The quote in the tweet is a distinction without a difference, for one.

It's a bit like telling a permanent wheelchair user that they're not too disabled to get out and about but if there are no accessible public transport services and they can't use a car then, yeah, they are too disabled to get out and about.

The cause of the disability can be debated but the reality of the disability doesn't care one bit for how you make that distinction, as you have already argued.

Secondly, autism is pretty well known for being a spectrum and you can't universalise the experience of autism just because Ellie in IT is autistic and she copes just fine (Does she really though? Is she so burnt out that she has zero social contact outside of work? Is the rest of her life a complete disaster? Does she literally spend each weekend stuck in bed as she tries to recuperate enough for the coming work week? You can't know what other people are going through unless you really know them.)

Third, autistic people have a high rate of catatonic episodes compared to most other populations. If you're autistic and you experience catatonia then, unless your job is a one-in-a-million with regards to accommodations, you're either going to be unemployable or you're going to bounce from job to job as your resume looks increasingly poor and you lose references and you dig yourself deeper and deeper into burnout.

As for your friend who doesn't believe in spoon theory that's simply an expression of their own personal experience being universalised onto everyone. If you've ever experienced burnout or you've been through it yourself then it's pretty obvious that you can push through but that it comes at a high cost and ultimately, at some point, you won't be able to continue pushing through.

I experience pretty severe bouts of executive dysfunction (hooray for being autistic and ADHD, I guess?) and there's a point where I get to that I just have to drop out of activities and recuperate. I can push through but I'll start losing possessions like my cards, my wallet, my keys, and it can even get so bad that I struggle with basic directions and following simple instructions and I'll forget to do things like locking things up, taking important things with me, or turning the oven or the stove off.

Can I push through? Of course.

Do the consequences of pushing through far outweigh the minimal benefits I might get from pushing through? Absolutely.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean that it's healthy, sustainable, positive, or that you should do it (and especially not on a regular basis.)

Can you go out drinking all night and then work the next day? Sure!

Can you do that every day of the week? Maybe...

Are you going to keep your job if you do that for longer than a week? Probably not.

I'd love to hear what the spoon theory-skeptic would have to say about "pushing through" on a week-long bender while trying to hold down a job. But that would probably come off as picking a fight so I doubt it would be worth the discussion.

and talking about how his manual labor job cured his depression (and acting like that will be the case for everyone if they just push, and that manual labor is a cure all)

My manual labor job exacerbated my depression to the point of breakdown and an almost total collapse of my life. I need the capitalism drugs to keep me from jumping off the next tower I'm working on and this person thinks if I just push through I'll feel better? Fuck off.

Sorry to take a small part of what you said and reply but I feel inadequate speaking on anything else in the post

I'm not diagnosed with anything because I'm poor and my parents sucked but I'm so tired of this idea that disability is too easy to get on. Anyone that has gone through the dehumanizing process of applying for disability and actually ended up getting it and can find a way to live off less than poverty wages they give you should not feel the least bit bad about it, even if they could hypothetically work with enough accommodations. Because no one makes those accommodations, those hypothetica ljobs that you could do don't exist, we'd need a radically different society than the one we do now where people are given assistance and have every accommodation. Until then, fuck anyone that says some people don't deserve it.

i am "high functioning" in the sense that i can communicate effectively and don't have any comorbid issues, but i am also "disabled" in the sense of getting so deeply burned out by my boss's incompetence and the reality of living in a capitalist hellscape that i've been quasi-vegetative for years and unemployed since july, in the sense that i quit the phd program i was doing because i don't care to write my dissertation and i don't think i could tolerate having to behave in accordance with social norms in the vicinity of tech bros. so in conclusion, uh, fuck the person that made this tweet, they fucking suck. under capitalism, it is absolutely disabling to be autistic because the basic resources for survival are doled out on the basis of social whim. the entire take that they have presented is "someone told me that autistic people are lazy actually, and i've taken that as license to believe in nazi-tier eugenics and institutional ableism because i'm a psychopath." that's a worthy attitude

I'm not autistic, but I'm schizophrenic. I'm able to function properly more than 95% of the time in modern society and even perform well in it. However, at my worst, my condition is such that a bad day at the wrong time could not only cost me my job but also real-life connections, which sucks. (I can also end up again in a closed facility, which is great fun.) This is why, apart from my close family and doctors, only one other person knows about my situation. I spiral really badly when it gets bad...which thankfully is extremely rare. But the threat of it hangs above me like a sword of Damocles.

Society as it currently exists isn't really ready to handle people like me, and I'm pretty much dependent on Lady Luck.

"Accomodations" means "pay them less and deny them promotions because they don't gladhand and kiss-ass like the normals do at the office."

Employment will be autistic friendly when it stops involving hierarchical social scripts whose entire purpose is to take forceful authority and dress it up like openness and vulnerability. “My door is always open” almost never means “my door is always open” and taking it literally will make people think you’re gunning for their position because they see you as playing the same hierarchy game as they are. Same reason people don’t like autistic people coming in, immediately identifying all the core issue with the organization, and disclosing them candidly. It’s seen as a threat to power because the assumption is that you’re trying to throw people under the bus for those problems existing. Absolutely none of this can be fixed through “accommodations”. A good mentor culture can help. But we need to find ways to scale up non-hierarchical organizations, which capitalism provides every incentive not to do.

Edit: Also, 10 hour work week when?

the reality is right now is that jobs dont have accomodations for neurdivergent thinking so its irrelevant to say that

I feel like you're coming at this a bit backwards, because you're seeing it as a "jobs" problem rather than an "employment productive" problem.

At the end of the day, every job needs to be an assembly line, because that's the only way Fordist minded employers are trained to think. If you can't work the assembly line, you're not sufficiently profitable. And that's that.

No accommodation can be made in a Fordist model, because deviation from the norm is always viewed as an extra expense.

This is, at its root, an administrative problem. The role administrators are (ostensibly) supposed to solve is workplace cohesion. But the only thing administrators know how to do is to shove square pegs into round holes.

It reminds me of my ex-friend who claimed to be communist but had a lot of reactionairy attitudes. He always told me that if I ever called him on something and told him it was ableist he would take it seriously, and even called out others when they treated me abliestly. But one day when he posted on his Twitter shitting on Spoon Theory I texted him to call him on that and he started ranting all this shit about how you can "always push through" and talking about how his manual labor job cured his depression (and acting like that will be the case for everyone if they just push, and that manual labor is a cure all) and then started accusing me of wasting my life and making excuses and using my disability as a criticism shield. We no longer talk much lol.

Did we have the same ex-friend?

My reaction is that autism is indeed a disability

jobs hardly accommodate neurotypicals

Especially since like, there are jobs that autistic people can do well but most of them are not "entry level" jobs that anyone can get without qualifications.

This is a really good point. Entry paths into jobs that are autistic-friendly tend to be based on opaque social expectations. The way I got my first tech job was so roundabout that I considered it dumb luck for a long time. Now I see that most people I work with got hired through similar “dumb luck” scenarios and the systemic nature of how this works to gatekeep people based on race, class, and gender has become very apparent.

Yeah, I want to say it's more probable than not that 1. the person advocating for less consideration for folks with ASD; 2. the person responding to the first person; 3. a health professional would all disagree with what accommodations look like.

I'd be willing to hear out provisions that a health professional might be willing to cede, perhaps in the longer term interest of the person or people with ASD. For 1. I don't think history generally shows a good track record for people wanting to take away safeguards and protections for any group, let alone those with mental health issues (which might just be enough history on its own).

ASD is really a number of different disorders and can vary immensely in how it impacts ability to hold a job.

Yeah, I think this falls into the trend of people wanting to make a hot take and accidentally saying something reactionary. Someone was hostile to puella_meiberu by denying / minimizing their experience. Instead of saying that was wrong, puella_meiberu wants everyone to be more hostile to ND people so that this someone will see their experience as real. This wouldn't work because the someone would still be hostile and deny / minimize, and it would be very obviously worse for even more people not mentioned. I don't blame puella_meiberu though, it's a shitty feeling.