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Plenty of neurotypicals, especially extroverts, keep telling me that I failed to pay attention

However I am just not as alert as some neurotypicals

Dissociated

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Clinical depression

Autism

How often does someone tell you that you are not paying attention?

I could not imagine driving a car to work.

Some coworkers work two full time jobs. 80 hours a week? How do they stay alert enough to not crash a car?

Good question really, but I don"t think they have much quality of life working such long hours.. Not sure how long tgey can sustain thst especially if marries with kids, they will hardly see them. Leads to relationship problems.

I fluctuate between scant attention/ day dreaming and hyper focusing.

For quite a few years I had two jobs (one part-time, one often 50–60 hours per week). At times I was very unhappy. At times I just crawled into my home for weekends and did nothing.

I don't like change so I persisted. But I was beginning to think that if I didn't retire early I wouldn't live until normal retirement age so I retired at 56.

Those miserable years of work are behind me and retirement isGREAT!

I'm glad I persisted. It paid off.

I was called "so unaware!" by a rather unpopular man, but I didn't see what I could do about it even if it turned out to be true, because he was rather unaware of me and my needs, and because if there is such a thing as a jerk, he was one. Anyway I didn't want to be aware of the things he may have wished me to do, as he was always trying to screw hard labour out of people, and had other ideas that were odious to me, such as his opinion that child seats in a car were a waste of money because children aren't able to do much productive work.

I also might not give the impression of being "alert" in real life, because I process information slowly and if there's no accommodation for my thinking style, naturally I'm likely to give up paying attention to the information being presented.

Having one job might be forgiven, but having two sounds risky. What happens to their work-life balance and their happiness? How many songs would I have written and recorded if I'd had two jobs? And in the UK at least, a second job attracts no personal allowance or top-up payments unless both jobs are very badly-paid.

I'm not as alert as most people. Being autistic and having anxiety and depression can slow my thinking. I also tend to daydream a lot. It used to bother me that people saw me as being slow. It doesn't bother me anymore because I am a little slow.

I have moments where I'm probably the most focused person, I have moments where I gap out even during high stimulus activities.

Thankfully the delay of game penalty I got wasn't actually my fault, I just served it. I was really anxious I had stared off into space between plays for too long.

sensory processing struggles of different sorts make it much harder for us to do may things that others can do easily, and that they take for granted.

I was told all my life that I was not trying hard enough and that I was not paying attention, when in fact, I learned at age 68 that I had 25th percentile visual processing, and 35th percentile audio/ hearing processing.

That meant that no matter how hard I tried I lost 75 percent of visual input (especially things in motion) and 65 percent of whatever was said or broadcast, what I heard.

Not my fault, but since my actual vision was corrected with glasses and my hearing tests as acute, nobody knew. It is actually almost impossible for me to try doing anything in "real time" without applying tremendous concentration and energy, working very hard to understand what is easy for most everybody else.

You are not alone. This has happened to many of us.

Cut yourself some slack and try to find "work arounds" whenever and wherever you can find them.
There are usually many ways to accomplish almost any project or to tackle almost any problem. Don't worry about other folk's judgement , do what is right for you, and in the way that works for you. Cheering you on.

It's unclear. My brain is a bit odd even by ND standards in that I don't have to actively pay attention to things to pay attention to them. Over the years, I've often been asked to repeat back what people say and can generally do it even if I wasn't at all listening. I'm guessing that's related to my savant memorization skills where I don't have to be aware of the things that I'm memorizing.

I deal with both hyperfocus and hyperactive-focus depends on the day, or hour - emotions - environmental distractions. Many things. I am always focused on something internal or external but my mind can jump from thing to thing. Sometimes I have to unravel a chain (string? yarn?) of thought to try and find how I got to where I am. “I’m fixing a crack where the rain gets in and keeps my mind from wandering … where it will go” sometimes my mind seems to have a mind of its own.
Sometimes I am exhausted trying to keep it from wandering where it will go.

I once had a roommate who was paying his own way through college. He worked three jobs every summer. One was some kind of shipping with heavy lifting. One was night clerk at a convenience store. I forget the other one. He needed the money.

In the Laura Ingle Wilder books (Little House On the Prairie and others) sometimes Laura’s father worked as a hunter and a trapper, other times as a farmer. It strikes me the type of attention needed for farming is very different than the type of attention needed for hunting and trapping. A hunter-gatherer who goes back to the same berry bush every day will soon find it has no more berries. But a farmer has to go to milk the same cow every morning, and work the same field every day.
Part of the paying attention thing is environmental.

I have ADHD (the inattentive type).

So spacing out and becoming not alert often happens to me without warning. It can happen anywhere and at any time.