Basic face to face etiquette lacking in a lot of NTs

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I would not be so hard on yourselves. A lot of NTs lack basic manners.

Half the time when you say a friendly hello to someone walking into work etc you get ignored. There really is no excuse for this.

It’s not always aspies with the problem. What is your experience with this??

I actually get accused of being too polite or too formal regularly. I was brought up with quite an old-fashioned (say WWII era), typically British sense of what my Grandparent's called "minding my P's and Q's". I always say please and thankyou to shop staff and bus drivers, never push into queues, always look first to make sure I'm not stepping into someone's path etc.

I think that old-style manners simplify things as an Aspie - the rules don't depend on context, you just show good manners to everyone by default. There seem to be autistic traits going back a couple of generations in my family, so maybe that ease of applying the rules contributes to it persisting in my family more than most other people around me.

It seems that as I've gotten older, these rules have become much more conditional, making it much harder to determine when they are deemed appropriate, hence I appear overly formal because I would far rather be too polite than not polite enough. I get really quite irate at people who treat shop staff, bus drivers etc. as if they are not there, or step out in front of people without looking - those things seem like they should just be common courtesy to me. It varies from place to place though, when I moved to Yorkshire, I quickly noticed that thanking bus drivers was far more common than when I lived further south, and it's still common here to see parents prompting their young children to do it.

I get tired of the "Hi, how are you?" crap. Like they really care. I don't have time for that. I'm also usually in my head thinking about what I'm going to be doing next and not really paying attention to anyone else. Sounds like what some Aspies have said.

I find most people to be rude. People are rude on the road, at the store, at church, and everywhere else in between.

I've noticed a significant decline in the social etiquette of NTs in general. From ghosting to randomly pulling out their phone in the middle of conversations, not because of an important message or text or to see who is calling them, but just because they are bored with the conversation and would rather look at social media or reply to a non urgent text from someone else.

I think social etiquette among the younger generations of NT has become quite horrendous actually. I suppose the question is, do their fellow peers feel this way? And I think they do because my brother, who is in his 20s, was complaining about this a while back. Additionally there was an article once that noted that the children of these individuals also dislike the level of social multitasking their parents often try to do. A parent should not act in a manner that makes their child feel second to their online activities.

Ironically, my neighbor, who is on the spectrum, has better social etiquette than most NTs these days.

I find people are intrusive when they don't need to be. Like if I'm lost in my thoughts and a stranger nearby says "cheer up!" I mean, they don't know what's going on in my life. Why do I have to go around smiling for? If people don't like it, then don't look at me! In fact, in my experience, me looking neutral attracts unwanted gazes, and me making eye contact and smiling at people makes them look away. But I'm always told "smile and the world smiles with you". That doesn't work for me. Smiling seems to isolate me. I really don't know what strangers want from me.

MagicKnight and Joe90, I hate when people tell me to smile. I find myself thinking, "Give me something to smile about then".

Upfront I'll say this will be a TL;DR, probably.

I think rudeness is a dominance thing. Look at your garden variety troll - it's not about the issue, whatever that may be; it's about being a jerk, in public, damaging someone and getting away with it. And the ramping up of hostilities if the target responds is just a continued effort to exert power over that target. The gang-type escalation, threats etc. is more of the same.

This might look like a recent development but I don't think it is. There have always been "outgroups" who could safely be treated with discourtesy in any particular culture - women, minorities, foreigners, the poor, the disabled - lately, though, the stain has spread, the discourtesy is no longer confined to the traditional targets, those targets are more visible, and they're belatedly being recognized as human and deserving of respect, and people are noticing.

At this point in my life, I automatically assume that a certain type of rudeness (calculated, defiant, sadistic, repeated and predictable) means the person is fundamentally a jerk, and a potentially dangerous one.

I just want to say that some of these NTs didn't know you had Aspergers. I didn't know anything about it and I went through nursing school. Maybe some of these people need to be cut some slack and given a chance to be educated.

I must say, a teacher who deals with children should know something about Aspergers. Speaking for myself, having been here for awhile, I have been able to notice signs in some of my adult patients where other nurses just thought the patient to be odd and later finding out the patient did have Aspergers. It's only because I have taken the time to learn some things.

A person doing the dominance thing only gets to do that once with me....after that, we are done.