this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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"I enjoy this thing so you need to too, so I'll make up a reason it makes me superior"
You do you, but you're willingly giving up on countless small moments of goodness in your life and a lot of potential opportunities, over what amounts to a minor amount of effort.
Like, the main point of small talk is that you can effectively turn your brain off and still produce something passable. You get to choose how far you're going to engage. You can, if needed, boil most of it down to a flowchart if it doesn't come naturally to you.
It depends on what they have going on. Small talk is literally painful to me to participate in, and I have no intention of trying to fix that because I’m not wrong or broken, just different, with different social needs that are met by people similarly different.
Autistics don’t small talk for a set of good reasons, including that it’s quite pointless and superficial to how we operate in the world, and we don’t get the same things out of it as neurotypicals. We have our own version of small talk, which is diving right into sharing special interests. It tells us what we need to know about the person we are talking to like small talk does for NT.
For us, those small talk conversations aren’t small moments of goodness. They might be for you, and that’s cool, but not us.
This might be interesting to you, or not, as you like. It goes over some of the reasons people on the spectrum don’t like small talk, and how we perform the same functions to maintain our social lives, but go about it differently.
https://www.autisticstudies.com/communication/autisticsmalltalk
Yeah, that's very true.
I have autistic acquaintances that are kinda friends, and it takes shifting mental gears to have good interactions. It really helps when the individual says up front that they don't like/want/have skill at the usual preliminaries amd wants to just talk about more specific things.
Bridging that neurofunction gap can be very hard on both sides, and it's always an ongoing learning experience.
All of that being said, it is also very nice when both/all people present make that effort. It's harder for autistic folks, or so it seems, but without at least a little willingness to communicate about how to communicate, it's a much harder thing to make work.
"Goodness" to you, norman, not to the rest of us. It's called subjectivity. As you get older you'll find there's nothing that can actually be defined as good for most people in this way as everyone is different. There is no "human experience", we're all totally different and forever unknowable to each other.
To me it just sucks and is actually depressing. I don't want to turn my brain off, I want to talk to someone that'll put my brain in overdrive.
Do you often not enjoy things you're bad at?
It's not that deep.