Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

As an actual aspie the rules I make up are very much modifiable, but I don't do so just because people say so. The replacements need to satisfy the internal need that led to the creation of the original rules, and those needs may well not be needs I understand. It was a very long time -- decades -- before I figured out the stuff I mention in this comment, but the needs and even many of the same coping mechanisms were present from about the age of five, and if you'd tried to take them away I would have been epically unhappy and quite unable to explain why. Autistics have very poor visibility into our own internal states. Equally, he'd probably be able to express this himself in a few decades. But this is my guess! :)

Of course, part of that need is for control of a chaotic world, and rules qua rules provide that control in and of themselves, as long as they are not rules imposed from outside: i.e. it is quite possible that a rule your son made up would be acceptable to him where *exactly the same rule* would not be acceptable coming from anyone else, because a key part of it was that the rule was not externally imposed!

> So e.g he very much likes to play games and watch Youtube videos, there is no rule in the world that I could create that he would follow that in any way would prohibit him from playing games or watching videos when he wants to. Aka I cannot create a new rule that says that for every 10 videos you have to go outside for 10 minutes, even implying something like that would just make him mad.

And there's a good reason for that. If this stuff serves the same purpose as reading and hacking does for me -- and I very much suspect it does, it feels exactly the same and I use gameplaying for the same purpose sometimes -- this is not *optional* or even exactly fun: it's an essential cooldown method, a way to shut out the chaotic outside world and restrict sensory input to something you control completely (even a youtube video -- you have control of pause and rewind, so it's a controlled sensory feed: and computer games are something you can redo without real-world consequences until you get it right, which might take *far* longer than for anyone else), until the chaos of your far-too-intense emotions recedes back to something no longer overwhelming. Ripping yourself out of that every ten videos or every half hour or whatever and hurling yourself back into the uncontrolled, glaring, noisy outside would feel very much like... well, I don't know what the world is like to people without sensory filtration problems. Being torn out of a classical music concert every half hour and having your head shut in a tin can that is repeatedly hammered by maddened giants, perhaps?

You might find he's happier if you suggest alternating with something else with similarly self-controlled content and sensory input. Reading? Music? I'm not sure: I am after all 40+ and thus out of touch with what the young do these days! But not other people and not outside and not uncontrolled input. :)