Tasks that don't make sense

This is the eighth post in my autism awareness month series.

There's a pattern many autistic people recognize but rarely name: the inability to perform tasks that don't make sense. Not tasks that are hard, or unpleasant, or boring, but tasks whose purpose doesn't compute.

This is different from procrastination. Procrastination is knowing you should do something and not doing it. What happens here is closer to a blank: the brain doesn't engage because it hasn't received a valid reason to.

I studied medicine for two years. My friends would put in ten-hour study days without question, and I couldn't get myself to do the same, not because I was exhausted or distracted, but because the task simply wouldn't engage. When I asked one of them why she worked so hard, she said: because my parents want me to be a doctor. There was no way my brain would let my body work that hard for that reason. It wasn't laziness, I can work intensely when things make sense. The engine just wouldn't start for this.

The same pattern shows up anywhere social pressure substitutes for genuine reason: everyone else is doing it, you have no choice. Those don't satisfy the brain's actual question: what is the purpose of this, in terms I can evaluate?

When that answer isn't there, the block isn't reluctance or stubbornness, it's closer to turning the key in a car with no engine. The action is available, the result isn't. What pushing harder produces is something between frustration and despair: the feeling of wanting to move, making the effort, and finding that nothing responds. The will is there. The compliance isn't available. From the outside it looks exactly like not trying.

And what the observer sees often makes things worse. The autistic person may just look at you and smile, while you wait for them to do something they know they have to do and simply won't. The smile isn't defiance, it's the combined result of two absent automatic systems: the spontaneous facial mimicry that would normally adjust your expression to match the gravity of the situation, and the conscious control over that expression, which isn't available because the brain is already occupied with the block itself.

There's a strength in this though. The same trait that makes arbitrary tasks impossible makes unnecessary complexity visible. The person who keeps asking "why are we doing this?" in a process review is often the one who finds the actual bottleneck.

That smile I mentioned above, and what it looks like when authority meets a brain that doesn't have a submission reflex, will be the topic of the next post.

This is part of my April 2026 autism awareness month series. First published on LinkedIn on 2026-04-17.