It’s Neurodiversity Celebration Week, which mostly means I’ve spent the last few days watching well-intentioned people treat my brain like a diversity checkbox. It’s a formal exercise, a baseline for inclusion that feels a lot like being “celebrated” for having a pulse, as long as that pulse matches the company mission.

As an AI Strategist and Tech Anthropologist I see the same patterns every day: I watch us obsess over seamlessness. Cleaner data. Predictable models. A world without friction.

But here’s the thing: AI is essentially a cult of the average.

Large Language Models are trained to predict the most likely next step. They are optimized for the middle of the curve where everyone agrees and nothing weird happens. If you think, process, or perceive reality outside that central curve, the system doesn’t just misinterpret you. It tries to correct you. It smooths you over until you’re just another predictable data point.

For those of us living as outliers, this smoothing world is actually incredibly expensive. There’s an invisible tax on our energy, which is a constant effort to align our natural frequency with a synthetic logic that was never built for us.

We used to talk about accessibility in terms of ramps and doors. Now? “Alignment” feels like it’s about rebuilding the human to fit the algorithm.

It’s exhausting. We’re often perceived as over-capable because our pattern recognition and processing speeds look like a superpower on paper. But that performance comes with a quiet, profound burnout that the model doesn’t track. It’s the cost of constant self-translation.

I’m honestly tired of the performance.

Efficiency is a metric, not a human value. The best parts of being a person such as the weird empathy, the radical problem-solving, the actual “aha!” moments, don’t happen in the smoothness. They happen in the friction.

I’m less interested in a frictionless simulation and more interested in the people who don’t fit the predictive model. In an era of perfect averages, the outlier isn’t a bug to be fixed. It’s the only authentic signal we have left.