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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 analogy. An allergic reaction is an inappropriate immune response. However, it's actually entirely appropriate to push me away and to be unable to commit care or attention to me. In my case, the rejection response makes sense. There really is no benefit to engaging with me that offsets the cost of your attention. It's perfectly reasonable for people to ignore me, even if it hurts me that they do, and the only way I can respond appropriately is to ignore them as well and accept being on the outside.


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