I like infodumping, then being infodumped back at, until we arrive at some crossover subject of mutual curiousity we can discuss till the cows come home. Unfortunately while my gf loves this, my bff doesn’t appreciate this tho.
I do enjoy that at times because I’m generally a curious person that likes to learn. Someone told me it’s a sign of autism once but that person was also an idiot in many aspects.
I find im always just howling into the void.
Nah, I’m just shy. Especially with women. I don’t feel I have much to offer anyone.
Yes, I feel that way sometimes. But I try to keep in mind that humans are innately social creatures, and I shouldn’t shut myself off like that. It helps to have pre-planned events with people I know I like, like playing a TTRPG or board game, or volunteering.
Being with people without an activity is weird for a long time, you need to REALLY know them to do that.
I feel this a lot. Between people moving away and turning inward, I have maybe one or two really good friends.
My social battery is dead and been incinerated.
I graduated high school in 2005, one out of some 300 of my graduating class. Had plenty of friends. Went to community college, several folks I knew from school went to the same community college, met plenty of new folks. Had plenty of friends. Transferred to university, had plenty of friends, got to know my roommates pretty close, that kind of thing.
Out of college, I disappeared into what I thought was going to be my career for a few years. When I came back up and looked around, I found myself in a different world with people that aren’t people anymore, there are walking talking eating shitting cell phone stands.
I don’t try to socialize for the same reason I don’t go hunting for Carolina parakeets: Interpersonal relationships aren’t a thing that exists in the world anymore. We killed them all and the corpse of the last one is on display behind glass at the Raleigh museum of Natural Sciences.
I understand the viewpoint but this seems exaggerated. If anything I think good interpersonal relationships are far easier and more widespread than like 20 years ago (mid-2000s), though 2010s were def peak 👌
There are still people out there which aren’t zombified yet. And it’s still worth the effort to try and seek them out.
they’re very rare though. i barely know anyone besides myself.
Walking talking eating shitting cell phone holders is pretty funny, and accurate
“… stands”, man, I wish my lack of social skills translated to a Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure like superpower.
For me, it’s more like:
My social battery has been dead for a while and I can’t moderate my behavior enough to get new people to put up with my bullshit.
Mucho self-aware. 👌
That’s why I hate the insertion of “mindfulness” into every type of self-help.
Motherfucker, did it ever occur to you that my hyper-awareness of shit is part of the cause of my problems?
it’s a statistical phenomenon. for 99% of the people, the problem is a lack of awareness, so they think it’s that way for everyone.
Awareness is only one part of mindfulness, you already got that, which is great.
The other part is equanimity, being aware of things, but not reacting or judging.
When you practice mindfulness, try to set a time goal of how long you want to do it and stick to it no matter what. If there are suddenly loud noises, or you suddenly feel very hungry, or you suddenly remember something important for work, just stick with the time you set. It’ll get easier over time.
Doing it frequently definitely helps with hyper-vigilance and being overly aware of things.
No thanks lol I’m going to stay hyper vigilant until I know people are paying attention.
Sometimes mindfulness is more of a soft awareness. Not really thinking or knowing about anything in particular.
I also don’t like how it’s used, because I have the same problem as you describe. It reminds me of trying to maintain a stoic perspective, being non-intellectually aware of sensations in your body, and trying to focus on what you can control.
You all had social batteries to start with.? I haven’t really ever had it and haven’t ever had much if at all deep connections. Not because I don’t try but because people can’t deal with my genetically dead social batteries.
If you’re still interested to try and meet people, I would suggest still trying to meet up or go to locations with a bunch of people and check yourself.
How do you feel there, what do you notice, what makes you feel tired?
Very often you’ll find yourself overly alert, overly self concious, or simply not used to the experience. These all drain energy.
Try again and notice if it changes. Keep trying.
See how many people here share your troubles? There’s no shortage of people like you. The thing is, like you say, you have to stop putting up with people’s bullshit. When you notice bullshit, confront them with it, and if there’s no way of reconciliation, move on immediately, don’t try to “put up” with anything. From what you said it seems like you hold on to toxic people too long.
Also, have you ever thought about that you might also have “BS” that other people would have to deal with when they want to create a deep connection with you? Do you think that’s absolutely impossible?
I’ve already accepted my closest friends are still going to have a lot of distance, that’s apparently just the level I can get to comfortably.
My wife on the other hand constantly seeks out friendships regardless of how ridiculously toxic they are (I shouldn’t detail but seriously extreme toxicity), she thinks if she doesn’t put up with it, then she won’t have any friends.
I know I’m not the only one with this issue and it could probably become more common with the direction society has chosen to head in. Ya unfortunately I was born to some less than ideal parents so I was forced into a caregiver role as a child. That made me into someone who would, to a fault, always believe people can change for the better if I give them the chance. Which of course is not true for a lot of people and a painful lesson to learn.
Nah, actually I’m perfect and everyone around me is just stupid. Kidding of course. I know I have my quirks and I’ve also learned to cater to other’s preferences as a child. Not so much anymore, someone mentioned in here something about not setting yourself on fire to keep others warm. I wish someone told me that was an option decades ago.
What I mean with “you’re not the only one” is that you’ll be (probably easily) able to find people that are good for you. Didn’t mean to put light on the fact it’s a societal issue; might be, might not be, but it’s irrelevant. Just meant to say that enough good people are out there.
If you’re like what you say you are, “staying with people in the hopes they might change for the better”, what I’ve noticed in my time on Earth is that “people like you” actually do find these problematic people specifically and spend their time with them. You want to improve the world and that means the people within them, and so you think your time is well spent like this.
However, this is unfortunately almost totally wrong. Instead of achieving your goal, the problematic people just mostly stay like they are, and because of that all that happens is that you become miserable because you don’t see any improvement, and don’t have any meaningful relationships.
If I may suggest an alternative, what I’ve found is that you actually have to find people that are already mostly good and have a proven track record of improving themselves. These are mostly good people. They have no big problems and no toxic behaviors. I assume you are such a person. So in other words, you have to find someone like you. If you do that, you can both improve together and help each other, instead of this one-sided thing you probably mostly had going on.
And yeah, like you said, “not setting yourself on fire to keep others warm”, this means you have to stop spending time with the people that just drain you, even though it may sometimes be painful.
Anyway, hope you have a wonderful time, because this is actually all really fun once you prioritize your own happiness while dealing with others :D
Ya I understood what you meant and it would be insane of me to legitimately think I’m the only one in this situation.
I’ve worked through a lot of cptsd to reprogram myself to take my own emotions into consideration. Parents have a huge effect on their kids. I was subconciously drawn towards people who reminded me of what was familiar, my parents, which most people couldn’t be paid enough to deal with long term. I was constantly told by them and their “friends” that my job is to take care of them, that is why I was brought into this world. When your brain is still malleable, you tend to believe things as they are presented.
Yes I do try to only seek out people who I aspire to be like now but it’s not always easy to figure out who someone truly is. Constant struggle between being forgiving and recognizing red flags for what they are.
I changed careers and cut off nearly everyone I was “friends” with prior to understanding what kind of people I was attracting with my personality. I do things that I want and enjoy now, I just don’t know how to recharge my social battery back to where it was. If it’s even possible.
the social battery just regrows like plants in a garden. no matter how many times you cut them back, they’re gonna regrow next year. just like the river carries water continuously, just like sunshine and rain :)
have faith in nature, if not in yourself. :D
Social media. You use it up spending time on Reddit and Lemmy etc.
people spend time on social media before it enshittifies completely. in 10 years it’s all gonna be dead internet theory and bots, controlled by oligarchs for the purpose of advertisement.
the problem will solve itself eventually.
Nah, it’s easy to block and or not engage in toxicity on social media if you choose so
That really does not matter. Spend some time camping with no phones and notice how differently you feel and behave. Humans did not evolve to have smartphones and social media, it triggers numerous emotional responses without actually satisfying them, by its inherent nature.
When I burned out of the corporate world, I went back to school for horticulture and became a gardener. Nature bathing/green therapy is very real and I agree very important for people to do regularly to ground themselves in this chaotic world.
Yup. It’s part and parcel of my autism.
i was going to say this.
are you me? lol
You can’t prove I’m not
dang! got me/you there. i didn’t know i/you was that smart. lol
Part of me is convinced this a joke for one guy, switching between two accounts, just laughing to himself. Like it’s some kind of inside joke. And by “inside” I mean “inside his own head”.
i wonder the same thing myself. lol
With a 3rd alt for misdirection and a 4th alt for plausible deniability.
There must be loads and loads of autism types. I see comments like this on Lemmy across the board. When I think of autism I think of truly slow autistic people. Can you explain deeper? I’ve looked online but there’s a lot of wildly conflicting information.
In recent years we’ve come to the conclusion that autism is much broather than previously understood and than many more people fall om its’ spectrum. People that have an account on a platform like Lemmy are automatically highly probably autistic in some way because or the barrier to entry and specific interests that normal people wouldn’t even bother with.
I personally do not like the way that the world now tosses around autism like its a collectable, that started up with adhd and its only gotten worse, and then it started up again with autism.
I understanding the benefits of having labels for things but like, you absolutely don’t need to rush finding labels for things you experience when you can just do the things to improve your experiences that you know you need to do, and if you can’t do them this is just a sign that more focus on health habits are needed somewhere because sleep diet exercise is our bodys gas and oil that is absolutely vital to working efficiently so we don’t kill ourselves.
What exactly do you mean by the barrier to entry? Did I unknowingly pass an autism test by creating an account?
This is just my opinion. Lemmy doesn’t conform to many of the current standards of reduced friction for the user. Before joining you have to figure out that there are more than one servers that you could join and make a decision which one you want to be on and depending on your choice you have to take a mini interview and/or be approved by someone to join. After joining you probably either deal with an ugly page design that someone created like in the hi5/GeoCities days or you have to choose one of the milion apps that are available for it. While browsing you have to figure out that there are duplicate communities and figure out which ones you want to subscribe to and figure out what kind of sorting works best for you on your main page. And in order to discover more communities you go to All where you see a bunch of unhinges stuff that either you learn how to block or you ignore.
By the time you are having a seamless experience you have truly past the test of being somewhere on the spectrum, because no normal person will ever put up with all this, as could be seen with the user gain of mastodon vs bluesky after Twitter went to shit. The platform with less friction even though more closed and proprietary gained more users.
Christ… autism truly has no meaning whatsoever
this, plus also the fact that normal people wouldn’t even use social media if it wasn’t full of attention-grabs and addictive techniques.
Dang we had a pretty different experience. I only had to do email verification, if I had to do a mini interview I wouldn’t have made an account
So, you’re basically saying that doing things the way you think works the best and not being afraid of new things, instead of simply choosing the path of least resistance gets you on the autism spectrum? If that’s the case, then I think “normal” might be the biggest lie I’ve ever been told.
Think about your average Joe/Joanne. Are they someone who are willing to go against the status quo? Are they someone always ready to try new things? Are they someone not afraid to express themselves and be an actual individual?
That’s why it’s called normal because it’s the most widespread, but I agree with you, normal is not something I want in my life and that already puts me on a spectrum somewhere.
Sure. This guy was extraordinarily helpful for me.
social batterysocial spicy pillow
I’m wired wrong for most social interactions. It’s a serious problem, and my attempts to overcome it generally make it much worse. But “accepting myself” means accepting unemployment, and then how can I pay rent? (Currently unemployed and living with family).
However, I don’t think people’s social behavior is all BS. I try not to be resentful. I know there’s lots of BS, but I also know that’s what becomes most obvious to me, so it’s partly a matter of perception.
Mind elaborating on how you’re wired wrong? Genuinely curious to see which, if any, traits we share.
Sure. There are layers to it. If I socially interact for a few hours then I’ll become exhausted, probably cranky. A psychiatrist said I have ADHD, and the sensory input of multiple persons being around is too much. Social environments tend to be overwhelming. A psychologist said I have avoidant personality disorder, but I’m not sure I agree since my problem isn’t based on fear, the fear is downstream to basic social inabilities. But the fear does cause its own problems.
I also have a social phobia. I don’t think it’s genetic, since I didn’t have it as a kid. But my teenage years (11-18) were severely isolated, and full of humiliation and severe loneliness. I just never recovered from that. I spent my 20s trying to learn, forcing myself into all these social environments, but it was mostly just a torturous cycle of collapse.
I over-rely on my sense of humor, and this often causes problems. Most of the time it works really well (people like to laugh, and they appreciate a good joke), so I can make a very good first impression. But when it comes to “actual” social interaction, I simply have no idea what to say, like ever. I can negotiate well on other people’s behalf, and I’m good at explaining things, but in open-ended social situations I tend to be weirdly quiet or else I say horribly wrong things without realizing it. I’ve experienced multiple instances of people doing prolonged campaigns of social warfare against me because I accidentally insulted them, and they recognize my vulnerabilities. I’m terrible at reading non-verbal communication (this isn’t just a product of social anxiety or phobia… my brain just doesn’t pick up on these things, doesn’t know what to do with them). So basically I’m not a social creature. Some people actually have thought that I was mentally handicapped (or experiencing cognitive decline, or that I’m “on drugs”) because I just don’t respond like an intelligent person. But then I’ll go to “therapy” (what a disgusting joke) and they’ll see how well I can explain myself, and they’ll declare me to be fine. Clearly no problems with “communication” (but socializing isn’t just explaining things to a person).
I could go on and on, but that paints a picture.
damn you’re so damn similar to me.
i think that probably you’re right that too many assholes dictate social perception, and that is actually what causes you to lose all your friends and such. we live in very exceptional times where public narrative is dictated by grifters and “normies”, i.e. people who are programmed to work instead of chillax, and that is the historical exception, not the rule (just look at how the medieval times had an average 20 hour work week), and i think that’s what causes people to be so angry all the time :D
as a heads up, as i said, these circumstances are the exception not the rule, so they’re not gonna last forever, somehow :D
You probably did not say horribly wrong things, those people are likely just assholes.
The power-hungry ones that start campaigns of social warfare, yes. But they’re also very socially powerful and are able to dictate social outcomes and perceptions. Often they’re jealous that people like me, or that I’m performing very well at a job, and they see my social ineptness as an opportunity and a fun way to publicly demonstrate their superiority in some other arena. To them socializing is warfare. And it’s not enough to just call them assholes, because I’ve lost many friends, and it has severely limited my job prospects. I need a response that benefits me more. But I also can’t just keep throwing myself into that thresher. I’m still trying to think of the right approach. Because I’m ambitious and intelligent enough to want more than unemployment and isolation.
The important thing is to not give up, and it’s important to bear in mind that at least in my experience other than being social manipulators they’re quite uninspiring in many respects. That is also why they don’t like people who don’t fit - they are, by nature, disruptive to that state of affairs.
I think if you keep working the problem you will come to a good conclusion.
I need more than to just keep working the problem. I’m middle aged and living with family again, I’ve always been poor even though I excel at all my jobs and I have a degree. And there’s no such thing as a “conclusion,” except death, so what I’m working at is stable ongoing engagement in an arena where I can maintain that engagement. Still trying to think what that can look like. Thanks for the encouragement.
Interacting with people is like any other skill. If you don’t do it badly at first, you’ll never get to the point where you can do it well.
I was an isolator who got a job where I was dealing with everyone in a public health facility. By ‘everyone’ I mean everyone from doctors and police to homeless schizophrenics.
It was sink or swim, but I got the skills.
I was very social when I was younger. Worked retail jobs from 15-23. I didn’t have and technically still don’t have a problem talking to whoever, whether it’s a crackhead at the library or a prof at school. I just got to a point where I couldn’t handle the abuse from family, being betrayed by my ex of 7 years, serious health issue, and noone wanted to help me through it regardless of what kindness I showed them in the past. Really woke me up to people’s bullshit, smile to your face but consider you an annoyance when you’re down and out. Made me really reconsider what I wanted to spend my few years on earth doing. Putting up with people, or providing myself with peace and security.
Edit: what I’ve found about being a forgiving person is that you can forgive someone for 100 of their faults but when the last straw breaks the camels back, you are automatically an anti-social asshole because you have a limit to how much BS you can handle
Let’s break it down.
First, what kind of ‘peace and security’ are you going to have without other people? Even if you manage to amass a vast fortune, you’ll need some kind of caretakers.
Second, you act as if every single person you interact with is out to get you. You had a lousy family and apparently one adult relationship that floundered after 7 years. That sounds about average, tbh.
As for your health issues. Have you looked for support groups of people with the same problem?
I find a lot of peace in limiting my social interactions because a lot of people like to make assumptions and act like they know my life better than I do. In this world, money is directly correlated with security and being in healthcare I’m sure you already know the difference in quality of healthcare between someone with and without the means to afford it.
You’re exaggerating and putting words in my mouth that every single person I interact with is out to get me. I hope you aren’t in mental health with that kind of approach. I had and still have a lousy family. Are you making assumptions about my relationship history or did I tell you that I’ve only had 1 adult relationship?
I’m not looking for support groups, I was stating a part of why I lost a lot of faith in people.
Have a good night
I just got to a point where I couldn’t handle the abuse from family, being betrayed by my ex of 7 years, serious health issue, and noone wanted to help me through it regardless of what kindness I showed them in the past.
Have a good night.
