It’s nice to have a fleeting moment of positive connection, if it’s just talking about the weather. In fact it’s usually talking about the weather, in my experience.
I’m good, thanks. I’m sure there are plenty of other ways to ensure my “soul isn’t small”.
When I was in NYC wandering around I found myself outside Carnegie Hall and started asking random people the thing “how do you get to Carnegie hall?”
Most people laughed and gave the response “practice.” Except one dude.
“Huh?”
“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”
“…What are you fuckin’ STUPID?! It’s right fuckin’ HERE!”
That guy was a real New Yorker. 😃
“I enjoy this thing so you need to too, so I’ll make up a reason it makes me superior”
You do you, but you’re willingly giving up on countless small moments of goodness in your life and a lot of potential opportunities, over what amounts to a minor amount of effort.
Like, the main point of small talk is that you can effectively turn your brain off and still produce something passable. You get to choose how far you’re going to engage. You can, if needed, boil most of it down to a flowchart if it doesn’t come naturally to you.
It depends on what they have going on. Small talk is literally painful to me to participate in, and I have no intention of trying to fix that because I’m not wrong or broken, just different, with different social needs that are met by people similarly different.
Autistics don’t small talk for a set of good reasons, including that it’s quite pointless and superficial to how we operate in the world, and we don’t get the same things out of it as neurotypicals. We have our own version of small talk, which is diving right into sharing special interests. It tells us what we need to know about the person we are talking to like small talk does for NT.
For us, those small talk conversations aren’t small moments of goodness. They might be for you, and that’s cool, but not us.
This might be interesting to you, or not, as you like. It goes over some of the reasons people on the spectrum don’t like small talk, and how we perform the same functions to maintain our social lives, but go about it differently.
https://www.autisticstudies.com/communication/autisticsmalltalk
Yeah, that’s very true.
I have autistic acquaintances that are kinda friends, and it takes shifting mental gears to have good interactions. It really helps when the individual says up front that they don’t like/want/have skill at the usual preliminaries amd wants to just talk about more specific things.
Bridging that neurofunction gap can be very hard on both sides, and it’s always an ongoing learning experience.
All of that being said, it is also very nice when both/all people present make that effort. It’s harder for autistic folks, or so it seems, but without at least a little willingness to communicate about how to communicate, it’s a much harder thing to make work.
“Goodness” to you, norman, not to the rest of us. It’s called subjectivity. As you get older you’ll find there’s nothing that can actually be defined as good for most people in this way as everyone is different. There is no “human experience”, we’re all totally different and forever unknowable to each other.
To me it just sucks and is actually depressing. I don’t want to turn my brain off, I want to talk to someone that’ll put my brain in overdrive.
It’s not that deep.
Do you often not enjoy things you’re bad at?
I’ll pass. Small talk with strangers has never been pleasurable for me. I’ve learned how to do it convincingly enough to function well at my job and not give off any negative vibe by appearing weird. The words that are exchanged with the people I truly care about are more than nourishment enough for my “soul”.
I think just being able to is probably good enough. Maybe if you move to a smaller town or something it’ll come in handy.
Smalltalk is soul crushing, if anything, because even NT extraverts yearn for connection and community, not corporations dictating them what can and can’t be said.
Don’t talk to me about the weather. Tell me what drugs you like, what hot takes you have, do you regret having that tattoo? what’s your hobby as of late? What’s your dream, passion in life? What really grinds your gears in the world? Talk to me heart to heart, or just put it in a social media status if you only want attention like some vapid big house yuppie.
Otherwise I’ll just pay my dues with the weather shit and move on. I don’t get anything out of it and neither do most people ITT.
Yup, I really admire the ability for the older generations ability to just chit chat. Don’t see it with younger generations. People act like they’re royalty and only shall be spoken too when it’s beneficial for them.
I absolutely can drone on for days if need be, but I do not want to because it’s actively depressing to communicate casually and walk on egg shells instead of talking about anything that really matters like philosophy, politics, Linux, media and public transport (both from a societal and engineering perspective - like what’s your favourite airbus?)
Why would I ever engage in this waste of oxygen “chit-chatting” is beyond me. I have no need to socialize in this manner.
I have heard from a few teachers it’s a phone thing. Like there are large groups of young people who don’t read faces or body language well because they haven’t done it as much as the pre-iphone generations.
