The repetitiousness is probably not unrelated to the fact that a lot of what is said and done in “the wider world” makes no sense to me, in a way that is unavoidably unpleasant to deal with
This isn’t “I don’t understand the social scripts people are following” so much as “I don’t understand why those scripts are the way they are.” I’m not (I think? hope?) unusually bad at predicting behavior, I’m just bad at imagining what it’s like to behave that way. It feels like I’m missing a lot of the standard repertoire of emotions or motivations or something
So you have this whole human world playing out, in a way I can model in my head, but it seems like the actors involved are aliens. Oh look, Zzarghl-3′s gas sacs have crossed the temperature threshold and now Zzarghl-3 is systematically killing every non-octopod in the area. “Well, that’s just how it is,” I say, “when your sacs are hot you just can’t help but want to kill some hexapods,” and Zzarko, listening beside me, sends a positive social signal by extruding an irregularly spaced tooth mesh, as though they think I really understand
This was actually easier to tolerate when I was younger and understood even less, because then I could convince myself that it would all make sense one day when I was mature enough to understand it, and that was nice and clear-cut, although it had its obvious pitfalls. But now I swing back and forth between “this thing I don’t understand is commonly done because it serves a need I don’t have” and “this thing I don’t understand is commonly done because I’ve figured out that it’s a bad idea and not everyone has,” and just about anything can send me oscillate between these two poles. A friend shared an article on Facebook, I don’t understand why this sort of article appeals to people enough to share it, it is because they have a richer palette of experience (am I inferior?) or because they don’t know these articles aren’t actually good (am I arrogant?)
Anyway, it is useful to me to have an area, and specifically a … discourse (lol), where I can say, yes, I am one of the people who is aware of this and aware of the standard repertoire of conversations, and sees why other people have those conversations, and even if there are parts I don’t understand, I’ve seen them before and have cached my evaluations of them so I don’t have to start oscillating again every time I see them
I keep wondering how many other people have this constant feeling – not the feeling that other people are unpredictable, but that other people are alien
Oh yes definitely. Alien isn’t quite the right word. But I’ve come to understand a lot of scripts are arbitrary. If course I’ve also come to understand that a lot of scripts are actually just over generalizations of more narrow heuristics, and people follow them because of pattern matching: either they themselves are pattern matching or they’re worried the people around them are pattern matching and they don’t want to look foolish.
