[saghm]

Yeah, at least in my experience as someone autistic, I sometimes joke that everybody else got together and decided on a bunch of rules for how everyone needs to talk to each other going forward, but somehow my invite got lost and I missed my chance to learn them. I don't pretend to have any idea if things would be better or worse for society as a whole if everybody did things the way that would seem more natural to me, but it does seem pretty likely to me that neurotypical people would probably struggle in a lot of the ways I often do.

In a certain sense, this makes the experience of being autistic more frustrating. If there were some definitive flaw someone could point to in my brain that would make communication difficult for me regardless of social norms, that might be easier to come to terms with; the feeling that I'm not actually struggling due to any actual issue other than not being in the majority makes it hard not to feel resentful sometimes though. That being said, it's so hard to conceive of a clean separation between the parts of my personality that I do like and the parts that make me struggle to communicate in a neurotypical fashion that if there were a magic switch I could flip to make me like everyone else (whatever that would mean), I still don't think I'd do it. At the end of the day, it's part of what makes me who I am, and I wouldn't recognize who I'd become without it.

[blueflow]

Is it the majority? For me its always the moral guardian type of person, and they are definitely not the majority.

[saghm]

I'm honestly not quite sure what you mean here (which I guess is fitting given the topic of conversation!). In case what I was talking about might have unclear, when I talk about feeling like the majority of people are different than me, I'm saying the idea of social norms being communicated implicitly, or at least being something most people seem to be able to infer from previous examples. To use the example of the interview given above, someone might be able to explain to me that when I'm asked that question, I shouldn't treat it as literal and instead given an answer that fits the expectation they'll actually have, but if the interview instead asks a slightly different question like "what's one thing you would change about your current job?", someone like me might not realize that this is _also_ not a question where it's good to give an answer like "I wish I got paid more for doing less work". For me, it's impossible to take all of the norms and expectations that I've learned over the years and apply them to an entirely new situation that I'm not familiar with, and that's not something that most people seem to struggle with as much as me.

[zozbot234]

> "I wish I got paid more for doing less work"

The socially acceptable way to say exactly that is something like "I wish I was enabled to be more productive and accomplish more with the same amount of effort." It's implied that you'd also want to be paid more as a consequence, since that's what everyone wants at the end of the day. The general rule, to the extent that there is any, is "try to be helpful to the interviewer and be cautious if it looks like you might be stating the obvious!".