The Wrong Planet Goes to Work: Neurodivergence, employment, and why the system isn’t built for us

Image credit: Midjourney

I’ve just completed what is, quite possibly, the most ambitious piece of writing I’ve ever tackled. An honest, detailed, personal, and hopefully action-oriented handout about what the working world is really like for neurodivergent people. And how we can try to make it survivable.

This is just one part of the book I’m working on, a user’s manual to neurodivergent life. I see this as not just my own manifesto or clinical experience as a ND therapist who has worked with hundreds of ND people at this point. I see it also as a community project, a dialogue, and a conversation. I’d welcome your input.

This document that I created took me an enormous amount of work. If you’d like to access it, the link is at the end of this article, which is an overview, summary, and invitation. I’d welcome your comments.

This article is a (relatively) brief summary and overview.

In middle school, I took one of those career aptitude tests. You know the ones. You fill out a survey about your interests and personality, and it spits out what you should do with your life.

My top answers were: doctor, lawyer, writer, and wildlife ecologist.

The test’s recommendations? Doctor, yes. Lawyer yes. The other two are a waste of your energy and talent. Have you considered finance? Sales?

I’m not making this up.

I’m now a therapist. I sit alone in a home office, looking out at deer and wild turkeys wandering across my backyard, with my dog snoring in the corner, seeing neurodivergent people one at a time (or sometimes as couples) for fifty-five minutes each. 

It took me about forty years and several collapsed careers to find work that actually fits the shape of my brain. And I still, genuinely, don’t know if I got the right answer or just the least wrong one.

This piece is about the “wrong planet” and its job market. 

“Wrong planet,” for those of you who don’t immediately get it, is shorthand for the ND meme that we very often feel like aliens living on the wrong planet, and wish we could just go home. These humans make no sense at all, and this world they’ve built is toxic for us. 

This article is about why work is so hard for so many of us. About what the data says, what my experience says, and — because this can’t just be a lament — what might actually help.

The honest numbers first

Between 40% and 78% of autistic adults are unemployed, depending on which study you look at and how you count underemployment. 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that only 22.7% of people with disabilities are employed at all, compared to 65.5% of people without. This is disability broadly speaking, not just ND, and it’s also counting people who formally are formally designated as “disabled” in the US government’s terms.

For ADHD adults, the pattern is job instability, disciplinary action, and termination at rates far above the general population.

But here’s the number that hits especially hard: in a 2024 study in Autism in Adulthood — titled, with painful accuracy, “I’ve Absolutely Reached Rock Bottom and Have No Energy” — 59% of unemployed autistic adults said their biggest barrier to getting a job wasn’t skills, motivation, or reliability.

It was that they couldn’t get past the interview.

The gateway to employment, the job interview process, is a performance that has almost nothing to do with job performance.

Think about what that means. Walk in, make eye contact, modulate your voice, manage the ambient noise of a conference room, read the unspoken social preferences of strangers, perform enthusiasm and confidence simultaneously — and somehow also communicate that you’re actually good at the job. All while your nervous system is quietly screaming.

I happen to be very good at this. I was the second-ranked debater in Michigan in my senior year of high school. I nearly threw up before every single round. Once I got up and started speaking, monotropic focus kicked in and I could perform. 

The cost didn’t show up until later. 

For a lot of ND people, it shows up before they even get in the door.

The career that couldn’t find itself

I’ve been an investment banker (very briefly), a management consultant, a development director at a dot-com startup, a Board President for a nonprofit, a project manager for a major healthcare company, a stay-at-home parent, and now a therapist. 

While I was in each of these roles, I looked like someone who was killing themselves trying incredibly hard to make it all work. Each career change looked, from the outside, like someone who was restless, couldn’t commit, didn’t know what they wanted. None of the career shifts fit the model of a steady upward progression. They looked like random zig-zags.

From the inside it felt like drowning in slightly different poisoned water each time.

I didn’t know I was autistic until I was 56. I didn’t know I had complex PTSD. I increasingly suspect I also have ADHD. 

What I knew was that I’d throw myself into each role with everything I had, perform well enough to advance, and then — reliably, predictably — collapse. 

In my twenties I could recover. By my forties, the recovery took longer. Now, when I push through the overwhelm, I collapse within weeks.

The last job before I started my private therapy practice was doing school-based child and family therapy at a community mental health center. 

Beautiful work.

And I was in burnout every six to eight weeks, with symptoms so similar to Covid that I was tested more than fifty times. (It was always negative.)

My office was a sensory nightmare: fluorescent lights I had to disable myself (sticky note over the light sensor), cinder block walls with the school cafeteria on the other side (5th grade/kindergarten lunchtime was a special kind of nightmare). No windows or natural light. 

On bad days I could sense the building’s energy from the parking lot.

In 2023, the agency decided to return to pre-Covid work rules and eliminate remote work. Everyone had to be at their desks 8-5, every day. Away from your desk more than fifteen minutes? Report to a manager. 

Before this, I typically did my therapy work at the school and my documentation at home, so I could be with my kids, my dog, my comfortable environment. Natural light. Sitting outside on my deck making follow-up phone calls and writing progress notes was what had kept me going for 3 years.

I asked for an exception — not as a disability accommodation, because I wasn’t diagnosed yet. Just as a request for sustainable working conditions.

They said no. If they made an exception for me, they’d have to make exceptions for everyone.

I’ve thought about that sentence a lot since. What they were really saying was: the system cannot accommodate reality. So reality has to accommodate the system.

I left. I started a private practice in May 2023, expecting it to take a year or two to build up to a full caseload. Six weeks later I’d hit my initial client target. I hadn’t even understood why until I realized most of the clients who were coming in were neurodivergent. 

I’d checked a box on Psychology Today saying I work with autism. I wasn’t yet a specialist in neurodiversity-affirming therapy, as I am now. I’d just worked with a lot of autistic kids and their families and was comfortable with it. I had no idea there was such a scarcity of therapists who are experienced and comfortable dealing with neurodivergent adults. 

Of course I was. Because that was me. I just didn’t know it yet. It took me another 2 years before my wife and my ND clients convinced me to take the idea that I might be autistic myself seriously enough to go in for an assessment. Surprise surprise, yes, I’m autistic. 

It explained so much. Including my chronic episodes of burnout. My desperate attempts to find work that would pay my bills without destroying me. 

I now have a caseload of 45 to 55 people and a waitlist of three to five months. About 70% of my clients are ND. 

This is not a success story, not entirely — private practice means no PTO, no sick days, no benefits, no stability. 

I’m always, always exhausted. 

The boat is still slowly sinking. I’ve just found a slightly better boat that’s sinking more slowly, with slightly more effective bilge pumps.

The myths that make it worse

"Tech is ND-friendly." Sometimes. The work itself can fit — structured problems, clear criteria, deep focus. 

But the workplace culture of tech is often something else entirely. Open offices. Constant context-switching. Standups. Performance reviews measuring “culture fit.” 

The Institution of Engineering and Technology’s research found that neurodivergent engineers mask heavily to fit in, that this leads to burnout, and that there’s a distinct “neurodivergent leadership ceiling” — ND people get hired for their technical skills and then blocked from advancement because they don’t perform leadership the way leadership is expected to look. 

The job and the job description are frequently two different jobs. The second, hidden one never gets listed.

“DEI includes us.” 

Sometimes. 

I’ve met a lot of ND people who are explicitly drawn to DEI roles in their organizations, because we’re often social justice-oriented and justice-sensitive by nature. 

What we frequently find is that DEI programs strong on race, gender, and sexual orientation have never once mentioned neurodivergence. Some are actively hostile when ND employees try to advocate for inclusion. 

And then there’s the manager who responds to your disclosure with “oh, I’m so scattered too, I probably have a little ADHD.” 

Which sounds sympathetic. And lands like a door closing. The fact that you misplaced your car keys yesterday doesn’t mean you have the slightest clue what it means to deal with a brain and nervous system that feels like Union Station at rush hour, and that has only two categories of time: now, and not-now. And not-now doesn’t exist.

“You just need the right fit.” 

Maybe. 

But “the right fit” usually means gig work, contract work, or self-employment — which sounds like freedom and functions as walking a tight rope. 

No benefits. No stability. No legal protections. No accommodations process. 

Gig work isn’t a solution. For many ND people it’s the only available option, and for most it’s fundamentally unsustainable as a foundation for an adult life.

What Covid taught us (and what we’re already forgetting)

In March 2020, without planning to, the world ran a massive natural experiment. Remote work became universal overnight. And something happened that many ND people had been asking for for years: a significant number of us thrived.

There was a meme running around that spring: “We introverts have been preparing for this moment all our lives.” I laughed so hard. So relatable.

A peer-reviewed study of 36 ND professionals working from home during the pandemic found it allowed them to create accessible physical environments, negotiate communication practices that worked for them, and reconcile tensions between productivity and wellbeing that had been irreconcilable in the office. 

Research on autistic employees found that remote flexibility allowed more engagement with special interests, drawing back into the workforce people who had previously avoided employment entirely.

What the pandemic proved, empirically, is that ND people can do the work when the environment is right. The performance deficits attributed to our neurology were, in many cases, actually deficits of environment. 

Take away the fluorescent lights, the open-plan noise, the unpredictable social demands — and the work gets done.

Return-to-office mandates, which accelerated sharply after 2022, have been documented as disproportionately harmful to neurodivergent workers. For many of us, return-to-office is not a neutral business decision. It is a health decision. And a disastrous one.

Burnout is not just tiredness

Patrick Casale is an AuDHD therapist, group practice owner, TEDx speaker, and one of the most prominent voices in the neurodivergent mental health community. He’s been publicly documenting being two or more years into the worst autistic burnout of his life — writing that he feels “like a husk of a human who is simply existing and not actually able to live and participate in the life that I have.”

His burnout started at a 24-hour mental health urgent care center where he was effectively on call around the clock. He left and built a private practice, then a podcast, then a retreat and speaking business. Each successive success created new demands that stretched his capacity further until it didn’t hold anymore. 

The ND person who finally finds something that fits, and then uses that fit as permission to push harder than ever… oof, do I feel that.

I’m in a similar state. I’m grateful my practice has been successful. And also, seeing 25-35 clients a week (most while managing a growing practice and raising kids while being an unmasked autistic adult with complex PTSD is a lot. 

I’m from Michigan. “Skating on thin ice” has a very literal meaning. It’s what I live every week of the year.

Autistic burnout is different from general burnout. It isn’t just tiredness. It’s a distinct state involving skill loss, cognitive degradation, sensory sensitivity that becomes unbearable, and collapse that can last months or years. 

Research shows 46% of autistic adults have experienced it four or more times. 

Recovery that aims to return to the conditions that caused it tends to produce recurrence — the goal isn’t bounce-back. It’s rebuild on different terms. 

Dr. Megan Anna Neff, an AuDHD therapist and researcher who is one of the best (and most authentically human) resources on the many facets of neurodivergent life, recently released a book called The Autistic Burnout Workbook. It’s where to start in rebuilding from burnout, if you’re in it or on the edge of it.

What actually works (honest version)

I don’t have perfect answers. The system is broken in ways individual strategies can’t fix. But here’s what I’ve seen work.

Remote or hybrid work, when you can get it, is often the single most impactful change. The Job Accommodation Network (askjan.org) is the best free resource for knowing what you can legally request and how. The full accommodation list — noise-canceling headphones, written instructions, flexible scheduling, private workspace, clear feedback structures — is real and legally supported under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

For job searching itself, Phyl Terry’s Never Search Alone makes a compelling case for community-based job searching over the solo application grind. 

The Neurodiversity Career Connector (ndcc.simplifyhire.com) and Mentra (mentra.com) connect ND candidates with employers who have built actual programs, not just stated policies.

For career direction: a lot of ND people are sitting on 26 hours a week of special interest engagement at high proficiency. That’s a career waiting to happen. 

Temple Grandin’s Developing Talents (updated 2024) is the most practical guide to turning ND strengths into paid work — including a serious argument for skilled trades that almost no career counselor will ever make. Plumbing, electrical, welding, HVAC. Clear outcomes, physical engagement, union protections, genuine demand, no performance review measuring whether you smile correctly at your supervisor.

And if you’re in burnout right now: collapse is information. Your nervous system is telling you the current arrangement isn’t sustainable. 

The answer is not to push harder. Almost certainly it means that trying to out-willpower a system not built for you is not going to work. Patrick Casale has tried. So have I. 

The concept of “subtractive recovery” is useful here: rather than adding in more self-care or just trying to push through burnout, reduce the demands you’re dealing with to the bare minimum that are either non-negotiable or genuinely nourishing to your nervous system. As you improve, try adding in one more thing at a time.

The hobbit hole

What I wish for every neurodivergent person I know — my clients, my colleagues, and honestly myself too — is what I’ve started calling the hobbit hole.

Somewhere small and quiet and yours. 

Work that fits the shape of your brain instead of requiring your brain to fit the shape of the work. 

People around you who are compatible — other quirky weirdos who get it, who don’t require you to perform neurotypicality as the price of admission. And who will play D&D or Magic: The Gathering, or talk about pug dogs, or watch and rewatch every episode of your favorite show with you, without complaining.

Enough safety that you can stop spending all your energy on the performance and start spending some of it on actually living.

The Big People are going to keep stomping by with all their noise. More of us finding our hobbit holes — building them, insisting on them, refusing to give them up — is part of how things eventually shift.

You deserve work that doesn’t cost you everything to do.

Where to go from here

The full clinical guide that accompanies this article — covering ADA rights in detail, the full accommodation list, how to evaluate workplaces, the research on supported employment, autistic burnout and recovery, skilled trades and entrepreneurship, and a comprehensive resources section — is available on my website in the members section, along with the other handouts that I have created for clients on a wide range of topics. 

For a limited time, I’m opening the Members section to readers at no cost. (Eventually, there will be a paywall, but you early arrivals, along with my therapy clients, will still get free access.)

https://www.thrivingfamilytherapy.com/member-access
Password: friendoftft!

thrivingfamilytherapy.com/member-access

Password: friendoftft!

Second: these materials are becoming a book. A user’s manual for ND life, covering every domain I can think of — with practical advice, personal stories, clinical depth, and a bit of humor. It draws on a decade of experience as a therapist specializing in neurodivergence, and on 58 years of living inside a ND body without knowing it.

I want this to be a community project. Not just me reporting what the research says and what I’ve learned in my particular corner of Oregon, but something that reflects the lived experience of many people — across cultures, across intersectional identities, across geography. The version you’re reading now is a first draft by a white, cisgender, heterosexual American man in his late 50s. It has real limitations, and I know it.

If you’d like to be included — if you have a story to share, an experience that isn’t reflected here, a correction, a perspective from a different part of the world or a different kind of body or life — I want to hear from you. Subscribe here or to my newsletter at thrivingfamilytherapy.com, and feel free to email, message, or reach out in whatever form and whatever language works for you. Google Translate can do a lot.

Let’s see what we can do together to make this strange planet more survivable for us aliens.

A few resources worth knowing:

Job Accommodation Network (askjan.org) — Free, confidential ADA accommodation guidance. The gold standard.

Neurodiversity Career Connector (ndcc.simplifyhire.com) — Connects ND candidates with employers who have built real programs.

Mentra (mentra.com) — ND-specific job matching, particularly strong in tech and data.

Never Search Alone — Phyl Terry (2023). The community-based job search approach that works better for ND people. The accompanying website and the tools for community job searching can be found at https://www.neversearchalone.org

Developing Talents — Temple Grandin & Kate Duffy (3rd ed., 2024). The practical guide to ND career paths, including trades.

Patrick Casale’s Substack (patrickcasale.substack.com and various other social media platforms) — First-person AuDHD burnout documentation, honest and current. The podcast he co-hosts with Dr. Megan Anna Neff, Divergent Conversations, is also an excellent and honest source for real discussion of ND life.

K. David Smith, LCSW, CASDCS, CCTP, CFTP

K. David Smith is a neurodiversity-affirming therapist specializing in autism, ADHD, and complex trauma. He is the founder of Thriving Family Therapy and is himself a late-identified autistic adult with complex PTSD. He lives in Oregon and is working on a book.

💙 Want more like this?

If this resonated with you, I’d love to stay in touch. I send occasional emails with resources, reflections, and tools for neurodivergent people and the families and therapists who support them.

👉 Access the Members section (free for now): thrivingfamilytherapy.com/member-access — Password: friendoftft!Download my free guide: “5 Stress Regulation Strategies for Neurodivergent Adults”