FOR ASPIES: UNDERSTANDING NORMALS
(Normals talk about meaningless nonsense all the time. we can learn to talk about meaningless nonsense too. it’s kind of hard at first to imagine meaningless nonsense, or even why you’d care about it. but it’s a product that the market wants, and if you want to obtain attention in the market, you have to use the currency of choice, and the currency of attention is meaningless nonsense: signals that do not require much of the recipient. once you try to talk about nonsense enough, it’s really just returning served pingpong ball with a little spin, not adding much to it at all. You sort of pick five topics that normals know something about, and keep informed about those in some niche, so you can always add niche info to a conversation. Most aspies specialize. But specializing in nonsense is unprofitable. So it is good to spread your specialization to something popular like fashion, music, politics, news, and spend the rest of your time on your specialization. This will let you talk to normals about meaningless stuff and enjoy it, as long as you simply understand that the entire purpose is NOT to share meaning, but pleasant images, and positive associations. we really like to talk about things that require thinking. normals have to work at thinking. we just think at the same volume that they feel. so they want to free associate with feelings, not with facts. when we free associate with facts, we look for contradictions. when they free associate with experiences they look for confirmations. when we look for dominance in our facts, they look for submissions in their experiences, so that they signal ‘I’m safe’ to one another. We find safety in knowledge and understanding, they find safety in shared experiences. They find pleasure in experiential novelty, and we find pleasure in informational novelty. Conversely, they find discomfort in the unknown information, and we in the unknown experience. It is far easier for us to work at contributing to the experiential association of normals, than it is for normals to work at contributing to the informational association of autistics. don’t be hard on normals for being dim. but don’t be easy on yourself for being dim either. Imagine that each of us sees a slightly different section of the spectrum of radiation, and that normals see most of the visual spectrum, and some of them are a little color blind. We on the other hand see in the equivalent of infrared. It is a much simpler view of the universe with clearer lines of delineation between entities that are meaningful (heat) and hose that are not (cold). But that is our only difference. Our world must be constructed of perceptions and analogies to perception. But with instrumentation and practice we can observe each other’s worlds. It just has to be cost effective. It isn’t really cost effective for them to perceive our world. But it is usually very cost effective for us to learn to perceive their world. It was very hard for me, and I am very bright and I worked very hard, but it is possible.
