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.

> 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.

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.

I think I've made the case above that it's not merely about "being neurotypical", it's also about being steeped in a very specific culture. That peculiar use of "why did you apply" might as well be described as an idiomatic expression, a play on words that happens to be common in that well-defined context. If you aren't familiar with that usage because you are from a different cultural context (or even something as simple as a different "low-class" socio-economic stratum in the same society), you might misunderstand the question in the exact same way - or perhaps you'll grok it but you'll still be bothered by the implied "dishonesty" in it and be inclined to subvert expectations by starting with a straight and to the point answer, and then getting into the actual topic of why you think you were right to apply.

My point isn't that neurotypical people will always be familiar with whatever idioms they encounter, but that learning those idioms is way easier for them. It seems like you're misunderstanding what I'm saying as the struggles of not understanding specific things as being specific to autistic people, and that's not the case; I'm saying that while neurotypical people might have to deal with specific cases of idioms or figures of speech, autistic people will often struggle with the meta-problem of struggling with idioms or figures of speech as an entire category rather than with not being familiar with individual ones. I don't just struggle with understanding language like that when dealing with people who come from a different background than me; I struggle to understand language like that when talking to my parents and my brothers and my wife, despite having talked with them more than anyone else in my life. That's not something that most people would struggle with, but it's something that I suspect a lot of autistic people would relate to.

As someone having experienced (and of course still experiencing) similar struggles as a person with ADHD, the Heureka moment for me was realizing that the difference is I'm overthinking it. In quite a lot of the situations, there's no right answer people are looking for. There's no strict protocol, people just say whatever random stuff that comes into their mind and it might not even be related to what the other person said, then the other person builds on from there or says their own random stuff. Sometimes they strike a chord, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they end up saying the completely wrong thing and then they may or may not attempt to correct the situation. Trying to attribute a system to it is mostly just my own desire for order that probably doesn't exist. Like most things in life, the system is so complex that it might as well be random in some aspects.

"Overthinking" stuff is good for you actually. It's just a phase of learning any sort of skill: 1. Unconscious incompetence 2. Conscious incompetence 3. Conscious competence 4. Unconscious competence. Step 4 is where you get rid of the "overthinking" bit.

For sure, zero disagreement there! Just pointing out my personal observation that most people seem to not really do that.

In myself, overthinking is a quality I value very highly in some situations while also being one of the highest contributors to personal misery in other situations. In the net though, definitely a keeper.

As you say, it leads you down a path. Often at the beginning there is pain, such as being painfully self-conscious. At the end of the path is often self-development though.

Actually I have a completelly opposite experience. Being among people, that I do not understand and where I am foreign is the best state for me to exist so far - it makes those people to adapt to me. I start to get communication issues, when they decide that I am no more foreign to them and that I should now adapt to their silly ceremonial behaviours, which I am very fully aware that I am not going to do.

>>> I struggle to understand language like that when talking to my parents and my brothers and my wife, despite having talked with them more than anyone else in my life. That's not something that most people would struggle with, but it's something that I suspect a lot of autistic people would relate to.

Exactly - I have never fought more battles to dominate than with my relatives. And to be fair the cases where I was getting along was when I fully subjugated to their will.

It doesn't seem plausible to me that "why did you apply" is like an idiomatic expression. Where would it come up outside of a job interview? Are you saying that a non-autist would not get it in the first couple interviews as a young person then pick it up?

From the comments I read, you just like rest of bunch are going in the wrong direction by thinking that you have to learn something from others, which logically in your argumentation point to a deficit compared to others, which is very wrong direction. Quite the opposite - autistic people are capable to learn behavior to adapt to others and many are very good at that, but NT would struggle to achieve talent levels of autistic people - they simply have no ability to learn to achieve that level. Also, you seem to be missing the main issue here - autistic people have issues not only understanding NT, but there are more issues understanding other autistic people at which autistic people seem to fail spectacularly(also for the logical flow reasons, the previous sentence would not have sounded as good, but exactly the same struggles for NT are affecting other autistic people achieving talents of other people they can't achieve). The harassment that I am receiving from NT people is rarer than what I would receive from autistic people and I can assure you that by classifying harassment that I would receive, autistic people would pretty much fall under the cathegory of plain stupid at that and I would think that the same observation would be from other autistic people towards me, pretty much because they are trying to limit their responses to what they know or have been thaught without thinking outside of the box on their own.

The issue with communication is not that it is something that is unique to humans, but it is how all the animals are functioning. Other animals are more specialized and their brains are attuned to that specialized behaviour. Autistic peacock that would not understand the requirement for flashy tail would essentially have change in brains that would make it a different peacock species. There are even more trivial differences - fishes that specialize in eating different foods would evolve into different species that would not crossbreed(mostly because they would also evolve different mating rituals). However with humans it is different - while we do not differ on genetical level to be classified as different species, the difference in cultural norms and ceremonial behaviour would make us different species but we can shift and adapt to different cultural environments, so this is something that does not effect us so much, though it still occupies a very large space in our brains.

Anyway, if we are returning to the topic of job interviews, then it has nothing to do with answering the questions correctly - the issue is mainly how would you get along(at least that is what I can extrapolate from successful interviews being in both sides of table). That also applies to other communication fields - generally my understanding with communication failures with other people has come to conclusion that we would not be getting along anyway and the tolerance level from me is not so high and subconciously or even consciously I was the one that was showing disrespect to other person. And that applies to communication between autistic people even more. There is no need to learn answers to these questions at all - if you want to get that route, you are going to set yourself for a failure, because learning questions and how to behave changes rapidly not only among differnt cultures(in a global village that is impossible task), but also among generations... and in the end you need to grow your own backbone, because adapting to virtue signaling(which basically is what society consists) is not how it is done, as you can't run across savanna in a zebra flock avoiding lions all your life. At the end you want for other people to adapt to you or at least acknowledge from hyenas that you are an elephant that wants to eat grass and enjoy the company of other elephants. And at the end we are humans and humans even more than other species want to change environment around us - if you are trying to adapt only, including to other humans, this is going to be a constant failure. Then again, this might not apply to everyone - my struggles are trying to dominate over other people obviously and I have not even decided if that is really something I require.