Feel Threatened When Others Know More About Special Interest

Page 1 of 1 [ 5 posts ] 

Signal
Emu Egg
Emu Egg

Joined: 16 Apr 2020
Gender: Non-binary
Posts: 1

12 Mar 2023, 2:06 am

Sorry for the long title. I searched for a duplicate thread but didn't see one. I hope this is okay to post here.

I was wondering how others dealt with the feeling of 'threat' that arises when others know more about your special interest than you do.

I would not necessarily call myself "possessive" of my interests, as in, I enjoy when others share them, because I am then able to talk about them. But I find myself having unnecessarily strong upset reactions when someone points out a fact that I didn't know, or translates something from the interest in a more skillful way that I did. I understand that these emotional reactions are unreasonable, but I am not sure how to lessen them. I do not enjoy feeling a burst of anxiety and despair in reaction to something objectively very unimportant. It is like by them knowing more about something that I have fixatedly involved myself in, I am "not doing enough" or "being a failure", regardless of how unreasonable these feelings are.

Do others experience this? Is this something that others know a method of dealing with?



Edna3362
Veteran
Veteran

User avatar

Joined: 29 Oct 2011
Gender: Female
Posts: 11,477
Location: ᜆᜄᜎᜓᜄ᜔

12 Mar 2023, 2:58 am

Not me.

Instead, I'd bug the crap out of them until I basically push their knowledge into an edge, and squeeze everything out of the person who knew more than me.

They'd either be excited for a while until they hit a wall, or exhaust themselves or some other limitation they have at the moment like time.


_________________
Gained Number Post Count (1).
Lose Time (n).

Lose more time here - Updates at least once a week.


Dengashinobi
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 15 Dec 2022
Age: 34
Gender: Male
Posts: 598

12 Mar 2023, 2:59 am

Usually the ones that overtake me on my special interests are fellow aspies. Yes I feel upset, I will admit. But at the same time I feel like congratulating the other person. I kinda feel good about them, because I get a feeling of familiarity. But I think that most people don't like to be proven wrong or corrected. I think that we aspies do that a lot to people. When another aspie does that to me It's just a taste of what I do to others.



Dengashinobi
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 15 Dec 2022
Age: 34
Gender: Male
Posts: 598

12 Mar 2023, 3:09 am

Edna3362 wrote:
Not me.

Instead, I'd bug the crap out of them until I basically push their knowledge into an edge, and squeeze everything out of the person who knew more than me.

They'd either be excited for a while until they hit a wall, or exhaust themselves or some other limitation they have at the moment like time.


That's basically what some people do here at WP. :? Not cool at all.



Mountain Goat
Veteran
Veteran

Joined: 13 May 2019
Gender: Male
Posts: 14,202
Location: .

12 Mar 2023, 3:34 am

I understand this as I sometimes feel the same on model railway sites and my response is that I found my very own specialist avenue within the hobby in which very few others do in the way that I do it. (I can only think of a small handful of others who do, but none of them have my exact style.... Moztly because I make one or two parts myself to my own design rather than buy them which makes my trains unique! I also hand paint mine by brush where most spray paint theirs. Another difference is (Though some go down this route) is that I do not make exact copies of any prototype, and if they are copies (If they start out as kits of a prototype) I change them so they become my own.
Doing this means I have my own things which no one else has and no one can claim they know more about them than me.
My Mum is in a hillarious position as one of her main hobbies is writing, and she is an author, but she looked up her book which was on wiki and they had it wrong, so she chaged it, and someone changed it back and it says that she wrote a series of books on psycology or anothef science based medical subject which an american lady that shares her first and last names wrote and she can't correct it. (My Mum also has a middle name to prove she only wrote her books, but wiki is a bit strange in not accepting corrections from the authors.
One lady she heard about had someone write a summery of her own books and got the characters completely messed up, and she corrected them on wiki and was told "She did not havr the athority to do so because she had not studied the book, and the one who wfote it had a degree based upon the study of her book! They will not accept that she was the author as an athority of this ladies book so refuse to correct it for her either! (What is wiki doing? Don't they know that the author is the one who knows what they wrote and why they wrote it more than one who reads and studies it?)

But yes, my advice is to learn your own unique aspects in the hobby and specialize in them, as when one matures in ones interests, one will begin to do ones own thing and not copy others so much, as within my hobby of model railways (Model railroads), most of peoples displays are re-arranged copies of each other built almost entirely from commercially obtained products so tend to look similar to each other, especially when the same trains come through as the next persons trains etc! Not knocking the products or the peoples hard work, but it gets boring when one is looking for something different and unique! Scratch and kit building do add a bit of the builders unique flair to the models and therefore break the monotony of copying others... Not to say that copying is bad or not allowed as one knows it works if it has been done before... But be unique! Do ones own thing!

Regarding knowledge, there will always be someone older who has more knowledge than one does, and some like to show it too! I go quiet and let them carry on because it means I don't need to take part in writing replies and avoid getting corrwcted for minor tiny things I may have said ever so slightly wrong. Is better just to do rather than talk about it as by doing one knows that it works.

The only aspect to a hobby where it can be difficult to specialize (Not impossible) is in collecting... I mean... One could have a collection of something that happens to be a popular thing to collect where others also have the same things. To me, I like collecting, BUT I prefer my own and other peoples own creations, even if they are messed up first attempts, as there is something uniquely special about something someones made as opposed to some mass produced item. There is something very personal about things one has made oneself as well! Can be hard to part with some of them even if one has too many! One remembers every one! But it is satisfying if they go to someone who loves them them too!


_________________
.