Do you feel like a resistor in a world full of conductors?
It feels like everyone else is plugged in, tuned in, moving with the current.
While you’re burning out, sparking at both ends, trying not to explode from the sheer voltage of existence.
We don’t trust authority without reason, and that’s not bad, it’s necessary. For us and for society. Learn how ASD, ADHD, and PDA shape human progress.
Frank Ludwig calls it the Deindividuation Resister Hypothesis. Some of us were built differently. Not wrong. Not broken.
Just wired to resist systems that dehumanize. That crush. That demand compliance over authenticity.
It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.
Evolution gave the world canaries for its toxic mines.
We’re the ones coughing up blood when the air turns rotten.
But tell that to a five-year-old crying under the table because the lights are too bright, the noise is too loud, and no one will stop talking long enough to let him breathe.
Tell that to a teenager who spends every waking hour masking, rehearsing facial expressions in the mirror, breaking eye contact before it burns a hole through his soul, flinching at every hallway interaction like it’s a landmine.
Tell that to me.
I wasn’t born for this world. I was born in it, but not for it.
Every institution told me I was wrong.
Lazy. Rude. Oversensitive. Too much. Not enough.
I was resisting and I didn’t know why.
They didn’t know the same wiring that made me agitated under authority was the wiring that stopped me from falling into line when something felt wrong.
They punished me for it.
I learned to apologize for myself before I even understood what I was apologizing for.
I learned that surviving meant becoming invisible. That being accepted meant performing a version of myself that didn’t exist.
This is what Ludwig is talking about. He’s not saying we’re heroes or saints.
He’s saying the very thing they try to medicate out of us, beat out of us, or “fix” is exactly the thing the world needs when it starts to lose its humanity.
When your brain lights up with every injustice,
every contradiction,
every false note in the song of society,
you don’t stay quiet.
You can’t.
You short-circuit.
You resist.
They called us defective.
History called us something else.
Emily Dickinson spent most of her life in a single room.
Reclusive, hypersensitive, socially anxious.
Likely autistic.
She wrote some of the most radical, raw poetry ever created.
She refused to conform.
She wrote in silence.
Her resistance was survival.
Nikola Tesla hated loud sounds and bright lights.
Avoided physical contact.
Obsessively repeated tasks and saw entire inventions in his head.
His brain was lightning, and he lived like a live wire.
They laughed at him.
Now he powers our world.
Barbara McClintock, geneticist, refused to publish research because she knew no one would take her seriously.
Her colleagues thought she was odd.
Her breakthroughs came through deep, obsessive, solitary focus.
She changed how we understand DNA.
Anthony Hopkins, diagnosed late in life with autism.
Known for roles that unsettle. That disturb.
That reveal the uncanny edges of human emotion.
He resisted Hollywood’s noise, worked in near silence, built his own rhythm.
Called himself a loner. Created brilliance.
Satoshi Tajiri, creator of Pokémon, likely autistic and deeply focused on patterns, collecting, and systems.
What the world saw as “weird,” he turned into a global phenomenon that made autistic joy mainstream.
And then there’s Isaac Newton.
Quiet, obsessive, prone to isolation.
Likely autistic, too.
The father of physics.
Every bit of modern technology from the smartphones in our pockets to the satellites orbiting above depends on Newton’s laws.
His resistance to social norms, his relentless focus, his refusal to conform, built the foundation for centuries of science and innovation. His Father, his Peers, the college itself tried to stop him.
He didn’t just survive the world.
He rewrote its rules.
These aren’t just success stories.
These are people whose very way of being
was treated as inconvenient, antisocial, abnormal.
But when they stopped fighting themselves
and started creating from that resistance,
they shifted culture.
This is what resisting looks like.
Not just revolutionaries and virtue-signallers.
But broken kids crying behind locked bathroom doors because their brain won’t stop screaming.
People who quit jobs,
leave relationships,
abandon entire lives
because they can’t fake it anymore.
We’re not always on the front lines, but we are always at the breaking point.
And sometimes that’s enough to shift the world an inch closer to sanity.
I see the cost.
I’m paying it every day.
The loneliness.
The suicidal ideation.
The feeling of being fundamentally wrong.
But I also see the value.
And so did Frank Ludwig.
This theory is not just an idea.
It’s a lifeline.
A reframing.
A rebellion.
It says maybe we’re not here to be changed.
Maybe we’re here to change something.
So here’s what I’m saying.
To every kid who can’t sit still.
To every adult who still can’t make eye contact without flinching.
To every autistic and ADHD brain that’s been told it’s defective:
Maybe you’re not the broken part of a perfect world.
Maybe you’re the perfect part of a broken one.
We need to stop fixing ourselves
to fit into a sick system.
We need to start forcing the system to make room for the people who were born to say no.
To see the cracks in the dogmas.
To see beyond what’s considered possible.
To see patterns across disciplines and unlock insight into the world.
We are not the problem.
We are resistant to BS.
References and Further Reading
- Ludwig, F.L., 2017. Deindividuation Resister Hypothesis. Available at: http://franklludwig.com/deindividuationresisters.html