I don't understand the way people interact

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Why do people insist that they know what other people are thinking? I'm always shocked when people tell me why I've done something and it has nothing to do with my actual motivations.

Complete stranger accused me of being sarcastic online (where no tone of voice is observable) when I wasn't being sarcastic. My ex-girlfriend, out of the blue, accused me of thinking about someone else while we had sex. And on and on.

It's like people are constantly digging for other people's motivations in their own mind instead of asking the people they're thinking about.

They must know that they can't read minds. They're not all stupid and they're not all trolls (are they?) I don't get it. It's tiring and anxiety-provoking, and I don't know how to prevent it, foresee it, or dodge it except to avoid people. And I never get over it; it always upsets me. It destroys the conversation.

Why even talk to other people if you're just going to tell them what they're thinking and refuse to believe them when they correct you?

"theory of mind".
They wish to know what other people are thinking, and the only way they can do that (aside from, i don't know, asking) is by thinking "what would i be thinking", and assuming that the other person has the same motivations.

this 'problem' persists in two ways, where the motivation an aspie would assume for an NT is far from the actual one.

Heh. My mum in particular has allotted me various motivations which are a) wrong and b) unkind in her assessment of me. It's very hurtful - for some unknown reason she seems to think little of me.

In my experience people want to tell you how you feel or the reason you're motivated or etc is because they either want to prove their superiority in their ability to read someone despite our insistence to the contrary, they believe they know better than us since we clearly don't know our own minds or they are passing their own issues onto someone else and it's easier to deal with if it's another person that's wrong and not themselves.