[lubujackson]

I have experienced these feelings personally, but to bring up a high school metaphor - at some point I realized the popular kids weren't just dumb pretty people but spent a lot more time and mental energy on thinking through how they appear, how others regard them and understanding the social relationship amongst each other.

Realizing this, getting called "socially retarded" wasn't just an insult but somewhat descriptive. My mind was much more focused on other things and I could see and appreciate the result of those social efforts but at the time it seemed too much work and not very fun to bother with.

So I doubt the cause is a lack of ability or capabilities that leads to magical social awareness but actual compounding effort over years and decades. If you talk to a NT person about a situation they say "it's obvious" but if they break it down you see there actually is a richer decision tree underneath where they are empathizing with the other person's perspective and triangulating on their overall objectives and both physical and verbal cues they are providing to guide you one way or the other.

Realizing this means it is a difficult but solveable problem, which I found a great improvement over "I can't" or "they are the weird ones".

Obviously your brand of ND may be different from mind but everyone comes in with different skills as well as interests and focuses. It is best to remember were are ALL neuro-different, it is just a matter of degree and flavor. And also that no of this is innately easy for anyone - humans are social creatures and it makes sense our brains are equipped foe and spend a lot of energy on solving these problems.

[saghm]

> So I doubt the cause is a lack of ability or capabilities that leads to magical social awareness but actual compounding effort over years and decades. If you talk to a NT person about a situation they say "it's obvious" but if they break it down you see there actually is a richer decision tree underneath where they are empathizing with the other person's perspective and triangulating on their overall objectives and both physical and verbal cues they are providing to guide you one way or the other.

I've been spending effort on this my whole life, and being in the position where it's still quite difficult for me but I manage to get by is the result of that effort, not because of a lack of it. If this was something I hadn't worked on with significant effort all these years, I wouldn't even be able to have the conversation that we're having right now without getting too frustrated or anxious to the point that I would just give up rather than try to engage at all in conversations online with strangers.

It's interesting to me that what I've described fits with feeling you've experienced, because I'm honestly having trouble feeling like much of what you describe having felt resembles what I've felt over the years. I don't think I ever assumed that other people didn't spend effort trying to understand how other people felt, and I spent _significant_ time and energy trying to understand what I could do to better relate to others; I just never was particularly successful at it.

It's worth mentioning is that I don't have any trouble empathizing with people generally; when people are sad or angry, or when I notice that they're experiencing something that I think is unfair, I feel those feelings quite strongly myself. My issue isn't that I can't relate to the feelings other people have, but that with the exception of people I'm close to and have spent a lot of time with, I have a lot of trouble figuring out exactly how other people feel if they don't express it to me. I've talked with plenty of neurotypical people about how they approach situations in the exact way you describe, but I haven't ever been able to do anything remotely similar to what they describe.

You mentioned that "it's just a matter of degree and flavor", but it seems like you assume that implies that the distribution of differences people have is relatively uniform. From my perspective, the issues you described having and the ways you learned to deal with them are so different from my experience that it's honestly feels like you're using them to handwave away the idea that anyone else might struggle with things far more than you did. I don't think that's your intention, but it really does come across like you fundamentally don't think that anyone struggles with these things much more or less than you have, and as someone who's tried my whole life to try to learn to communicate better with others, it seems pretty dismissive.

[Anotheroneagain]

He's wrong. He's probably from a country where NTs are not predominant.

First, NTs don't ever consider anybody except themselves, they only care about their own good. Even when they seem like they're helping you, they only think they get some benefit from being seen doing so.

Second, they don't think like you do: What you consider a failure is a success to them. They memorize the phrase, and learn how they're supposed to react to it. You think they understand the phrase and come up with their own reply like you do, but they don't, because they can't.

There is nothing that can be understood about the NT world, it's all just rote learned. It's a cargo cult remnant of what people created when they were still normal, mixed with some random nonsense creativity of the schizophrenics who work on "improving" it. The only reason why you think you're failing at it is that the difference in intelligence between you and them is so vast.