"I spent my childhood trying to understand systems that couldn't understand me. I spent my career trying to understand systems that couldn't understand people."
If you want to know how I ended up as an analyst who spends a suspicious amount of time arguing with economic models, that is the short version.
Being neurodivergent, specifically, navigating the world with Autism and ADHD (AuADHD) is essentially a childhood apprenticeship in systems analysis. When the world is not built for the way your brain operates, you cannot afford to coast on instinct. You have to observe. You sit at the edges of playgrounds, classrooms, and dinner parties, furiously calculating the unspoken rules of neurotypical engagement. You are constantly looking for the hidden variables, the behavioural proxies, and the expected outputs.
Without realising it, I was practicing junior data analysis before I even knew what the words meant.
When I eventually took those skills into the City of London, I assumed I was entering the big leagues of rational, perfectly structured systems. Instead, I discovered a hilarious, closely guarded secret, the financial and economic systems aren't perfectly rational either. They are just incredibly good at masking.
There is a belief that economics loves to rely on the concept of the average human, a perfectly rational actor who always makes the most logical financial choice.
However, as I explore in my upcoming book, The Great Decoupling, economics doesn't actually believe that every individual makes perfectly rational choices. The profession knows full well that we are haphazard and that any one of us might wake up on a Tuesday and make a completely ridiculous, unpredictable purchase.
But economics relies on the law of large numbers. It knows that while you are unpredictable, a crowd of ten million people making chaotic choices eventually smooths out into a highly predictable, mathematically safe aggregate curve.
The model works perfectly, right up until the moment we try to force individual human beings to live inside it and that is exactly what our institutions do. Standardised systems, whether it is a rigidly enforced school curriculum, a corporate HR policy, or a government procurement framework, take that smoothed-out, economic aggregate and try to enforce it as a daily behavioural standard.
They build systems for a statistical ghost. They demand a theoretical average human who never gets overwhelmed, doesn't carry generational trauma, and certainly doesn't forget where they put their car keys.
These standardised systems are terrified of human variance, they demand conformity because variance breaks the spreadsheet. But as anyone with a neurodivergent mind will tell you, forcing a square peg into a round hole doesn't change the shape of the peg, it just damages it.
I used to think my neurodivergence made me the odd one out in a perfectly ordered world. It turns out, the world is a messy, chaotic place, and the perfectly ordered systems are the ones living in denial.
We don't need humans to try harder to fit the models. We need models that finally possess the humility to recognise humanity.
