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==
In Finland nobody asks you that and if somebody does, everybody gives a direct and correct answer. It is one of the perks in any Finn that makes it hard for us to discuss with Americans if we’re not used to them.
Mostly the same in Germany, except for business context.
Hmmm. I live in Germany and I do small talk everyday at work.
Hallo! Na? Wie geht’s? Gut, danke! Und dir? Mir geht’s auch gut danke. Sehr schön. Schönen Tag! Gleichfalls!
All of it takes less than 10 seconds (I work in a hospital).
I would file that under business setting in total. Usually I can be much more open with my colleagues than what you describe……
Serious question from a non neurodivergent. Why don’t you tell the truth? What’s wrong with that?
Sorry, just for me to understand because I have no experience
The truth about how I am? Because they don’t care. They don’t actually want a long infodump about personal details of my life.
I just give short honest answer. If they are interested - might turn into a good conversation if not, I don’t care. But I’m also not neurodivergent - just not too much into small talk.
I believe that part of the problem - at least in my case - is that typical person immediately sees 3-4 possible generic answers to such questions.
For me… It’s like opening Pandora Box and have the brain flooded with not just answers but long chains of interactions, where none leads to anything positive. A “simple” question is like like an abyss that’s gonna suck you down and exhaust you while you’re trying to escape it so much, that you feel like lying down and trying to remember that air is meant to be inhaled again after it’s exhaled…
There was this scene in the original Terminator movie, where the robot sees the spinning list of possible answers to “cat question”. For me, this list doesn’t stop. Even when the conversation is already finished, the list continues to spin.
The “typical” person doesn’t see 3 or 4 answers, they have prepared a few generic answers to those small questions, and anyone can do that. Unless you’re really feeling different, and have enough intimacy with the asker to be honest, it’s just a game of tic-tac-toe that anyone can learn.
How are you doing? Fine, how’s life treating you?
Nice weather, eh? I’ve had better.
Etc.
First downvote on Lemmy because it’s simply not true. To some people, smalltalk does come naturally.
Also, having “a few generic answers” does not solve the problem. The mind still fills with way too many thoughts.
Nobody is saying that neurodivergent people can’t do small talk, it’s that it is oftentimes a dreadful experience for them. You do understand the difference, yes?
It’s a bit like telling someone genetically predisposed to disliking cilantro because it tastes like soap to “just eat cliantro… everyone can do it!”
Fine, but beware of getting on the “I was born this way and I can’t change even if I wanted to” train. That’s extremely harmful to your personal growth, because even if you were truly different genetically, it can be used as an excuse to not learn or change, even if you were capable of it.
The thing is I can do small talk, it just costs a lot of energy that I’d rather use for something more important. And I honestly don’t see a reason to mask all the time and pretend I’m not who I am.
While I might mask in short interactions with strangers I refuse to do it with people I know. They’ll have to accept me the way I am. And that, in fact, is personal growth as well. To accept yourself the way you are and stop pretending to be something you’re not.
In fact, I believe it is the “truest” form of growth, to accept oneself the way one is.
And where in the game is the free will to simply not play the game? Shouldn’t that be an option as well?
This comment gets under my skin because in this community for autistic folks we have heard this kind of thinking our e-n-t-i-r-e lives and NT never ever ever ever understand just how much effort it takes for us to mask in order to fit in with their arbitrary ass rules that we consider hella dumb. I long for the day when a NT person comes into communities of autistic people and says, “wow, you know what, all this you’re saying makes a lot of sense and this social protocol IS hella dumb and doesn’t actually serve any valid purpose and I’m with you! I’m going to help out and join the movement to making society more accommodating to different brains preferred way to be, instead of assuming like everyone always does that the way society is is by definition the right and only way it should and could be.” How about calls for personal growth that aren’t ableist and full of unexplored privilege and ignorance about what masking actually does to us. Because I’ll tell you right now that it is 100,000% devastating and the fact that many of us are keeping it together enough to survive is FUCKING MIRACULOUS and we honestly deserve monetary awards and rest and a fucking break.
Thank you for saying what I was trying to express and just couldn’t. It hurts so much to be told “just act like ‘normal’ people so you don’t seem to be ‘disabled’”. We’re not disabled, just different!
I’m disabled. I can barely deal with normal amounts of noise. Banning cars and ads would go a long way to making me less disabled, but unfortunately I just have a lower tolerance for attention violence, and we live in a society of frequent attention violence.
I understand what you mean. I’m also extremely noise sensitive and have to wear ear plugs pretty much all the time. Being outside is so exhausting.
That’s part of what I was trying to say though. This world isn’t made for us and barely anyone cares to make it easier. In a different world we wouldn’t be disabled. We have different needs than NT people and it’s the world that disables us, not our being different.
Many people like Americans say as a trained friendly greeting “hi, how are you”. Other people like Chinese say “hi, have you eaten (had rice) yet”. They both simply need to be viewed as greetings. Neither actually want to know your full life story of your eating habits or the many bad things that may have happened to you in your day week or life.
Don’t try it here in Germany. Often people will try and test you and tell you a long story of many bad things to see if you “care”. But it is in fact missing an important cultural contex. It is not that they don’t care if you have eaten or that your wife is dieing of cancer… It is that is not what they were truly asking. It should be interpreted simply as a friendly greeting such as good morning. It is as inappropriate to responding to good morning with, “no it isn’t. It’s a terrible morning. I had diarrhea this morning and my cat died”. The lady at the grocery store doesn’t need these details and was simply being nice.
To the chinese greeting “Have you eaten yet?” as I understood it is fine to just answer factually what you have eaten, it could even be a decent start for small talk. Much better than “How are you?”.
You could say “I feel the way I usually feel” (which is what I always say).
- It’s truthful (probably).
- It confuses the other one, giving you a second to breathe.
- It could be perceived as funny (as unconventional) by others, making you be seen positive.
