I had a “friend” that was like this but this was only because she lied to everyone about just about everything and it was at a point where she struggled to keep up with the lies.
Half the time it was pointless nonsense. The other half it meant she was probably cheating or attempting to cheat with someone in the group’s partner.
You shouldn’t be getting upset because your friends remember what you said the last time you hung out. That’s just weird.
This post is a perfect example of everything is neurodivergent now.
Curiosity can be rude
Nobody seems to understand that I’m just genuinely curious about things. I have no other reason for asking. Nothing wrong, nothing to make fun of you for, and nothing to try and make things worse. Don’t ask me why I asked.
It just happens.
A good chunk of people are hostile bloodsuckers just pretending to be normal people, and they think everyone thinks like them secretly.
So usually, the person will look at an angle of how you are trying to undermine them.
No contact those people.
Me: Question A
Them: Ah you must really mean Question B. Here’s your answer.
Me: OK but Question A
Them: Ooh, you’re really grilling me now. Relax.
“I asked the question I intended to ask using the words that I intended to use because they have the meaning that I intend them to have. There’s no secret subtext to read into, I am asking this question literally with the words coming out of my actual human mouth” And people will still think I’m fucking sarcastic.
I endlessly strive to figure out how to have my words mean what they mean, when asking questions. TOO MANY times, suffering this^ scenario.
… And then tone too, finding what this mystery perfect intonation that has them remain in their considerate, critical, creative, compassionate forebrain, and not be thrust to the back of their brain in survival mode. It’s just an honest question! … Ever baffling, the psychology, the astrology, the lunar cycles, the weather, whatever else is going on in their life, to cause these impediments to simple direct communication that means what it means, and not all these sensational pos-hoc subtexts imagined but not intended.
I remember that asking a co-worker if we should do something, came across as ordering them, and made then very angry.
Am I autistic? I have definitely done this by accident.
Could be.
Could be that you were just encountering any of several types narcissists, who in their fragile egos cannot entertain curiosity or criticism or advice as anything but an attack on their perfect image of themselves that they identify with.
There are various free online tests to help towards making a determination as to which it may be. Or even both.
My neighbor across the street has solar panels. I chatted with him once, and he brought them up. I asked if he got the battery wall too, and he said no, but seemed slightly miffed. Then, he said his electric bill was $60/mo. I probably didn’t seem suitably impressed, I didn’t tell him mine is $50/mo. and I don’t have solar panels, I just don’t use much electricity. I wanted to ask whether he was leasing them, or took out a loan for them, but didn’t.
I think the only way residential solar panels make sense is to have a battery, especially in the winter when we get a lot less sun, and most people are at work during the day, so a lot of residential electrical use is after sunset. That’s why I asked, but I didn’t say any of that to him.
Where I live most electric is air conditioning.
And what the hell else are you gonna do with that space? Do they get in the way of your rooftop garden?
Nah. I’m in Australia and our electricity bills have been slaughtered by two thirds. We used to have a powerpal (it died, ironically for the following) and even midwinter there would be huge chunks of the day where it registered 0 meter use - we are literally powering everything in the house just via solar.
So even without a battery (they’re 20k+) we’ve cut a large chunk of fossil fuels clean out of use. We also feed back into the grid - we get bugger all money for it, but that’s not the point. The point is reduction of fossil fuelled power.
we get bugger all money for it, but that’s not the point.
Money is the point for most people, I would think. Altruism doesn’t pay the bills.
That sounds way nicer than the US. Even the high pressure sales guy said the math didn’t math for our house. It’s basically a 20 year loan to pay off the panels and even though we don’t have many trees I guess our house is at the wrong angle? To break even we would have to make it to 20 years. To save we would have to keep it longer than that. But they were only warranteed for 10. No thanks.
Why?
(This is a joke about asking people why to they suddenly have to do some critical thinking)
OMG is that what we’re doing!?
And here I thought I was doing a great job masking with small talk.
Yep absolutely. Especially with these communication challenges NT <-> ND and trying best to understand. Suddenly bam! aggro mode.
I was just trying to understand, genuinely. No, you went too far!
You stop wanting to participate in society the moment you realize most ‘normal’ people just say random words and avoid thinking about any of them like the plague.
Oh I hate this. They tell me something interesting, I ask questions because I’m genuinely curious. And now they’re offended because they think I’m questioning what they just said.
My uncle is further on a spectrum than me, and when I was young I hated when he does this. You tell the story, and there is a passing character that doesn’t matter, but now he asks a lot of info about that one. Used to drive me crazy. The story is about a cute dog in a hat I saw on a train, it doesn’t matter how old was the dude that walked past it and also complemented the hat. It doesn’t matter where was the train going. A dog was wearing a hat, who cares how many people was also on a train.
I now understand better why he was asking the questionsYoung kids are like this, unable to parse what the is important and not important in any given story. They grow out of it pretty quickly, by maybe 10, at least in my experience. We’re neurotypical (as far as I know).
For my special interests I don’t mine follow up questions at all, in fact I like them. But most normal stories or narratives are fairly linear and there’s no need to follow every thread.
importance in the eye of the beholder
Of course, but when listening to a story it’s usually polite to listen to the person telling the story and what they want to tell you, what they deem important.
Wanna share a special interest here maybe? Seems a good thread for it.
Ah, well, there are many of them. Collecting ancient coins, for example. Messing around with Reticulum, an alternative network structure. Right now also shooting pistols, just started that some months back. Byzantine history… linguistics, particularly parts of speech in a typological perspective. And many others 😂 but as a dad of 3 I don’t get to spend enough time on them all.
I hear that. I am taking a look at:
Thanks! Sounds like the kind of stack that might help in post apocalyptic scenarios.
Hope to see you on RetiBooks then! 😊
Indeed
Oh yes…all the time. Either that or you’ll just hit a wall of “uh I don’t know?” Or “Why do you want to know such weird things?”.
I think it’s a little unfair to brand the other person as avoidant of self-reflection, as if that’s just a core personality trait and not something that varies contextually. This kind of therapy-speak in inappropriate venues is such a huge red flag. No, you did not “trigger” the other person. You hurt their feelings on accident. That happens, but your measure lies in how you respond to having unintentionally hurt someone. This tweet reeks of “I acted like a shitty person, and now to soothe the feeling of my superego poking my ego I will go online and paint the person I was a dick to as an unreasonable person through oversimplified vagueposting.”
edit: With half an hour of distance between me and this comment it now feels important that I point out that I’m not calling out anyone ITT. Just the original poster on Twitter. Weaponized therapyspeak really, ahem, triggers me. I’ve been on both sides of this dynamic, and both sides can really ruin my day. I just really hate it when people try to avoid accountability for their behavior by using detached and clinical language. Ironically, the author of the linked tweet is avoiding self-reflection in real time. It’s just… goddamn, dude. This shit is serious. You can really hurt somebody when you start talking like unregistered therapy tiktokers. Don’t ask me how I know, that part’s private.
Weaponized therapy speak is annoying, but this is a real phenomenon, just like people like you explaining that this everyday part of my life isn’t actually happening and is all my fault and deserved if it is and…
It is very real. I have experienced it myself. And when it happens I try to recognize that I am not a bad person, and neither are they. Sometimes you trip somebody else’s insecurities. And it’s on them when they let those insecurities get the best of them, and it’s on me when i don’t notice they’re getting uncomfortable because they’ve said “idk man I just started this hobby” three times and instead of taking the hint and high fiving them for their kickass walking artillery robot miniature I ask what brand of paint they used and why. Spoiler: they used it because the dude at the store recommended it and they don’t know anything about paint. Sometimes it is unreasonable to expect someone to be an expert, and repeatedly asking questions beyond the scope of their expertise is incredibly rude because it embarrasses them. That doesn’t make anyone stupid or evil. It just makes us human.
My objection here is that the linked tweet avoids any accountability. “I’m just curious and therefore virtuous, and they are triggered because they lack self reflection” is beyond insufferable, it is corrosive. When you think like that it feels like self acceptance, but it’s also complacency. Conversation is hard, especially for autistic people, but that doesn’t give us license to act like jerks and refuse to learn from the experience.
‘I don’t know’ is an answer. ‘I just started this hobby and bought some random paint’ explains why don’t know pretty well. That is not the majority of my experience.
It is a complete answer, but it also makes a lot of people feel like they don’t know something they should. Repeatedly feeling that way is why they start to get defensive. In my experience. Its the repeated asking of questions they don’t have “good” answers for. And so I try really hard when people share things with me to pay extra attention to how they are reacting to my questions.
The same structure holds true when I’m asking questions about peoples beliefs or any other topic. People really hate feeling caught out in a conversation. My girlfriend almost broke up with me towards the beginning of our relationship for being “too Socratic.” And so now I try to be more conscious about what I ask, and when, where, why, and how I ask them. So far it’s been working pretty well.
Anyway your experiences are your own, my point here was and still is that people don’t react this way because they are stupid or incapable of self reflection but because sometimes we really do come off justly or unjustly as interrogators, and it’s on us to learn to identify when that’s happening and back off.
That can happen!
Much more common is assholes getting defensive when I ask them literally any questions, especially when they’re in positions of power-not even administrative power; I basically don’t fuck with doctors anymore.
That seems somewhat red-herring / strawman, like you’re responding to some dyslexically re-scrambled arrangement of the words in the original post.
Neurodivergents will trigger people that avoid self-reflection simply by asking follow-up questions and being curious about them.
See how it does not preclude?
a little unfair to brand the other person as avoidant of self-reflection,
is talking about something else.
[ This is more a “those who” than a “they are”. Following the logic?]
… Almost as if that could be a gaslighting darvo reflex to avoid self-reflection [~ perhaps about how triggered you get to questions about you? a wild conjecture to entertain, given it fits the data immediately available.].
… Have you considered this? (I ask, thinking it in reach for you, given your edit.)
Mine is more like I’m pretty comfortable with myself and being vulnerable and it makes other people super uncomfortable instead of triggered.
I get that. I’ve worked hard to calibrate my filter so it’s appropriate to different situations. It’s difficult to figure out the line sometimes. The best I can do is take the misunderstandings and turn them into self-deprecating jokes. I might end a spiel with, “Okay, I’m done nerding out now” or something along those lines. Usually people are cool about it. Maybe it’s the acknowledgement of my own awkwardness that helps?
Otherwise, I often hear, “Huh, I never thought about it that way,” and honestly that’s my favorite response. I want to make people question things. I want them to reflect on why they do what they do. I know it can be uncomfortable, but it’s better than living a life unexamined.
I learned while gardening that when you lay manure to fertilise, the direction of the wind will determine the neighbors you upset. Just being yourself is going to upset someone at some point and it’s entirely out of our control.
I love this analogy so much.
Neurodiverse people🤜 X 🤛German people
Asking followup questionsWarum?
