Skip to main content

Asociality and Polite Intrusion

Restaurants should have quiet sections.  People seem to have an impulse to socialize.  Sometimes strangers will attempt to converse with me.  I don't know why.  I think it safe to say that this impulse probably has some relationship to a neurological event.  This neurological event doesn't happen in my brain.  I don't experience the impulse to socialize.  I wonder what it's like but I expect that many who do experience the impulse would be unable to describe it.  I don't see the point of making small talk even when it's explained to me.

Strangers might begin talking to each other about nothing at any moment.  Maybe they want to soften situations.  Or to display some intent.  I can only guess.  When they talk to me they are asking me to invest in them.  Suddenly I have to indulge their impulse.  I have to make them comfortable at my own expense.  I don't know what they're going to say, what they might want, if they could be dangerous, or how they see the situation they've created.  If I humor them, will they think I want them to continue talking to me?

People seem hostile in their demands that I engage them in ritual pleasantries.  They bother me to nod and smile.  What comfort do they take in this?  I have no explanation.  I'm baffled.

Those helpful few who try to exlain often point to politeness.  Leave people alone.  That's my rule.  That's polite to me.  Leave me to do the things that I'm forced to go among you to do that I may return sooner to the shelter of my own company.  Socializing is extremely stressful.  Overexposure to the public is significantly upsetting to cause me to have seizures.  After an unscheduled outing, I am enervated and I need a day to recover.  All this being as it is, it's not necessarily that I don't want to socialize.  It's that I'm unable to want to.

In closing:
Questions arise when I express all this.  Why can't I get over it using any of the methods that have worked for someone else?  What about mind over matter, cognitive behavioral therapy, or just trying harder?  Comments emerge from incredulous people. That is ok.  What I'm talking about is not an attitude problem but a persistent, clinically significant issue related to a pervasive multisystem medical condition.  Some won't accept this explanation.  That is ok too.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Man Is Not Great: The Evolution of Anthropocentrism

Why do humans care whether their species is special? Why are they so invested in their specialness that they're uncomfortable with the idea that they aren't? Why is it a bitter pill to swallow that humans aren't uniquely important in the universe, that they aren't the intended end of evolution, and that their wondrous and diverse subjective experiences emerge from the same physical processes observable in "lower" animals? I think that the maladaptive human tendency to insist upon their specialness in the universe is an extension of an adaptive tendency to self-advocate in their tribes. Consider fear. The predisposition to turn around when you feel like something might be behind you is likely to save you when there really is something there. Most of the time, when you can't help but turn around on the dark basement steps, there's no threat. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s better to turn unnecessarily than to do nothing in a moment of danger. That...
Post a Comment
Read more

Threat and Opportunity

Humans see everything as either a threat or an opportunity. These are the only classifications they have. A threat could be a corporal threat, like a violent person, or it could be a threat to their attention, like a boring person or a waste of time.   You're not in control of whether something looks like a threat or an opportunity. You can certainly apply control to turn one into the other, but your first impressions of anything are unconscious. I'm a waste of time. There's nothing to be gained from socializing with me because I'm profoundly socially impaired. I have no status and no way to earn status, so I'm a threat to attention. People who choose to pay attention to me find the endeavor prohibitively expensive of their energy. Attending to me is necessarily a struggle against the Darwinian impulse to conserve energy.  We can call this a rejection response.   I've said that humans naturally have a psychological allergy to me, but that's not a good...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Save the World

The following isn't related to autism.  It's an edited transcript of my side of a conversation with an AI.  I'm including it here because I think it's important. It should be pretty easy to arrive at the notion that, if we want to minimize our environmental impact, we should look back at a time when we were making a minimal impact and return to that. But that is not a suggestion anyone is making, and I don't think it's a suggestion anyone is likely to make, wherever these conversations are being had.  The conversation about conservation always begins with the tacit question, "How can we continue breeding unchecked forever, and how can we continue to deplete natural resources indefinitely?"  If you start from the idea that what we are doing now must not be impacted by whatever solution we come up with, then you're not going to come up with a good solution. This issue seems complex.  I don't think it's actually complex at all, however. I thin...
Post a Comment
Read more