Advice to aspies too basic - anyone agree?

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Nonperson, it's THEIR society we live in. It's natural that there'll be conditions to be accepted. Let's face it, WE haven't created a self-sustaining society, and they have. Your employer, your doctor, your super-intendent, your teacher, your social security clerk, your judge, your constitution, your mechanic, your congressman, your gym instructor, your bank clerk - are most likely NT. We'd fare a lot better in their world if we were taught a bit more than how to fit the basic, laboratory-ideal situations.

Furthermore, the advice is also painfully lacking in how to relate to people in non-leisure situations. The vast majority of our human interactions is not "social" for the sake of sociability but to succeed in fulfilling a practical need, such as getting our TV repaired, our garbage collected, our test graded anew, our message across to our doctor for diagnosis, etc. There's zero advice out there for us on social relating for purposes other than the 2 typical ones: "making new friends" or "finding a girlfriend". As if you could go to a drive-thru Court with automatic verdict-dispensing machines. And as if once you graduate from college with friends and a girlfriend, your struggles in society are over. We're taught the basic, but not the crucial in human relating. Being left hanging half-way in the air like this can even be more detrimental than helpful.

Thought I should mention two sources of possible useful information for adult autistics:

1) Marc Segar's Autistic Survival Guide
http://www.autism-help.org/aspergers-guide-intro.htm
http://www.autismusundcomputer.de/marc2.en.html
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Autistic_Survival_Guide

2) Ian Ford: The Field Guide To Earthlings.
http://www.afieldguidetoearthlings.com/

At least they have been the two most outstanding sources of written help to me so far.

The reason I don't mention it much is because it often sets off some sort of discussion of status that ends up belonging in PPR, and that's if it's actually responded to at all. Posters generally don't want to read about that topic.



My theory is that if you're of that age, and you're posting on WP, you might not have been in an enviroment where that was as much of an issue. Or if you were, you spent so long in that enviroment where it blends together. I see/hear that alot when moving over generational lines.

Thank you for the idea. I've been reading from the web these last couple days about developing persuasiveness and empathy in Sales. It seems to be mostly about talking less and observing a lot instead, and asking "why" questions to learn what makes someone tick. I'm excited about it. I've created a folder with key ideas.

Ojani, I'm going to read your links now, thanks to you too.

AgentPipeline, I don't think I understood your comments. Could you explain a bit more? For example, power interplay in a family, say, or between neighbors...how could it belong in the PPR forum??

I might have found the reason why older autistics don't show much interest in relating their experiences, these are Marc Segar's own words (link above):

"I choose to write this book now and not later because I feel that the relevant mistakes and lessons of my life are still clear in my head."

AgentPipeline.....lol

If people actually care enough to respond, the most common response is to start off in a long drawn out rant of how power differences are wrong and the world is screwed up and (sometimes) that I'm not really an Aspie because I write these things.

That last part only happens every year or so.

That sort of thing is why I don't give out much advice when it comes to that issue.

You hit the nail on the head with that one. I'll be happy the month that two WPers move to be near other Aspies.

Sorry, AgentPalpatine, I should have double-checked your nickname! To be honest, I'm now laughing too!

I agree with the comments of you both, except as to forming a self-sustaining community, it depends on life sustainance resources and not on physical proximity. Eg: an aspie who has a translations service (internet-based, no need at all for real-life meetings), does not automatically seek to fill their openings with aspie translators around the world but will hire according to other priorities.

If your income comes from another aspie, your whole life changes. You suddenly don't have the life-or-death need to force yourself to fit in the NT society - not nearly as much as when your life depends on NTs. All the rest - friends, social frameworks, family - is secondary to basic needs of roof, food, medicine. At this point in history, the only aspies that don't need to fit in for survival are the very rich ones.

We should take this to one of the threads about Aspies livng near each other (currently front page of "General", or "(Urban) Aspie community, front page of "activism". I have some sort of interest in both

If I understand your point, and we're well beyond the OP's topic here, your arguement is that we want to have an Aspie-based economy, or "internal" economy as I've refered to it in the past. I agree in large part with you, but I think the easiest way to get there is with at least a small Aspie community, which could be as simple as a few small apartment/retail buildings near each other in an existing urban location.

Anyway, I'm well past OP's intent here.

Any minority, what to speak of any disabled group, could say the same. I CAN'T fit the basic, laboratory-ideal situations. Maybe you can learn to, in which case you are lucky, but most of us simply can't.

No, they don't deserve to have us contort ourselves into impossible shapes because "they built society". Indeed, they built it, for their own benefit and comfort, and we have no escape from it. Among people on the spectrum, you are extremely privileged if you are capable of learning to get along in it, and you should think twice before applying that expectation to the rest of us.
It is easier for them to accommodate us than for us to imitate them. If that is not true for you you have no disability and no need for a diagnosis.
It is also a society created and sustained overwhelmingly by people who can walk, and yet no one demands that people be denied wheelchair ramps for that reason. Well, no one except a complete jerk.

A self-sustaining farm would be the ideal, but I'm talking about things that could be done 1 minute from now by any aspie, and are not done by any one aspie. Because aspies don't really want a society of their own. Aspies suffer from the Woody Allen syndrome of not wanting to be accepted into groups that accept people like them.

Take for example the Jews, scattered all around the globe and still as strong a community as they come. They just have a very high awareness that integration is a carrot they'll never reach. Aspies may reach that awareness too in a few thousand years, and write their own Book of rules too. At this point in time, however, they're all busy learning NT "social skills".

One more factor is that we aspies don't enjoy lack of empathy, verbosity, lack of reciprocity, relating obliviousness, blunt observations of themselves, etc. in their friends any more than NTs do.

I respectfully disagree with the above. Wanting to be a part of something seems to be a common trait with most people. I draw the readers' attention to the social skills section, where people want to be a part of a group, but just arn't fitting in. Communication and information processing differences will cause that, and at some point, it's really "square peg into a round hole".

Do all Aspies want thier own society, I doubt it. I'm fairly sure that some members of PPR would be engaged in a cage match within 168 hours of arrival. Do some Aspies want a society, I believe they do.

As for the lack of empathy, verbosity, etc., how much of that is the result of not treating social conventions the same way? There is a reoccuring theme on these boards, and that's of not recieving reliable social feedback during development. If a young Aspie carried out a conversion discussing dinosaurs, and did'nt understand the non-verbal social cues of discouragement, well, that could lead development issues very quickly.

I personally would be willing to accept the risk that I might not like my neighbors, others may not.

For NTs, they typically learn the basics in elementary school and they just naturally figure out from there how to apply it more complex situations. I think when you get beyond the basics, it becomes extremely variable and the advice really needs to cater specifically to each individual aspie. For me, things are very complicated. I have skills and deficits ranging from very basic to very complex social skills due to the immersion experiance that I got in college. I went around picking up complex social stuff and not even having the basics down good. Hiearchy makes things very confusing.

This thread brings up a good point, and it's something that's been on my mind for a long time.