The autistic cognitive style (less reliant on social reassurance and more comfortable with complex causality) can make tipping points legible before they are socially acknowledged.
To a neurotypical worldview, this often looks like pessimism, but to a systems-oriented brain, it simply looks like the moment the pattern finally resolves into coherence.
This is a claim of context, not superiority. In a growth-stable civilisation, linear cognition is adaptive. In an overshoot-destabilised civilisation, nonlinear cognition becomes revealing.
Collapse rarely moves in straight lines, and neither does the recognition of it.
Chapter 6. The emotional landscape of divergent perception
Neurodivergent people who become collapse-aware often describe emotional responses that differ from their neurotypical peers.
Many speak of reaching clarity earlier, sometimes accompanied by an earlier sense of anxiety, simply because pattern recognition brings the implications into view sooner. Yet this can sit alongside a sense of steadiness; the absence of self-deception.
There is also typically less reliance on cultural reassurance. When a person’s identity is not anchored in dominant social narratives, the erosion of those narratives does not produce the same level of disorientation.
They tolerate the collapse of cultural stories more easily than the absence of coherence itself.
Their relationship to grief can look different as well. Collapse grief is often processed through analysis, integration, and the search for coherence rather than through denial or oscillation - not because they feel less, but because coherence often takes precedence as the primary stabilising force.
Some also describe a heightened sense of responsibility, a moral intensity that can accompany hyperfocus: not a fantasy of saving the world, but a commitment to living truthfully within it.
For some, this shows up as a drive to understand the world as it is; for others, it becomes an ethic of care, a desire to reduce harm, or a resolve to act in ways that feel aligned to the reality they now see. The expression varies, but the underlying impulse is the same: alignment between perception and action.
None of this is universal, but the pattern recurs often enough to be noteworthy. For many, these emotional differences are not symptoms of divergence but adaptations to a world that was already misaligned.
Collapse awareness doesn’t produce these responses; it shows the conditions that shaped them.
Chapter 7. The Inversion of Cognitive Advantage
To understand why neurodivergent people often perceive collapse earlier, it is necessary to look directly at the function of neurotypical cognition.
The primary evolutionary and social role of neurotypical cognition has been to maintain cohesion: to preserve group stability through shared narratives, emotional synchrony, and a collective sense of continuity.
These traits are not deficiencies on the upward slope of the overshoot curve. In an expanding civilisation, they are adaptive. They minimise anxiety, they reinforce cooperation, and sustain the cultural story required for large-scale coordination.⁷
Fig 2: Ecological overshoot (Source: Research Gate) 2025
But the same traits that support stability can obscure disruption. Social-conformity bias, optimism bias, normalcy bias, and culturally reinforced worldviews (all well-documented psychological mechanisms) help keep a society together during its growth phase.
They also make it difficult to perceive structural risk, ecological overshoot, or the fragility of a paradigm that has begun to falter.
This is where the inversion emerges. The cognitive style that once served the maintenance of a growth-based civilisation becomes less suited to recognising the limits of that civilisation.
Meanwhile, the perceptual traits often associated with neurodivergence, pattern recognition over social reassurance, systemic perception over short-term reward, and truth orientation over comfort orientation, become increasingly relevant in a world where biophysical reality is asserting itself.
This reflects a change in environmental conditions. A culture built on continuity, stability, and upward trajectories rewarded those who reinforced its narrative.
A culture entering contraction requires something different; an ability to see the cracks in the dominant story, to detect pattern breaks, and to register tipping points, even when they remain socially unacknowledged.
In this light, the apparent mismatch between neurodivergent perception and normative culture looks less like dysfunction and more like early alignment with an emergent reality.
The cognitive minority happens to be tuned to the underlying dynamics sooner - not because of special insight, but because the environment has shifted away from the conditions that shaped the dominant cognitive style.
The result is a hidden but consequential reversal: the minds best suited to maintaining a growth civilisation are maladaptive in recognising its limits.
Both cognitive modes are human - both are valid, and both evolved for different ecological contexts.
But only one of them believes the ship is unsinkable.
Chapter 8. What this means for the future
If the overlap between neurodivergence and collapse awareness is real, and not merely an artefact of who chooses to write to me, then it carries practical implications for how collapse discourse unfolds in the years ahead.
The first is straightforward: collapse-oriented spaces are likely to contain a higher proportion of neurodivergent people than the general population. This is simply a reflection of who tends to perceive systemic risk earlier and who is less buffered by dominant cultural narratives.
A second implication concerns support. If collapse-aware communities continue to grow, they will need to account for different cognitive styles; differences in information-processing, emotional regulation, communication preferences, and thresholds for ambiguity. A single approach won’t work for a group that arrived here for different reasons and in different ways.
Third, neurodivergent perspectives should be taken seriously. This does not mean treating them as authority or expertise in themselves, but recognising that atypical perception can illuminate dynamics that remain invisible within more conventional frames.
Collapse awareness has always depended, in part, on people who notice the gaps in the dominant story.
A fourth implication relates to the culture of collapse discourse itself. If it is to be accessible to a broader audience, including neurotypical people who may not intuitively grasp non-linear dynamics, it must remain grounded, rigorous, and communicated in plain language.
The aim is to build conceptual pathways that allow others to cross the perceptual threshold without shame or defensiveness.
Neurodivergent people are often early to recognise collapse, but that does not mean they should be left to carry it. Clarity by itself is not resilience. Collapse will demand many forms of work, distributed across many kinds of minds.
Chapter 9. Closing reflections
Many people who are late-diagnosed describe spending decades sensing a kind of fragmentation beneath the surface of ordinary life without having the language for it.
Collapse awareness does not break anything in them, but gives shape to a break they were already carrying. Their cognitive style makes certain patterns impossible to ignore, and this clarity often arrives with its own costs; intensity, dissonance, and grief that shows up long before there is any preparation for it.
For many readers, this landscape will be familiar. What is offered here is not a diagnostic frame, but recognition - a way of understanding why some people move through collapse awareness differently, and why those differences do not deserve pathologisation or praise. This is not about hierarchy.
Those who have been told they are “too much,” “too intense,” or “too literal,” often turn out to have been responding to conditions that others were able to avoid seeing.
They noticed something real, and they noticed it early, not because they were broken, but because the dominant cultural paradigm was. For people whose perception is attuned closely to the world as it is, collapse awareness is not a failure of coping, but an understandable response to the realities of an overextended and collapsing civilisation.
That clarity carries weight, and it deserves to be honoured.
This essay explored how some minds perceive patterns differently. The next will turn to the patterns themselves, and what they tell us about the future of humans and the living world.
References
¹ Baron-Cohen, S. (2006). The hyper-systemizing, assortative mating theory of autism. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry.
² Lent, J. (2021). The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. Prometheus Books.
³ Yafai, A. F., Verrier, D., & Reidy, L. (2014). Social conformity and autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
⁴ Tart, C. (1975). States of Consciousness. Dutton.
⁵ Dupuis, A., et al. (2022). Hyperfocus in autistic adults: Cognitive and experiential dimensions. Autism Research.
⁶ Dupuis, A. et al.; Yafai et al.; Baron-Cohen (See references 1, 3, and 5).
⁷ Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Random House.
⁸ Pellicano, E., & Burr, D. (2012). When the world becomes “too real”: A Bayesian explanation of autistic perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
⁹ Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism.
¹⁰ Boulter, C., Freeston, M., South, M., & Rodgers, J. (2014). Intolerance of uncertainty as a framework for understanding anxiety in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
The autistic cognitive style (less reliant on social reassurance and more comfortable with complex causality) can make tipping points legible before they are socially acknowledged.
To a neurotypical worldview, this often looks like pessimism, but to a systems-oriented brain, it simply looks like the moment the pattern finally resolves into coherence.
This is a claim of context, not superiority. In a growth-stable civilisation, linear cognition is adaptive. In an overshoot-destabilised civilisation, nonlinear cognition becomes revealing.
Collapse rarely moves in straight lines, and neither does the recognition of it.
Chapter 6. The emotional landscape of divergent perception
Neurodivergent people who become collapse-aware often describe emotional responses that differ from their neurotypical peers.
Many speak of reaching clarity earlier, sometimes accompanied by an earlier sense of anxiety, simply because pattern recognition brings the implications into view sooner. Yet this can sit alongside a sense of steadiness; the absence of self-deception.
There is also typically less reliance on cultural reassurance. When a person’s identity is not anchored in dominant social narratives, the erosion of those narratives does not produce the same level of disorientation.
They tolerate the collapse of cultural stories more easily than the absence of coherence itself.
Their relationship to grief can look different as well. Collapse grief is often processed through analysis, integration, and the search for coherence rather than through denial or oscillation - not because they feel less, but because coherence often takes precedence as the primary stabilising force.
Some also describe a heightened sense of responsibility, a moral intensity that can accompany hyperfocus: not a fantasy of saving the world, but a commitment to living truthfully within it.
For some, this shows up as a drive to understand the world as it is; for others, it becomes an ethic of care, a desire to reduce harm, or a resolve to act in ways that feel aligned to the reality they now see. The expression varies, but the underlying impulse is the same: alignment between perception and action.
None of this is universal, but the pattern recurs often enough to be noteworthy. For many, these emotional differences are not symptoms of divergence but adaptations to a world that was already misaligned.
Collapse awareness doesn’t produce these responses; it shows the conditions that shaped them.
Chapter 7. The Inversion of Cognitive Advantage
To understand why neurodivergent people often perceive collapse earlier, it is necessary to look directly at the function of neurotypical cognition.
The primary evolutionary and social role of neurotypical cognition has been to maintain cohesion: to preserve group stability through shared narratives, emotional synchrony, and a collective sense of continuity.
These traits are not deficiencies on the upward slope of the overshoot curve. In an expanding civilisation, they are adaptive. They minimise anxiety, they reinforce cooperation, and sustain the cultural story required for large-scale coordination.⁷
Fig 2: Ecological overshoot (Source: Research Gate) 2025
But the same traits that support stability can obscure disruption. Social-conformity bias, optimism bias, normalcy bias, and culturally reinforced worldviews (all well-documented psychological mechanisms) help keep a society together during its growth phase.
They also make it difficult to perceive structural risk, ecological overshoot, or the fragility of a paradigm that has begun to falter.
This is where the inversion emerges. The cognitive style that once served the maintenance of a growth-based civilisation becomes less suited to recognising the limits of that civilisation.
Meanwhile, the perceptual traits often associated with neurodivergence, pattern recognition over social reassurance, systemic perception over short-term reward, and truth orientation over comfort orientation, become increasingly relevant in a world where biophysical reality is asserting itself.
This reflects a change in environmental conditions. A culture built on continuity, stability, and upward trajectories rewarded those who reinforced its narrative.
A culture entering contraction requires something different; an ability to see the cracks in the dominant story, to detect pattern breaks, and to register tipping points, even when they remain socially unacknowledged.
In this light, the apparent mismatch between neurodivergent perception and normative culture looks less like dysfunction and more like early alignment with an emergent reality.
The cognitive minority happens to be tuned to the underlying dynamics sooner - not because of special insight, but because the environment has shifted away from the conditions that shaped the dominant cognitive style.
The result is a hidden but consequential reversal: the minds best suited to maintaining a growth civilisation are maladaptive in recognising its limits.
Both cognitive modes are human - both are valid, and both evolved for different ecological contexts.
But only one of them believes the ship is unsinkable.
Chapter 8. What this means for the future
If the overlap between neurodivergence and collapse awareness is real, and not merely an artefact of who chooses to write to me, then it carries practical implications for how collapse discourse unfolds in the years ahead.
The first is straightforward: collapse-oriented spaces are likely to contain a higher proportion of neurodivergent people than the general population. This is simply a reflection of who tends to perceive systemic risk earlier and who is less buffered by dominant cultural narratives.
A second implication concerns support. If collapse-aware communities continue to grow, they will need to account for different cognitive styles; differences in information-processing, emotional regulation, communication preferences, and thresholds for ambiguity. A single approach won’t work for a group that arrived here for different reasons and in different ways.
Third, neurodivergent perspectives should be taken seriously. This does not mean treating them as authority or expertise in themselves, but recognising that atypical perception can illuminate dynamics that remain invisible within more conventional frames.
Collapse awareness has always depended, in part, on people who notice the gaps in the dominant story.
A fourth implication relates to the culture of collapse discourse itself. If it is to be accessible to a broader audience, including neurotypical people who may not intuitively grasp non-linear dynamics, it must remain grounded, rigorous, and communicated in plain language.
The aim is to build conceptual pathways that allow others to cross the perceptual threshold without shame or defensiveness.
Neurodivergent people are often early to recognise collapse, but that does not mean they should be left to carry it. Clarity by itself is not resilience. Collapse will demand many forms of work, distributed across many kinds of minds.
Chapter 9. Closing reflections
Many people who are late-diagnosed describe spending decades sensing a kind of fragmentation beneath the surface of ordinary life without having the language for it.
Collapse awareness does not break anything in them, but gives shape to a break they were already carrying. Their cognitive style makes certain patterns impossible to ignore, and this clarity often arrives with its own costs; intensity, dissonance, and grief that shows up long before there is any preparation for it.
For many readers, this landscape will be familiar. What is offered here is not a diagnostic frame, but recognition - a way of understanding why some people move through collapse awareness differently, and why those differences do not deserve pathologisation or praise. This is not about hierarchy.
Those who have been told they are “too much,” “too intense,” or “too literal,” often turn out to have been responding to conditions that others were able to avoid seeing.
They noticed something real, and they noticed it early, not because they were broken, but because the dominant cultural paradigm was. For people whose perception is attuned closely to the world as it is, collapse awareness is not a failure of coping, but an understandable response to the realities of an overextended and collapsing civilisation.
That clarity carries weight, and it deserves to be honoured.
This essay explored how some minds perceive patterns differently. The next will turn to the patterns themselves, and what they tell us about the future of humans and the living world.
References
¹ Baron-Cohen, S. (2006). The hyper-systemizing, assortative mating theory of autism. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry.
² Lent, J. (2021). The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. Prometheus Books.
³ Yafai, A. F., Verrier, D., & Reidy, L. (2014). Social conformity and autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
⁴ Tart, C. (1975). States of Consciousness. Dutton.
⁵ Dupuis, A., et al. (2022). Hyperfocus in autistic adults: Cognitive and experiential dimensions. Autism Research.
⁶ Dupuis, A. et al.; Yafai et al.; Baron-Cohen (See references 1, 3, and 5).
⁷ Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., & Pyszczynski, T. (2015). The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. Random House.
⁸ Pellicano, E., & Burr, D. (2012). When the world becomes “too real”: A Bayesian explanation of autistic perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
⁹ Murray, D., Lesser, M., & Lawson, W. (2005). Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism.
¹⁰ Boulter, C., Freeston, M., South, M., & Rodgers, J. (2014). Intolerance of uncertainty as a framework for understanding anxiety in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.