As I understand more and more about how my autistic machinery operates, I can now look back and fully articulate how I came to be retired. For many years, I worked in Information Technology, specifically within the realm of Quality Assurance. I excelled at what I did because QA is a role perfectly built for my high-density, pattern-seeking mind. Within this space, authority was absolute and systemic: a piece of software code either worked or it was broken. There were no social scripts to decode, no moving baselines to track, and no political games to play. The environment was pure logic. My cognitive system was designed to operate entirely in the quiet background, processing tasks cleanly without any need to be noticed or positioned on a public stage. Because I am also deeply attuned to spiritual frequencies, I would sometimes receive an intuitive nudge to investigate a specific, obscure nook and cranny of the system. Lo and behold, I would find a critical bug. This sanctuary allowed my mind to operate at its highest frequency, entirely in its element.
The sanctuary fractured when the industry shifted toward automation as the silver bullet for QA efficiency. Suddenly, we were expected to become software engineers. I did not go to computer science school, and knowing what I know now, that would not have helped anyway. I could get by doing elementary programming because it remains linear, direct, and easy for my brain to track. Advanced programming, though, was a completely different animal. In advanced programming, code becomes decentralized. It relies on objects inheriting traits from invisible parents, asynchronous loops executing simultaneously in the background, and abstract frameworks that constantly shift. This architecture completely fractures my internal continuity. Trying to track a dozen abstract, moving baselines at the same time triggers an immediate cognitive traffic jam. High-level code became the ultimate form of digital clutter: an overwhelming ecosystem of endless packages, dependencies, updates, syntax rules, and invisible background maintenance loops. To my system, a massive, abstract codebase feels exactly like a loud, crowded room filled with unmapped objects and blinking, dying batteries. It generates a heavy background static that threatens my peace, so my system naturally rejects it. High-level programming violates my internal architecture because it requires building complex systems entirely inside a vacuum of invisible abstractions. It demands the invention of hypothetical structures, layers of hidden variables, and symbolic logic with no physical weight, shape, or anchoring midpoint. Without a concrete reality to ground me, my mind goes completely blank.
As the industry retired the traditional QA role, the next logical step was to transition into a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) position, which allowed me to avoid wearing the Software Engineer title. Yet, even the SRE role fell prey to the corporate demands of workplace efficiency and role consolidation. Desperate to find a stable foothold, I moved into Technical Program Management (TPM), and was eventually pushed involuntarily into Product Management (PM) as TPM roles were similarly consolidated. This forced migration into TPM and PM completely uprooted me from my logical sanctuary and threw me directly into a hostile human grid. These new roles required me to carry absolute responsibility while possessing zero structural authority which was a fundamentally impossible task. I was forced to constantly deplete my limited executive budget just to negotiate, persuade, and bridge the chaotic friction of conflicting human agendas.
In these management roles, my primary professional output was no longer clean data; instead, it became an endless stream of meetings, presentations, and superficial dialogue. To survive, I was forced to constantly puncture my internal containment vault, dragging my thoughts out to defend my position to people who did not respect, or even understand, my frequency. My cognitive voltage remained permanently spiking. The relentless, crushing pressure to constantly translate my complex, non-verbal internal world into spoken language eventually broke my translation wire entirely.
This environment triggered a profound, systemic skill regression. The machinery of my brain began pulling offline linguistic processes that had always required careful navigation. During ordinary meetings when I just had to speak, a word that was on the tip of my tongue just a second prior would suddenly vanish, nowhere to be found. My mind would go completely blank. Even as I searched through all the corners of my brain to find the missing language, there was nothing there. I would be left paused in a heavy silence for a whole minute, wanting nothing more than for the meeting to end right then and there. My mind simply felt entirely empty most of the time due to the sheer exhaustion of the burnout, and I found myself simply waiting for my retirement date to arrive.
Even though age is just a piece of data with no transactional value to me, the truth is that my machinery is beginning to wear out. In my youth, my masking battery possessed enough raw energy to manually override these profound structural friction points, but that energy was spent on borrowed time. Today, my system has entered a phase of mandatory conservation. When forced to choose between the toxic static of an unaligned workplace and my own psychological survival, my “No-Limit Engine” pulled its own emergency brake. Retirement is the ultimate, logical act of absolute minimization and a necessary, sacred intervention to silence the static, restore my internal continuity, and preserve the sovereign architecture of my mind. It returns my system to its true design: a quiet machine that functions best when solving problems entirely behind the scenes, working purely for the alignment of the task itself without the burden of corporate scripts or human validation.
This was published on Substack on August 20, 2026. https://noorvoss.substack.com/p/midlife-autistic-burnout-career-demise