5 ms·
What's the solution for a smart person with poor executive function?
My life is always on the verge of falling apart. I don't seem to make progress in life. I don't seem to be able to learn from experience or change the things that have held me back in life. I have trouble meeting and forming connections with people. I have trouble with maintaining relationships. Fortunately my parents care for me. Out of the blue my sister estranged herself and her family from me some 3 years ago and despite trying I have not been able mend the rift or even understand its cause. I think she thinks I am a screwed up person. I don't get in trouble and don't intentionally harm people. I live in my head and I am an introverted person. I live independently and I have my own house I inherited from my grand parents. I recently lost my job and have been underemployed and misapplied in the labor market since I graduated college 2009. I can't keep a job longer than about 3 years and can't progress in a career. Most have been far shorter. At work people's opinions of me swing wildly over time from thinking I am a genius to thinking I should be fired or I am bad actor. I am pretty unemotional and don't have strong feelings on much. I have difficulty managing my own time and organizing my life and setting goals. I lack self discipline. I lack sufficient fear of consequences. I take risks and sometimes make mistakes but can do amazing things on projects at home or at work. I always stand out in a positive or negative way. People tell me their innermost secrets but they don't trust me or see me as one of them. I missed the socialization process because I isolated myself as a teenager and young adult. I think I have schizoid personality disorder that developed
due to trauma in my adolescence. I enjoy living because the world is interesting and i don't feel much in the way of negative emotions.
But because of how I am I am worried I am headed for a crash. I believe one can only start over so many times from nothing.
Even when I start over I can't progress into a real life.
Before someone says seek therapy I can say that I have tried but it doesn't seem to work for me because I lack feelings to talk about and I lack the ability to change my procrastinating and organize my life. Typically the therapist doesn't understand me or how to address me. I am not anxious or psychotic but I am also not normal.
Emotions are what drive a person forward and keep them on the rails or between the white and yellow lines.
I lack the emotions to get in trouble and the emotions to do something positive with my life. I feel emotions but they are not strong enough or directed enough to drive sustainable motivation toward a goal.
I want to live a good life. I suppose all I can do is try my best every moment of the day each day and not beat one's self up for the past missed opportunities.
I am worried about my future.
Working for someone else doesn't work for me over any length of time. I don't want to get another menial job just to fail again and waste more time.
I would be interested in business ideas or passive income ideas to help give me income.
I am a good problem solver and learner and have a beeadth of knowledge about a variety of topics that exceeds most people. I have the ability to analyze a process and understand how it works and what is going on.
I have some experience in computers and programming but not recent and with so much open source and people working in the industry world wide it seems a waste of time to write software or make a website for income because its all been done and said by someone else before.
I would rather do a local service business than compete with the whole world.
- dylanhassinger 1y agolearn React and get a software engineering job work out and read books to get your mind under control follow Dave Ramsey's financial advice and stop making excuses
- austin-cheney 1y agoYou might have the Asperger’s variant of ASD. Asperger’s is no longer diagnosed, but it’s identified as a benign ultra low social intelligence, low conscientiousness, and obsessive disorders. It is often misdiagnosed, or at least prematurely, as ADHD. What other people see is impulsivity similar to ADHD but without the introspection or impulse regulation still present in people with ADHD. Do you think almost exclusively in terms of first person pronouns? Do you have difficulty knowing when not to talk or when to stop talking? Do you have trouble determining the interest level or listening posture of the people around you? Do you find it challenging to put things away or remember where you left something? If any of that describes you I recommend focusing on only two things: 1. Active listening. You have to teach yourself to not talk and to read the nonverbal communications of people. This will be tough because it will be completely outside your interest. 2. Organizational skills. I suspect organizational skills are something always of interest to you but just a bit out of reach. I am not sure how to help with this because I have seen people obsess over this and still do poorly.
- morpheos137 1y agoI can make a list of 30 agenda items and then just don't do them. The emotional drive to motivate action is broken for me. I just do what I am interested in unless i am forced by some urgent external factor to do otherwise. I can prioritize and evaluate but I can't act on priorities except when urgent then its a day late and a dollar short and i muddle along through life. I think its lack of fear of consequences. Maybe i have Asperger's syndrome but i don't know. My experience has been Asperger's people are very emotional and attached to their special interests. I am not attached to anything. I am not materialistic. The main thing that drives me to muddle along through life poorly is a dull fear of catastrophic consequences if i just do nothing but read and post on news.ycombinator.com all day. Somewhat metonymous symbolic or facetious statement there. My feeling is I unfortunately have many of the emotional regulation deficits of a psychopath BUT I lack the history or bad motivations that would result in me getting in trouble. I really have a hard time caring about people including myself and I also don't care enough to want to harm people and am not needy enough to need to get something at their disadvantage. I find it is usually not necessary to lie and i see lying as necessitated by a weakness when I observe others lying. If I had a strong ego and strong needs then I could lie to get what I want but in most situations I don't. I do not think I have trouble reading people or with non verbal cues. sometimes I talk too much and am disinhibited but I don't think I have the social skills deficit that Asperger's people have. In fact I have such good social skills people usually love me at first but because I am not a team player and don't care about consequences I make subtle choices that result in people distrusting me in terms of "will he do this task reliably?" or "do his goals align with the team or does he just not give a shit?" Thus my masking is poor. I think I lack internal motivation and executive control to have a good mask. To play the game of life in a workplace environment. But I believe in contrast to Asperger's people I understand very well how social processes work as they are working. I am often not a great listener but can be depending on the person or topic. I think a lot of this is genetic. My parents are bad listeners and also have a degree of narcissism I do not. I have read the amount a person talks and interrupts others correlates with primary psychopathy and I think that is a strong genetic component in both sides of my family versus my experience with others. I often act altruistically because for me it is easy and I don't have an ego to protect. That's why people like me at first. I am open to everyone and treat everyone good. I don't usually get into conflicts with others unless they unjustly try to control me. Disrespect or being slighted doesn't bother me. In fact I am so laid back people often try to push me around. I am able to understand how people work internally but it is very alien to how I work internally and it shows through. Another part of it is socialization. Because of my social connection deficit, possibly latent social anxiety, and because of a communication disorder I have missed many of the socialization milestones so I don't have a common ground of a lived life to share with others. Like hobbies or family. My hobby is thinking and making things and fixing things and I have no family of my own. I don't care about social identities. I don't care about who someone I am working with sleeps with or what their politics or beliefs are or whats important to them. I find people have all these strongly held opinions about all areas of life. Likes, dislikes, pleasures, hates, that don't matter to me. That lack of content makes me hard for others to understand I think more so than for me to understand them. I think most people are living successfully because they choose a course through the options available in the world. I don't care and sometimes that on it's own alienates me or prevents me from connecting with others. Maybe it is Asperger's and refractory depression from pervasive isolation but i don't know. I have never felt emotional attachment to a political cause. I have never felt emotional attachment to most other causes. When i feel part of a group or that I can go somewhere with a job it inevitably rejects me over time.