A picture of me

Or bars and cafes. I'm an absolute hound of places where people loosen up and start talking. Social circles don't have to be planned and managed through an app. On any given evening I know I can go somewhere to talk about politics, or about family, or about local happenings, and I'll know 80% of the people there and meet 20% new ones. There's absolutely no guarantee of having a unique high level conversation, but those do happen and inch by inch that's how we get to know each other, agree and disagree, and move forward in this huge experiment called life. The utter oversimplification of the occasionally stupid aspects of human interaction into something that someone cannot engage with is something I don't accept. A hundred or more years ago it would be the recipe for "Notes from Underground" or "The Stranger" - a capacious look at what happens to man if he retreats from society into his own brain, builds his own ideas on nothing. I'm a fan of man vs. society. I'd never want to tell anyone to be a member of society. But there's a new, special kind of alienation that comes along with all this message board posting. It's getting to hate your own kind before you really know them. It's what causes castout kids to pick up assault rifles and disregard human life. It's too easy; it's a lazy kind of hate. So yeah the kid's on the floor and spewing nonsense. It's our job, more or less, to pick him up and dust him off. It's hard to ignore because it's a real societal problem.

Now I only have the heart to treat the social goings-out like a hobby such as video games. I can't stand huge swathes of traditional video games except adventure ones; they frustrate me and send me to sleep irritated, and I don't want to drag myself back to them again for no real benefit day after day. I keep thinking that why should trying to make friends in a world not meant for me be any different? I'm generally happier now than when I hit my lowest lows from rejection by people that I thought I got along with for years until it was all over in the span of a few hours.

I firmly believe my only hope to find companionship is through the identification of mutual suffering in another autistic or schizoid individual, but that does not seem likely with how invisible I am on the internet and in public. Read all the posts about how communication online destroys everything and everyone, etc. (HN is not immune to this either.)

By the way: something that I've rarely seen people discuss is that this pathological inability to be interested in people extends to therapists as well. Therapists are people, too. I feel truly satisfied in life by telling my therapist over and over again how this companionship hobby never works out instead of trying to get better. I even explained this exact positive association to her face in the hopes that she would catch on. Her response: she couldn't help me, because she "was only human". I guess that means I require a superhuman to get through to me. In fact, by then I had already suspected as much. That was the moment I lost all hope in the profession.

From now on I'm more likely to think that someone that recommends me to go back into therapy after 11 years of failed attempts is some kind of delusional. I think I am just an incomprehensible person, genetically or otherwise. The therapeutic outcomes for psychopathy are widely pessimistic; why wouldn't the same apply to someone like me?

And I’m not about to express my interest to sun stranger on the Internet that I don’t have a biological or physical connection with. That’s not the connection I’m looking for.

And the fact that you think people who talk about football are stupid Is depressing. Football, to me, is stupid. But not the people. It’s not a value judgment to say you don’t like football it’s a value judgment to say people who like football are stupid.

How can I get this across to you. I work with people all the time. What I am saying is that they do not work with me. There is nothing I can do to change that and it is lonely. When I talk about the things I want to talk about after listening to them for hours I get strange looks and they change the conversation.

This does not happen with everyone, but it happens with the majority of people I meet. How does someone who sees the ultra violet spectrum of light share that experience to someone who does not?

For a white European I know I am neurologically genetically different than most. (Yes, I know my genetics). This has caused me to express a bipolar schizoaffective phenotype every know and them, but ordinarily it makes me different.

So even coming here of Hacker News, most every thing I say gets downvoted before people even ask me why I think the way I do. But you know, it is so easy to get up votes here, just submit a post about ADHD. ;) So like I said, I can meet people where they are, but I do no think people want to try to meet me where I am since they can just quickly find someone else like them in the world.