Artificiality = biggest difference between Aspies and NTs?

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I guess the fact is that it is really psychological warfare out there. Sometimes I feel like I am not having a conversation, but performing delicate microsurgery, or trying to diffuse a bomb, or landmine.

I think there is a lot of aggression in society and being an NT doesnt protect you as much from this as we think. I think the hard part is dealing with all this aggression, and artifice doesnt necessarily do that.

I am saying this because I just had a very polite, sugarcoated, civilised fight, with another aspie. It was even weirder than if it had happened with an NT. The thing is that real emotions and real relationships are involved here, and those are hard, whoever is involved. I know of aspies who have had terrible fights and are no longer friends.

So I think NTs are just trying their best, but really they dont know how to truly deal with conflict any better than we do. They just know how to avoid it, and how to appease others.

Since we need to learn and practice the non-verbal communication that comes naturally and spontaneously to others, I suspect we'd be the ones more apt to feel like we're being phony.
But at least our self-consciousness might assist us in avoiding being truly phony.

While I find the concept interesting... I think that, in my mind, it is more an art of indirection when observing others - or at least I am missing part of the conversation. When I have to interact with people, I find my own responses highly artificial. Everything is a construct, something designed from a combination of experience and expression. When observing others, it seems to be more misdirection, a multi-leveled process that doesn't move on a straight line. Just my two cents.


M.

I'm so crappy at small-talk. Occasionally I might mention the weather, but it feels stupidand I wonder why I can't come up with something better to talk about. I'm not interested in other people's personal lives and it feels 'invasive' on my part to inquire about such things (not to mention, pointless, because I don't really care). Small-talk and schmoozing is what NTs do when people are standing around, looking at each other. They're trying to 'fill' the silence with shallow/meaningless repartee. Apparently NTs can't stand silence. Yes, small talk is an artifice, for the reason I just mentioned - to fill an empty space. There's simply no need for it. I only talk to other people (in person) when there's a substantive reason for it.

I think that for NTs, society is a chessboard and people are pieces to be played, with the goal of personal advancement. It's the normal way. In the family, at work, at school, in the street, in friendship. Depending on how they play (aka manipulate) their relationships, they'll advance or not. Eg: so called white lies not to offend, showing interest and caressing egos, going on holiday to the place in fashion in order to be "in" with a certain group, etc. etc. These are the behaviours I call artificial.

It' s difficult to say exactly what the difference is without knowing what NTs experience. Would be willing to bet there would not be many responses of "well, I enjoy sort of a hive-mind-like understanding of other people".

I know that, as a child, I learned to be very silent and introverted at an early age after apparently stressful distinction/separation from others as early as nursery school. I was too young to analyze it at the time, I really did not know what was going on. But I was never part of the group. For me, as best I could explain it, beginning with prekindergarten, I thought of it as people who knew how to join vs people who didn't. For me, that was the difference: a basic lack of instinct for group dynamics.

One on one connections never bothered me until I developed social anxiety/confidence issues from all the meanness. And I believe that lack of instinct can be overcome pretty well by observation and eventual understanding of rules. In an attempt to overcome social anxiety and make up for my natural "shortcomings", as an adult, I have actually become pretty adept at dealing with strangers, acquaintances, even large groups of people at once. But this will never feel one-hundred-percent completely natural.

One thing I have always been told was that a lot of my deficits came from being an only child. My ex-husband even said my lack of empathy was "only child syndrome". I have been hit in the face with numerous balls, and tend to trip over my (small) feet for no apparent reason. People laugh when I say things that I don't intend to be funny. Sometimes they tell me to "spit it out". I obsess over weird things. When I was about 10 or 11, I wanted to get cancer so I could learn about it from the inside out. But - while I think AS really is a constellation of phenotypes, I too wonder if there is one baseline trait, rule or difference. I think it may be our way to try and decipher it. unfortunately, it took me about 5 paragraphs to realize I am at a total loss for any explanation. I don't think it can be reduced to "artificiality".

Good news, though, coming from my 30-something years of experience: a lot of adults, even NTs, appreciate honesty and intelligence, and I'm finding that I can peel away a lot of the callouses and be myself again.

If people are shallow, selfish and insensitive it's not because they're NTs, it's because they live in a society that hardens them.

As far as I can tell the difference between people on the spectrum and people who are not is that the latter filter things (information, sensory inputs (all six included), interaction, toxins) in roughly the same way, whereas people on the spectrum filter things differently. Not all the same, not to the same degree, not always in a debilitating way (or to a debilitating degree), but differently than the norm.