Part 3 of a seven-part series exploring what it feels like to live inside a system that values certain minds for their usefulness. Recognition of neurodivergent strengths in modern industries has created new opportunities, but lived experience reveals a more complex reality. This article reflects on the gap between technical usefulness and social understanding, exploring masking, misinterpretation, and the persistent challenge of belonging in environments built around neurotypical expectations.
Contents
1. Introduction
In recent years, discussions about neurodiversity have increasingly emphasised the strengths associated with certain neurodivergent cognitive styles.
In fields such as technology, engineering, cybersecurity, and data science, traits often associated with autistic cognition, pattern recognition, deep focus, system-level thinking, and sustained analytical attention, are frequently described as valuable assets. Organisations run recruitment programmes aimed specifically at autistic candidates. Conferences celebrate “neurodivergent thinking” as a driver of innovation.
From the outside, this looks like progress.
In many ways, it is. For much of the twentieth century, neurodivergence was framed almost entirely through the language of deficit and disorder. The growing recognition that different cognitive profiles can bring distinctive strengths represents a meaningful shift.
But lived experience complicates the picture.
Because being useful does not necessarily mean being understood.
1.1 Series Overview
This short series explores the “question of usefulness” across seven perspectives: historical, social, personal, diagnostic, systemic, experiential, and constructive.
- Asperger’s Syndrome and the Question of Usefulness examines the historical origins of the diagnosis in Nazi-era Vienna and the uncomfortable context in which it emerged.
- Neurodiversity and the Question of Usefulness looks at how modern economies increasingly frame neurodivergent cognition in terms of its value to technical industries.
- Lived Experience and the Question of Usefulness reflects on what it means to live inside that dynamic, where certain cognitive traits are valued while the broader reality of neurodivergent experience often remains misunderstood.
- The Spectrum Problem after The Question of Usefulness examines whether the modern autism spectrum accurately reflects the diversity of autistic cognition, or whether diagnostic simplification has obscured meaningful differences in neurological profiles.
- We Still Don’t Understand Neurodivergent Minds Even Beyond the Question of Usefulness brings these perspectives together, exploring how the concept of usefulness continues to shape the conversation and arguing that meaningful inclusion requires changing environments rather than sorting or flattening different kinds of minds.
- When Autism Doesn’t Work: The Human Cost of the Question of Usefulness describes what that dynamic looks like from the inside when it does not work.
- Choose to Build Your Own Meaning Anyway: Beyond the Question of Usefulness explores what remains when usefulness fails as a framework, arguing that meaning must be constructed deliberately rather than assumed to emerge from success or inclusion.
Taken together, these essays explore a simple but important idea: that understanding neurodiversity requires looking not only at cognitive strengths, but also at the historical, social, human, and structural contexts in which those strengths are interpreted, and what follows when those frameworks break down.
2. Competence Without Belonging
There is a phrase I have heard, in one form or another, for most of my life.
“I just can’t understand how you think.”
Sometimes it is said with curiosity. Sometimes with frustration. Occasionally with admiration. But the underlying dynamic is usually the same: the gap between different cognitive styles is acknowledged, yet the responsibility for bridging it quietly falls on the neurodivergent person.
For many autistic people, this creates a strange position in professional life. It is entirely possible to be technically valuable while remaining socially peripheral.
The work may be recognised. The way the mind producing that work functions often remains unfamiliar.
This gap can appear early and persist for decades. Neurodivergent individuals may find themselves called upon in moments of complexity, when systems need to be analysed, problems untangled, or patterns identified, but left outside the informal social structures that shape everyday belonging.
It is rarely open hostility.
More often it is simply distance.
3. The Map Everyone Else Seems to Have
One of the quieter realities of autistic experience is not malevolence but asymmetry.
In many social environments it can feel as though everyone else has access to a map. Sarcasm, teasing, shifting conversational hierarchies, and subtle status signals circulate easily between other people.
For someone who does not automatically detect those signals, the landscape can feel opaque.
I do not reliably detect sarcasm. I do not instinctively detect deception. When conversations rely on implication rather than clarity, interpretation often happens slowly and deliberately rather than intuitively.
By the time a missed signal becomes clear, the moment has usually passed.
These are rarely dramatic failures. They are small misalignments that accumulate over time.
What others experience as a fluid social environment can feel more like a system that requires constant manual interpretation.
4. The Work Speaks for Itself
Because of this, many neurodivergent people learn to rely on a different form of credibility.
They rely on the work.
In my own career, that work has involved building national-scale systems, designing infrastructure used by millions of people, and founding organisations operating within complex technical and security environments. The outcomes exist independently of diagnosis or explanation. Systems either function or they do not.
Work delivered at scale tends to speak clearly.
Yet the experience of delivering that work has always existed alongside another reality: the ongoing effort required to navigate social environments designed around different cognitive assumptions.
Competence can open doors. It does not always eliminate misalignment.
5. Masking as Adaptation
Many neurodivergent people respond to this misalignment through a process commonly called masking.
Masking involves consciously adjusting behaviour in order to align with neurotypical expectations: monitoring tone of voice, controlling body language, rehearsing conversational responses, and analysing how words or actions may be interpreted.
At a distance, this adaptation can appear seamless.
In reality, it requires continuous attention. Over time, masking becomes less a deliberate strategy and more a background process, a constant effort to remain synchronised with a social environment that operates according to different instincts.
For high-performing autistic individuals, masking can become particularly complex. Professional success can create the impression that adaptation is complete, that the differences have been resolved rather than managed.
But invisibility does not remove the cost.
It simply hides it.
6. The Thin Slice of Judgement
Research suggests that neurotypical observers often form impressions of autistic individuals within seconds of meeting them. Those impressions can persist even when competence and intelligence are held constant.
Autistic people rarely need research papers to recognise this phenomenon.
It appears in small signals: a brief pause after speaking, a shift in tone, a subtle recalibration of attention when conversational rhythm diverges from expectation.
These moments are rarely dramatic. They are rarely openly hostile.
But they accumulate.
Over time they create environments in which belonging must be constructed deliberately rather than assumed.
7. Useful Minds
This is where the question of usefulness becomes personal.
In many technical environments, the same cognitive traits that produce social misalignment also enable unusual forms of analytical work.
Pattern recognition. System-level thinking. Deep concentration sustained over long periods. A willingness to sit with complex problems until their structure becomes visible.
These traits can make neurodivergent people extremely effective in certain contexts.
But usefulness is not the same as acceptance.
A mind may be valued when it produces solutions, analysis, or innovation. The person attached to that mind may still struggle with the social choreography surrounding those outputs.
The analytical capacity is welcomed.
The difference accompanying it often remains unexplored.
8. The Cost of Being Useful
Over time this dynamic creates a subtle pressure.
If usefulness becomes the primary justification for belonging, then usefulness must be continuously demonstrated.
Competence becomes a form of social currency. Each project, each problem solved, quietly reinforces the legitimacy of remaining in the room.
For some people this pressure becomes exhausting. For others it produces a quieter form of distance: a sense that participation in the social environment remains conditional on performance.
The work speaks clearly.
The person remains harder to interpret.
9. Conclusion: Beyond Usefulness
The recognition that neurodivergent cognition can bring strengths to certain fields is important. Challenging deficit-only narratives is a necessary step toward greater understanding.
But lived experience suggests the conversation cannot stop there.
Human beings are more than the outputs of their minds, or what their minds can produce.
For neurodivergent people, genuine acceptance means more than appreciation of analytical ability or technical skill. It means recognising that different minds experience social environments differently, and that those differences deserve understanding rather than constant correction.
Usefulness may open doors.
Understanding is what allows someone to remain inside the room.
For many neurodivergent people, that difference matters more than productivity ever will.
This question is explored further in: The Spectrum Problem after The Question of Usefulness.
The history of Asperger’s reminds us how societies once judged human worth through usefulness. Lived experience reminds us why that question still matters. The later articles explore what happens when that framework breaks down and what follows.
This article is part of a series:
- Asperger’s Syndrome and the Question of Usefulness — Historical Origins
- Neurodiversity and the Question of Usefulness — modern economic narratives
- Lived Experience and the Question of Usefulness — personal realities
- The Spectrum Problem after The Question of Usefulness — diagnostic frameworks
- We Still Don’t Understand Neurodivergent Minds Even Beyond the Question of Usefulness — systemic perspective
- When Autism Doesn’t Work: The Human Cost of the Question of Usefulness — how it feels from the inside
- Choose to Build Your Own Meaning Anyway: Beyond the Question of Usefulness — constructive series finale
10. References
- References Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society.
- Hull, L. et al. (2017). Camouflaging in autism: A systematic review. Autism.
- Pearson, A. et al. (2020). The relationship between camouflaging and mental health. Autism in Adulthood.
- Horkan, W. (2025). Guide to Masking for People without Asperger Syndrome (or ASD).
https://horkan.com/2025/02/09/guide-to-masking-for-people-without-asperger-syndrome-or-asd - Horkan, W. (2024). The Reduction of Diagnostic Categories in the DSM-5: Overlooking Important Distinctions.
https://horkan.com/2024/07/27/the-reduction-of-diagnostic-categories-in-the-dsm-5-overlooking-important-distinctions - Horkan, W. (2026). Can’t Understand Neurodivergent Thinking.
https://horkan.com/2026/03/01/cant-understand-neurodivergent-thinking - Horkan, W. (2026). The Work Speaks for Itself.
https://horkan.com/2026/01/02/the-work-speaks-for-itself - Horkan, W. (2026). The Hidden Costs of Masking: What Research and Autistic Voices Reveal.
https://horkan.com/2026/01/01/the-hidden-costs-of-masking-what-research-and-autistic-voices-reveal - Horkan, W. (2025). The Problem with High-Performing Autistic Masking.
https://horkan.com/2025/10/15/the-problem-with-high-performing-autistic-masking