How about we brainstorm better ways to socialize

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Small talk isn't great but it's a way to start a better conversation. What other, more autism-friendly methods could a person try to make friends or start a conversation, ways that have a good chance of not alienating everyone? (It's inevitable that some people will be alienated.)

I would like less focus on fitting in and more focus on alternative ways to socialize.

The best thing that helped me was being myself and socializing more.

What I am doing with my daughter is teaching her "active listening" and "actively observing".

Since picking up social cues, timing and context don't come naturally to many on the spectrum then the next best thing is learning to i) listen carefully to content, intonation and volume/pitch in speech and template ii) connect this to body language and iii) facial expression.

NT socialising is like choreographed dancing and singing where the performer must control their voice, the content of the song and move their body to the music while either dancing with a partner and/or facing an audience and calculating when to display their emotions through their facial expression/posing and of course eye movement.

I have heard the argument about impaired mirror nuerons etc. but what I am suggesting is just using schemas or templates/scripts for situations as they arise and practice as often as possible so that you simply get better with time.

The crucial/underlying requirement here is putting yourself out there and practice/try try again till you perfect the art.

That is really hard question, especially since we are not a homogeneous group. In some sense, I would like to blend in with our NT brothers and sisters. In another, I would like to simply operate without that limitation.

In my case, fitting in doesn't much interest me. I do it when I have to just so I don't end up being hated by people I can't easily get away from. The mainstream social system comes across as shallow and pointless to me. There might be more in it than I can see, but until I've seen the virtue in it, I don't really want to join in with it.

Frankly I think there are better ways of interacting with people than those ways that society in general follows. I prefer it when people don't fake anything, so if they give you a compliment it's because they really like something about you. I also prefer in-depth conversations to the more common glib exchanges where the subject has moved on before I've had the chance to think it through. And let's get away from pecking orders, leaders and bullies. I also have a high regard for the notion that a group needs a genuine, common purpose if it's to survive and have any value. It doesn't have to be a particularly serious purpose as long as it's shared. I always think of Huckleberry Finn as a character who had a good intuitive grasp of what socialising should be about, surrounded as they were by hypocrites who didn't have a clue.

This is basically what I do to socialize. It's very helpful, but I'll admit it can also be exhausting and distracting (since I'm bad at prioritizing what I should be observing in a situation).

What does make it easy is that I'm good at picking up on patterns, and can eventually throw together tone, facial expression, etc. into a "pattern" I recognize that correlates to an emotion or some other social concept.

My best ploy was to do interesting things, and talk to the people who wanted to meet me.

Yes this is useful for parents to know that you can exhaust/bore a child by getting them to practice too much. I will probably never know how difficult it is to imitate/mirror social behaviour/communication that came naturally to me. It's the arrogance of NTs to assume its easy.

It's an interesting point about analysing patterns. For my daughter (and probably others on the spectrum) her motivation is the biggest factor in analysing anything. If she is interested in something she does it well. NTs refer to these as obsessions but I am beginning to see these are also strengths,

I think of them more as distant cousins.

How about your parents?

Pretty much agree. I can't remember my early childhood but by the time my age got into double digits the size of groups I wanted to fit into began shrinking and shrinking. Now I want to fit into my marriage, to some extent into my family (siblings, etc.), sort of with a few folk...and beyond that I'm beginning to think I'm most comfortable practicing avoidance or disinterest or passivity or infiltration.

And pretty much, the rest of ToughDiamond's post sounds good to me.

Some wiseguy on this website keeps saying things like "To gain people's interest, you must first become interesting".

Frankly, I don't find most people compellingly interesting enough to want to socialize them. The triteness, the pleasantries, the "we both really don't find the other that interesting but are socially compelled to do a little dance to pass the time as if we matter to the other." Oh and the likeliness that whatever is discussed will just be rehashed in a mocking way when they are with their actual friends. My god who wants to live a life like this! It is SO draining! I would say I have somewhat of a sixth sense in reading a person's receptivity to me from a moderate distance, and if I don't get a good feel that this person is a my kind of fellow oddball person I am just NOT interested in the whole song and dance "how are you" "great weather" blah blah blah blah blah. According to Dale Carnegie it is as simple as just asking the person questions about themselves and talking about things that interest them. But when it comes to most people, what interests them is highly banal and I don't really know if I care that deeply to get to know them better...

PS - I was just doing stuff that seemed sensible to me. Others decided it was interesting. Since I have trouble with sleeping and diet, I made my tiny car a "home away from home" with all the things it lacked the last time I lived in a car. Now I'm getting bugged to document it extensively. Not really a new friendship yet, but the publicity may turn up someone.

When I try to do small talk it often backfires on me. Probably because I just say things that I've heard elsewhere, and often it comes out as really inane and dumb. So then the most interesting people decide I'm an air-head and want nothing to do with me.
Seems like the best way is just to be myself, forget the smalltalk and not worry about making NTs comfortable - trusting that the best of them will seek to understand, or at least not be completely put off by my oddity.

Yes. I read that Carnegie book a long time ago, during a phase when I was feeling my circle of friends was falling to zero and so I was studying psychology in the hope of fixing it (decades before I was diagnosed). I remember getting to the end of the book and thinking that his ideas were all very well but that really I wasn't interested enough n the trivial details of other people's existence to follow his instructions. There's a bit in the book that strikes me as ridiculous - first he explains how to deliberately feed people's ego by looking as if you really dig them and are fascinated with what they had for breakfast, then he says "be genuine." Nothing genuine about it, he'd just basically applied salesmanship tricks to the art of friendship. Maybe a better title would have been "How To Fake Friends And Influence People." I'm very thankful that real people, even mainstream NTs, don't quite fit his model, and that in truth most folks want a bit of genuine in their relations with others. I wish it was a lot more, and in some people it is, but I think it's a rare person whose social life is nothing but schmooze.