Image text: @agnieszkasshoes: “Part of what makes small talk so utterly debilitating for many of us who are neurodivergent is that having to smile and lie in answer to questions like, “how are you?” is exhausting to do even once, and society makes us do it countless times a day.”
@LuckyHarmsGG: “It’s not just the lie, it’s the energy it takes to suppress the impulse to answer honestly, analyze whether the other person wants the truth, realize they almost certainly don’t, and then have to make the DECISION to lie, every single time. Over and over. Decision fatigue is real”
@agnieszkasshoes: “Yes! The constant calculations are utterly exhausting - and all under the pressure of knowing that if you get it “wrong” you will be judged for it!”
My addition: For me, in addition to this, more specifically it’s the energy to pull up that info and analyze how I am. Like I don’t know the answer to that question and that’s why it’s so annoying. Now I need to analyze my day, decide what parts mean what to me and weigh the average basically, and then decide if that’s appropriate to share/if the person really wants to hear the truth of that, then pull up my files of pre-prepared phrases for the question that fits most closely with the truth since not answering truthfully is close to impossible for me.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CvPSP-2xU4h/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Imagine if you’re working as a cashier and you say to your customer, “hey, what’s up?” and then they start a ten minutes monologue about everything that’s happened to them today and how that’s made them feel. You’re just sitting there like “I’m at work, I’m just being polite, you’re holding up a line of customers, I’ll get in trouble with my boss for being so slow, etc.”. All you wanted was for the customer to say “Yeah, you?” and move on.
In the UK and America, and probably most places, saying “how are you?” or “what’s up?” is the equivalent of saying “hello” or “I would like to start a conversation with you” – it’s very rare that you actually want to know about the other person’s day. For a lot of autistic people though, we take those questions literally.
Edit to add: you can’t always assume that people don’t care about how you are. Got in trouble with my doctor for just saying “fine” when he was actually asking what is wrong with me. So it always feels like you have to make this calculation of what does the person really mean? I understand that neuro-typical people just sort of magically know the context in a way that autistic people don’t - I think it’s just a lived experience where we both have to say “I don’t understand how that is, but I trust that it’s the way you experience things” and move on.
And what’s the problem to always reply “not too bad”, as if it was a normal greeting? Without thinking, as if saying “hello”. Why is it difficult?
Again, asking to understand
@Zeth0s @Worx “not too bad” is what i do (where “too bad” implicitly means death)
unless i’m receiving a call in which my response is “what’s up?” which is ambiguously either (a) responding to a meaningless pro forma question in kind, or (b) expressing immediate interest in knowing what the call is actually about
@apophis @Zeth0s @Worx but the fact that we even have to think that much to establish the patterns like that… oof
But also very similar to my answers as well
I just added an edit that addresses exactly that as you were typing :p
The truth is that neuro typical don’t even consider the context. We say something along the line to “not too bad, and you?”. We just know that doctors and parents want a longer more detailed version.
To doctor the longer version, to parents the diluited version (otherwise they get worried).
Basically this is the rule. We think of it as a synonymous of “hello”, same meaning different spelling
Then why don’t you just say hello if you meant to say hello?
No idea, even hello what does it even mean? Just an empty word to exchange the information that you recognize the other person and that you don’t dislike them.
Any combination of sounds recognized by the interlocutor is fine for the purpose.
One can say “hi”, “what’s up”, “how is it going”, “how are you doing”, “ciao”. Each of the has a combination of sounds expected as response to understand that the interlocutor doesn’t dislike you as well. For the “how is it going” “what’s up” type of greeting, response is “not too bad and you?”.
It is just how language evolves. Someone found “hi” was outdated, and moved to “what’s up”. I guess gen z moved to something else again.
@Zeth0s @SRo it’s because we fundamentally process language and interactions in a different way, our brains aren’t wired for “small talk” or non-meaningful communication. Also the example earlier of context mattering where sometimes they might be asking with sincere interest and it can be catastrophic to fall back on a pattern like that.
And that’s simply because we’re either following an unnatural pattern that we’ve jury-rigged together from years of painful trial and error or we’re thinking much harder about the words being said than you are.
We call this masking and it’s a severe drain on our mental resources every single day and it’s why it’s claimed that we have a social problems (claimed because those problems completely disappear when interacting with fellow autistics, they’re considered problems only because the majority expect us to do all the work of accommodating them and none of the work themselves).
Also, hi/hello are different from “what’s up?” and “how’re you?” despite being used the same by allistics (non-autistics). Hello is purely an acknowledgement, it doesn’t even need to lead to a conversation, it’s just basically saying “I know you are there and recognize you as a person”.
Think of it like this: if you’re in a dark house and hear a sound… do you say “what’s up?” or “Hello?”
The others are formalities, evolved originally from real interest eventually into empty phrases. It has a lot to do with how allistics connect socially vs autistics.
We’ve recently begun to unravel the fact that allistics connect their social interactions and relationships to their identity while autistics connect values and actions. Because of that, I believe allistics put a lot more meaning into the form of an interaction than into the actual things accomplished in it.
“How’re you?” was originally an expression genuinely asking someone about their day, a genuine expression of caring. However, since it became associated with caring it eventually became a formality, a shape of conversation in which “Hello” became seen as cold and uncaring… so everyone changed their patterns of speech for it and felt it much warmer… despite dropping what actually made it warm.
Us autistics however, we often struggle with casual lying because we care intrinsically about our actions, even the small perceived as meaningless ones. When we ask how someone is, we have the intent of asking that question.
Small talk is all about the “form” of the interaction. It’s tied to allistic identity in that allistics typically seem to define themselves by the forms of their interactions. Autistics however couldn’t care less about the form if nothing actually happens in it because we tie our identity to the actual things happening.
An allistic might consider themselves caring if their interactions take a caring tone and form… and they’re often right (but not always, there’s always that person everyone humors but can’t stand). An autistic however might consider themselves caring based on the individual elements of the conversation, what was actually talked about and what happened during the conversation (ie. the person opened up, became less stressed, you got an update on what was going on, you were able to share inspiration, etc)
Best comment in this whole post
This is a highly cultural thing. Where I live, cashier (great example) are told by the manager to not speak with the customer. The interaction is just “Hi!”, the price, “Thanks! Bye!”.
It’s just respect and politeness. I don’t practice small talks at all. People don’t care about it. It’s not their business.
To illustrate, how it is here. People don’t make friends outside secondary school or universities depending on the degree they have. I know people who still have the same friends for 50 years. People are not open.
Maybe cashiers shouldn’t ask questions they don’t want the answers to