Does Your Place of Residence Make a Difference in Your Life?

Post Reply New Topic

I didn't know which forum this topic belonged in, so I placed it in here.

I feel the regional culture affects how I am able to cope with life, especially in the social arena. For instance, my info sidebar loudly proclaims that I am a DC resident. DC is great for me as I am a student there, and it provides me with economic opportunities. However, everyone here is so cold and so self-interested that most NTs would probably be turned off. It's not a good climate to meet people in.

So what's it like where you live? Do you feel the culture there helps you in life, or hinders you?

I get on better with English people; they are more formal and polite, especially strangers. I orginally come from a very 'friendly' country, which isn't really, but you have to appear best pals with everyone, which is quite difficult if you have AS.

yeah id rather live in miami. DC people (especially girls) are weird and seem to have weird social hangups that are weird enough that an aspie like me even recognizes how antisocial they are. Girls from AU are the weirdest.

Yea it makes a BIG difference, although that doesn't necessarily mean that difference is for better or worse. Where I am now is super boring, but life is very simple and straightforward, which makes things easier for me.

I want to move back to Seattle so bad. I know life is way harder and more hectic there, and the people aren't very cool there in general, but I love the city so much and I have all the friends I need there. Sigh, two and a half years to go...

I live in San Jose, Ca, which is considered to be the "capital of Silicon Valley." I love it here. To be frank a lot of nerds live and work in this area because this is where many of the big computer/internet companies are. I can't count how many times I have ridden my bike past eBay or Apple, or gone to the movie theater by Yahoo.

Because of that, there seem to be a lot of people here who have autism or autistic tendencies because we are the kind of people who do well in "silicon valley" jobs. In turn there are a lot of resources and educational services. I personally work at a school that is specifically for children with special educational needs that the public school system isn't equipped for.

Other than that the atmosphere is generally laid back here. San Jose is bigger than, say, San Francisco, but it isn't nearly as bustling. People are friendly and accepting but at the same time there's not too much pressure to be social or keep up appearances.

There is a lot of comfort in knowing that I can keep to myself without anyone batting an eye. Or that if i do want to go out and be social, there are people just like me with my same nerdy interests and awkward mannerisms.

Lastly the location is excellent. SF is about 45 minutes north and Santa Cruz (a beautiful hippie college town) is about half an hour south. Great campsites and ocean are directly west. The whole of silicon valley is surrounded by beautiful mountains, hills, and forests.

Las Vegas is great if you never want to meet people. Everyone here keeps to themselves, mainly because half of them are tourists or recently transplanted. So you don't have to worry about making eye contact with random people on the street, in fact in some parts of town that'd get you shot.

Yes, i've noticed that location makes a differance. I live on a military base in the south... and that has it's upsides and downsides. I was in the reserves back in Phoenix which was kind of cool because my usefullness outweighed my akwardness. I'm not in the military now, my husband is. He joined a differant branch of the military that's more family orriented I guess. I've been told that my ability to fit in (or lack there of) can impact my husband's career, which can be agrivating at times (especially because when I was in the military my personal life was never factored in so it's strange to me). The upside and downside to being here is that there's alot of "mandatory fun" where I have to go to my husband's work parties which is nice because it gets me out of the house but sucks because I find it hard to relate to people here and being in a crowded room where I only know one person is overwhelming. The structure here is nice but at the same time alot of times things change at the last minute or things are uncertain (like deployment dates and lenghts). The envirnonment here is very small town and community orriented. It's kind of the worst of both worlds... you get the crowds like you would have in the city and at the same time you bump into the same strangers over and over again like you would in a small town. It's weird to me either way. The vast majority of people here have children and I don't which adds to the akwardness at times because most of the other "wives" only want to talk about their kids and most of the "husbands" only want to talk about the military (which i'd rather talk about but i've been informed that it's innapropriate for wives to make friends with soldiers because "people spread rumors"). Either way, it's challenging because the people that i'm "allowed" to be friends with don't share any of my interests. One place i've found here that I do enjoy though is the Dog Park because there it's normal to talk about dogs and only dogs and to ramble on about dogs (and I like dogs so that works for me). And i've noticed that the day of the week and the time have a big impact on how many people are at the dog park (for instance there are usually alot of people there on the weekends, a moderate amount of people there durring the week after 5, and very rarely people there durring the week before 5... so that predictablity is kinda cool).

Interesting topic. I think I prefer self-interested city and/or suburb people to a really small town though. I wouldn't be able to cope in someplace as crowded as DC though, I don't think.

Well, I have only lived in the midwest US, and the southeast US. Specifically, Oklahoma for the 1st half of my life, South Carolina for the last. The large towns I spent most time living in, in both states, are about the same population size. However everything here seems so much more crowded. More traffic, more crowds in shops, etc. I guess because in OK there were vast stretches of empty land between towns/cities, whereas here its mostly all filled in with suburbs. Life has been more difficult since I moved but that's due to being a married, working adult vs. college kid. Where I live now, is much prettier and nicer, and in general people seem more well-off, but there aren't an especially large number of job prospects in aspie-ish careers in either location I've lived. One thing I could say about where I lived in OK, was it had better medical care - better hospitals, more doctors to choose from. Its been really hard here to find good medical doctors for me and my family, let alone anyone I'd trust to diagnose ASDs.

I lived in a smaller town once, for about a year, and hated it, because I was always running into people I knew from work while on weekend errands, which was usually awkward. That and the gossip. >.<

Also for a year or two when I was little my family lived literally out in the middle of nowhere. No neighbors, just wilderness. It was kind of nice, except for the long trips to and from school.

From my limited experience, isolation is good but if I have to be surrounded by people, maybe its better if there are lots them.