Are we responsible for being annoying?
No. Absolutely not! Unless of course you are consciously aware and are doing it with the intention to annoy.
For personal experience's, it seems that anything and everything can annoy someone. Even breathing can annoy people, I kid you not.
Ask yourself this, is it you? Are you doing something with the intention of winding someone up? Like saying something hurtful, harming someone, playing practical jokes at persons expense?
Or, is it them? This it there intolerance towards you? Is it because you are both very different people with a personality clash?
I think it depends on my mood. If I am just being myself and talking how I normally talk then no I don't think it's my fault. Other people can try to steer the conversation in another direction if they feel I am on the same topic to long or it's one they are just not interested in. I read almost all day long, so there is a lot I could talk about happily. On the other hand I have used my ability to read a whole lot about one subject to annoy people that annoyed me by talking about pop culture for so long I thought my head was going to explode.
This. And also, if you're consciously aware that you can take better steps in recognizing when your behavior could be problematic but don't, you're responsible for that as well.
In most cases no, in my opinion. People can get annoyed about something that is actually totally harmless, such as just being different, speaking with a different accent, being detail-oriented etc. Many people choose to be annoyed by you because they choose to interpret you negatively and want to punish you. Once people decide that you are an outcast, they will be annoyed by whatever you do, while they won't be annoyed if other people do the same thing.
Yes and no. People can be annoyed with anything. When I was a kid my stuttering annoyed kids and the way I talked. I could do nothing about it. But if I was sitting in my chair and I was doing something with an item in my hand and it's making noise and kids tell me to stop and I keep on doing it, I am responsible for it. But I have to wonder where do we draw the line for when we are responsible like what if someone is annoyed with our style of hair or what clothes we wear or what if someone is annoyed with us playing our video games during break? What about rocking or making sounds? What about loud coughing or throat clearing or sniffing?
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Son: Diagnosed w/anxiety and ADHD. Also academic delayed and ASD lv 1.
Daughter: NT, no diagnoses. Possibly OCD. Is very private about herself.
Strictly speaking, if we take away the annoying individual, the annoyance goes away.
But, it is incumbent on the other individual(s) who interacts with the annoying individual to help mitigate the annoyance. So long as individuals with ASD (or other disorders) decline to add themselves to the developing public face of autism, misconceptions like the annoyance schism will persist.
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Diagnosed in 2015 with ASD Level 1 by the University of Utah Health Care Autism Spectrum Disorder Clinic using the ADOS-2 Module 4 assessment instrument [11/30] -- Screened in 2014 with ASD by using the University of Cambridge Autism Research Centre AQ (Adult) [43/50]; EQ-60 for adults [11/80]; FQ [43/135]; SQ (Adult) [130/150] self-reported screening inventories -- Assessed since 1978 with an estimated IQ [≈145] by several clinicians -- Contact on WrongPlanet.net by private message (PM)
I think if one person is annoyed by the behaviour of another, then both people have a part it. It's one of those "it takes two" things, like offensiveness. There's the annoyer and the annoyee.
But the OP asked if the annoyer is responsible for the annoyance. That's the tricky part. Responsibility is a moral thing. If somebody says "you're responsible....." they're making a moral judgement, and moral judgements are difficult to objectively validate, to say the least.
If the annoyer is aware that they're annoying somebody, does that make them responsible for the annoyance? Not necessarily. If the annoyer isn't aware that they're annoying somebody, it's less likely that they could be reasonably held responsible, but it could always be argued that they "should" have been aware - ignorance of the law being no excuse and all that. On the other hand, ASDers are frequently genuinely unaware how they're coming over because they're frequently mind-blind, so I think that has to count for something, though if we let it count for too much, it opens the door for mischief, because ASDers aren't necessarily incapable of wrongly blaming their annoying behaviour on disability.
Much depends on one's idea of what morality is:
If you're a fundamentalist religious believer, then as far as you're concerned, morality is handed down from your deity, so your deity will hopefully have informed you about your responsibilities with regard to avoiding annoying people, usually via scripture or priests and prophets, though in practice opinion is often divided even within the same church, and scripture can be vague and contradictory.
If you're secular, you might take your lead from general consensus - the "everybody knows that's annoying so you should stop it" defense. But consensus is rarely if ever complete, and it can be argued that the consensus could be wrong. The other way is to define morality as "whatever rules are necessary for people to rub along together in peace and harmony." That's my preferred definition, but it can be very hard to apply in any particular case, because the necessary data often isn't available.
So I don't think we can know for sure whether in any particular instance a person is responsible for annoying somebody or not. I think all we can do is to engage in discussion and bargaining. If somebody complains to me that I'm annoying them, we can talk about it in the hope of working out a solution that's acceptable to both of us. Each party can state their case, one explains how the behaviour winds them up, the other explains the difficulty of changing the behaviour, and then they can have a good think about it and see if any bright ideas emerge that might resolve the situation. But I've noticed that very often people just go into competitive mode, in which case the only resolution will be based on who is the mightier of the two parties. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between co-operation and competition, but I think it can be done.
Summary: I don't know, and I don't think anybody else does either.

