it simpler to understand. It's like a step-by-step manual for how to live life in various situations. That way, I'm not constantly evaluating my options and deciding what to do based on emotion or more complex things. If I didn't follow systems, I can't imagine how I would ever get anything done!

I find that very odd,seeing the most popular movie or highest calorie food. I just choose whatever looks good.

I can be very indecisive with important or complex decisions in real life. In gaming, sometimes I hesitate when I'm playing in RPG in the social context because I start over thinking about how well my character's story will play out, and whether or not the other players will think I'm a fun player to play the game with again. How do very minor decisions cause the need for arbitrary rules? For example, passing up a food you like for the highest calorie food.

From what I've experienced, OCD compulsions might have been be calming, if and only if I wanted to keep doing things the way I've always done them. or, if I didn't keep asking the question, am I done yet? The more irrational or annoying the compulsion, the more I wanted to get rid of it. so I realized that the calmness was actually an illusion.

How about rituals that people create to bring meaning to their lives? For example, discrete stages of intimacy for a new relationship. It seems to me that the only way to be comfortable with letting go of a ritual like that is to reevaluate how to find and express meaning.

But when you're choosing between movies you haven't seen and foods you haven't eaten [at least in a specific restaurant's incarnation] you're choosing based on one or more descriptions [menu summary, movie posters, reviews, menu pictures of food] which someone else decided represented the salable/salient aspects of the thing.
You're really choosing the marketing, not the thing itself.

8208 has a system that relies on at least a theoretical approximation of most value for money - most calories, most people who also chose to use their limited resource to experience...

Yes, you are choosing "the marketing, not the thing itself." I never quite thought of it that way. As you gain more experience choosing stuff though, at least you have reference points, so the marketers can't literally make you do whatever they want

When it comes to movies I can choose based on genre or a franchise that usually makes good movies.
Titanic and Avatar were popular but not a genre I like.

When it comes to food I can order something that has chicken and a sauce that sounds OK, ordering based on calories sounds really weird

Yes I have a way of doing this sometimes. I tend to turn things I like into an all-or-nothing activity. Or I will want everything to be just-so before I will do something so I can maximize my enjoyment of it (which sometimes tends to do the opposite, lol).

Like where most people would just decide they want to go see a movie, and they just effing go see it, I would want to make a long ritual out of it, obsess over whether or not to go out to eat and whether it would be better to do that before or after the movie, probably take a long time showering and then getting dressed because I want to feel comfortable and not be distracted by any ickiness, read reviews of the movie before I go and obsess over whether or not it's really worth going out and paying to see it, probably try to find it online first to preview a few minutes of it just to be sure, change clothes again because I just realized something feels weird and oh I might be cold in the theater, and what if I get hungry, I will need some snacks and I am not going to pay those outrageous movie theater prices, then I have to change my handbag 3 times to find the right one to hold my snacks, before I end up deciding not to take any snacks because now I've made my mind up to get pizza, but it's too late to do so before the movie because I've spent so much time deliberating, so it will have to be afterward so maybe I really do need to take just a small snack with me. It's a wonder I ever get around to doing anything.

Yes! I can relate to that experience Dianthus.

Like an all-too-familiar storm of sudden onset coming in the midst of a sunny day, where the lightning is the particular ASD ability to hyperfocus on details, the thunder is the rumbling inner voice of the anxious 'what-ifs' (which must be silenced by covering all bases in advance) and the rain like a wet blanket drowning out initial, pleasant anticipation.

Very astute observations. Just today I was getting to know someone new at work and was reminded how different "my norm" is to "the norm." I felt accepted, not judged or criticized, but I just had this awareness that something about me was not what quite they expected. I wonder sometimes if being around me makes people begin to realize that they have that filter...like if my difference was more obvious or offensive I think they would simply categorize it according to that filter, as a deviation from "the norm."

As a teenager I got labelled with "depression" and I really resented it because I didn't necessarily feel depressed, nor did I think that the conventional symptoms of depression were accurate harbingers for me. Withdrawal is more often a self-treatment for me, rather than a symptom, and sometimes I withdraw simply because I feel fine and there is no pressing need to do otherwise.

I have much more of a tendency to seek company when I'm emotionally distressed, which can be a terrible form of self-abandonment that is just likely to make me feel worse...almost nothing would be a more dangerous sign than if I become unusually "social" all of a sudden. Worst case scenario, I have done that when I was feeling suicidal, and not necessarily wanting to say so but not wanting to be alone either. But other people would interpret my out-of-character behavior as a sign of positive change, as being more what-they-thought-I-should-be and so would completely misunderstand the signs of distress.

I also have this bad habit, which I'm trying to stop, of making the excuse that I feel depressed when I just don't want to see people.

It is the same for me: seeking company is much more likely to occur when I am distressed, the very opposite of the NT conceptualisation and response to depressive feelings and experience. Though until you observed it, it was never so sparklingly clear to me that that is what I characteristically do. I wonder how common that is for us as a group.