[dkarl]

Another frequent side effect of Asperger's is the impulse to fix things and make sure everything runs smoothly. (I think this is not limited to Asperger's but is common to many people who are uncomfortable with emotion.) A frustrating aspect of Asperger's is that you don't feel the same emotions at the same times for the same reasons as other people. People ignore you or discount your feelings because the logic behind your emotions seems bizarre to them. And the disconnect goes both ways, of course, since people with Asperger's have a hard time understanding others' emotions and responding to them constructively. For many young Aspies it is a simple bedrock truth that whenever emotion and personal interaction mix, it's a clusterfuck, because engaging with other people emotionally ends in failure and trauma. So you keep your emotions inside, studiously avoid responding to others' emotions, and structure your interactions with other people around what you _are_ capable of doing right, which is fixing things that cause bad emotions in the first place.

In this way, having Asperger's is kind of like the opposite of being a drama queen. This is not to say that people with Asperger's are always emotionally appropriate or easy to get along with. What I mean is that some people love emotional chaos because they deal with emotion very well and always seem to come out on top in emotional confrontations. They relish the chance to stir up chaos because to them it's another chance to put their skills on display and come out ahead. Aspies are not like that at all; when they get into an uncomfortable confrontation, it's a mistake, and they don't enjoy it. People who deal poorly with emotion go around fixing things and (some) people who thrive on it go around breaking things. Sounds like a good reason to hire Aspies to me.

[ambiate]

That is a very elegant way to describe one of my most non-human features. I have huge issues with saying "I'm sorry." My brain does not allow me to even consider it as an option. If I am truly sorry, I will masochistically introspect, learn, reiterate, and adjust the scenario until the feeling of saying, "I'm sorry", becomes a moot point due to my effort to correct the situation. Words are quite meaningless without action, but action does not seem meaningless without language.

I think 'normal' people do this too. They just have an easier time of convincing themselves of abstract concepts like love, remorse, etc. Looking at myself, I have very primal emotions and filters. There is much self-interest, but I through repetition I have learned to take others into account. This is due to 'others' being a crucial part of what I consider my identity. Without their language (body, verbal), which I cannot fully utilize/process, I could not exist.

I call it my absurd void philosophy. Given that I was placed in a void, stripped of light, sound, floating around aimlessly... I would lose my identity. Without others, there is no me. If I do not take others into consideration, they will not take me into consideration and I would lose my identity. This is the root cause of my social interactions other than habit.

How does this play in the workplace? I make mistakes, and I bust my arse to not let the behavior happen again. I utilize the experience to warn others of my shortcomings.

As a generous Southern man once said to me, "Jonathan, some people just want a Thank You letter as gratitude instead of an email or phone call." To which I replied, "gratitude, on any medium, is still gratitude, this is a difference of culture, but to disregard my sentiment is to deny my humanity, not just my culture."

I strive to be concrete and universal, because no one does it for me.

[dkarl]

This is getting off-topic a bit, but I think the onus is on the person communicating to make an effort to communicate in a way the other person understands. It's up to you to learn to communicate in a shared language and not in an idiosyncratic language that only has meaning to you.

Words are quite meaningless without action.

This is incorrect, especially when it comes to thank you notes and apologies. The gesture is significant in itself, regardless of the sentiment behind it, because the gesture is conventional. When a response is expected, you can't expect silence to mean the same thing as the expected response. Often it means the opposite.

It's like you're trying to rewrite a protocol without consulting with anybody else. If you deploy a bunch of servers that speak your own proprietary dialect of HTTP, don't expect to be able to interoperate with other people's systems.

Edit/continuation:

I think 'normal' people do this too. They just have an easier time of convincing themselves of abstract concepts like love, remorse, etc.

It's true; shared experience gives an illusory reality to feelings. There are emotions (such as fear) that are biologically real in the sense that they are rooted in the structure of the brain; people would be capable of feeling these emotions without any social exposure. There are other emotions whose reality is based on shared cultural experiences, which are difficult for someone from another culture to understand. The subleties of emotions like guilt, shame, and gratitude are very difficult to understand outside a shared cultural context, because they are used to regulate relations between people. People treat them as if they were primal emotions like fear, which is very misleading. They expect that you must experience these feelings exactly the same way they do simply because you are human, but if they were transplanted into another culture they might find themselves as disoriented and "weird" as you. If you see shame, gratitude, and guilt as part of an emotional "language" like English or Spanish or Chinese, which can only arise between people, and which exist in different forms in different cultures, then it is a lot less confusing.

[fyi80]

> "gratitude, on any medium, is still gratitude, this is a difference of culture, but to disregard my sentiment is to deny my humanity, not just my culture."

And some people prefer to be compensated in dollars, not bitcoins.

Giving is about giving something that the recipient will enjoy, not about what the giver wants. Gratitude is such a gift.

[ambiate]

If I give gratitude, then, you demand a separate kind because it does not suit your tastes seems more rude than my ignorance of what you initially wanted in exchange. The example of currency follows a completely different set of rules than gratitude of the 'thank you' nature for me. I suppose I am not one to judge what is(n't) rude.

[ludston]

This is straw man fallacy because they have not demanded gratitude. They have been given a gift that they do not understand or value, then you've expected them to return their own gratitude.

[vorg]

> Another frequent side effect of Asperger's is the impulse to fix things and make sure everything runs smoothly [... ... ...] (some) people who thrive on it go around breaking things. Sounds like a good reason to hire Aspies to me.

The types of people who get themselves into building new computer systems tend to meet the deadlines but what they build is full of bugs. The aspies, i.e. maintenance programmers, then spend years afterwards fixing the system based on issues raised by the unit testers, i.e. live users of the system.