Why are special intrests such a bad thing?

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Espicaly if it is something innocent such as a certian animal species? My meerkat special intrest was the one that people gave me the most trouble about until Meerkat Manor came out. I hate Meerkat Manor! It made it okay to like meerkats and I can no longer tell if anyone is truely loves them like I do or if they are just pretending to because it's the "it" thing right now. Anyway before meerkats, I had other special intrests such as Lion King and people harassed me about it too. What is so wrong about a special intrest? Sure that's all I think about but who said that is their buisness? If people don't like hearing about them all the time, why don't they just get up and leave and go find someone "fun" to hang out with. There were people who did not want me to even think about meerkats let alone talk about them. It's no one's buisness what I think about and I can think about whatever the hell I want. Meerkats make me so happy why did they want to take that away?

There's nothing wrong with special interests, just with the people who think there's something wrong with them. Though I would suggest not talking about your interests all the time when you're around people you know don't want to hear about them. Whether they're wrong or not, they're still going to get mad at you & behave negatively toward you if you keep talking about things they want to hear about. I know how hard it is to not have anyone to talk to about your special interest (I have no one, myself), but sometimes you have to be careful of who you talk about it too.

I don't think that there's anything wrong with having special interests, personally. There seems to be a stigma that comes with having special interests. My mum wasn't crazy about me listening to The Kinks, until a "friend" of mine admitted me into the emergency ward at the hospital, for being obsessed with them. Now my mum just leaves me alone to listen to them on YouTube and to come to her place, dressed the way that Mick Avory did in 65-66. It's amazing how the stupidity of a fake friend, told in third person to my mum, will help her to change her tune, about my special interest.

I don't think that there is anything wrong with them, you just have to make sure you balance that with the stuff you have to do (fun, I know )

There's nothing wrong. You could end up being meerkat specialist, world-renowned for understanding meerkat behavior, health, and care. You could be the expert all the preservation societies and zoos bring onboard as a paid consultant for advice. And why would that be a negative thing????

I think Nan is right. You could turn your interest of meerkats into a career.
I used to like meerkats while I had an obsession with The Lion King. I remember that when I visited the zoo all I wanted to see were the meerkats. Meerkat Manor is lame.

There's nothing wrong with having special interests, unless you obsess about it to other people who may not have the same ones. Then you may come off as being in your own little world with just you and your meerkats. You live in the real world whether you like it or not, which is probably a world where there aren't many meerkats.

Living in the here & now is crucial when it comes to dealing with other people. You can talk about what you like, but don't do it so much it squeezes everyone else out.

I never really seen what's wrong with special interests. People have tried to get me off SpongeBob for a while. But the world can be very stressful, and I need something to calm me down, so really they'd be taking away something that calms us down when stressed.

There isn't anything WRONG with them in my opinion, they can be turned into succesful careers. And they're a fun way to pass the time. And it's good to have something to be passionate about and also they're useful when someone needs information on that subject.

The only thing negative about them as it were is that they can annoy people, I know mine do/did, but I don't give a s**t muahaha they'll just have to put up with me

There's nothing wrong with special interests; they aren't even exclusive to those on the spectrum.

I think what you're doing is seeing people's negative reactions to how you present your interests and interpreting that to mean they think having an interest is bad. I understand perfectly what it's like to have an interest, and how fun discussing that interest is, but I still wouldn't want to hang out with you if all you did was talk about meerkats. It's nothing personal, it's just that I don't care enough about them to carry on a conversation about them, much less multiple conversations.

If I didn't know about special interests and I knew someone who constantly talked about meerkats, I'd think they were off their rocker. It's a perfectly understandable reaction. However, if I knew someone who learned as much about meerkats as they could and loved to talk about them, but didn't turn every attempt at conversation into a meerkat discussion, I would be impressed by their knowledge and passion.

For example, I'm currently obsessed with Pokémon. Do I talk about it to anyone and everyone? No, I find the appropriate place to talk about it. I've even told some of my friends about it, and they didn't react like it was a bad thing because of the way I presented it.

I'm not singling out your interest, what I said holds true for any subject. I just didn't see the point in thinking up another example when you had already given one.

There was a time, when I was 14, when my mum thought that it was unhealthy that I wanted to stay in my bedroom and listen to The Beatles, all day long. I'm not sick, I'm autistic.

[quote="CockneyRebel"]I don't think that there's anything wrong with having special interests, personally. There seems to be a stigma that comes with having special interests. My mum wasn't crazy about me listening to The Kinks, until a "friend" of mine admitted me into the emergency ward at the hospital, for being obsessed with them. quote]

You've got to be kidding. What happened? Did the hospital people think you were loco?

Especially interesting special interest especially interesting topic

Right now I have honed an interest in Genealogy. I am doing a family tree, and I will be getting the Family Tree Maker software in order to organize it as a useful file for my decendents and a hard copy to put in a shoebox for them to find. They might just be sick of me after reading.

I am also tring to find my own Autsource. getting closer to the origins of my Aspergers, and will be filing a detailed analysis for my decendents--I hope this will help them to understand Autism better.

Eh probably not a bad thing, though people have told me all my life stuff like "Nobody wants to talk about computers all the time!" and "Why do you always talk about computers?" or even told me to stop talking to them overall.

The way it seems to work for me is I have had the long term (pretty much life-time so far) interest in computers, then I'll usually have something that I'll obsess about for a few days or weeks. At the moment, it's asperger's/autism, mostly because I've been trying to figure out if I have it for the past few months. I often talk about it on IMs and stuff to people a lot, though I'm old enough to realize that people don't like to talk about something as random as autism very much if at all, so I try to keep it under control. This place has actually made it worse, because you all so openly discuss it, and I'm just used to it, now. :p

Previous interests were products that I've bought (mostly electronics) and thought were cool and would try to learn everything I could possibly learn about them, and talk about ... probably way too much, or this game called Blockland that I used to play a LOT, though now I mostly just sit idle in my server. I figure I'll get back in to it eventually but for a few months it was all I did. There was also this game creation thing called Megazeux, which was all I did in my spare time, mostly messing around in the editor, for several years (this was when I didn't have internet, so it wasn't quite as easy to get new things.). Of course, Pokemon, but who wasn't obsessed with that, right? Other than that, I'd usually get obsessed with TV shows and movies and video games I liked at the time, but I guess that's common for children? People did occasionally complain about it to me, though, looking back.