10 ms·

I think you're wrong on one point: you constantly repeat how different and strange you are from everyone else. You're really not. As you mentioned at one point:

by RyanZAG 14y ago

I think you're wrong on one point: you constantly repeat how different and strange you are from everyone else. You're really not. As you mentioned at one point: you didn't want to go out and play, but the teacher forced you to do so. This is very common behavior, and teachers are forcing children every day to go out and play. Huge amount of people go through similar experiences to yours. Others start to lapse into an experience like yours and get scared - they go the other way and try to force social behavior on themselves, often becoming bullies or the kid you mentioned who hurt himself trying to show off to you. So my advice (since you're obviously not posting something publicly and expecting to get away without advice shoved at you) - stop worrying about 'normal'. Stop trying to fit in or not fit in. There are no points to be won by having social interactions. Social interactions are so you can learn, experience and enjoy. Approach them like this, and walk away when it's not working and try again. Everyone is doing the same thing, social interactions are breaking everywhere, you just don't see it so much from a distance because people cling to the precious few social interactions which have actually worked for them. Since you're trying to put things in terms of programming: if your program doesn't work/is slow because you're looping over the wrong thing, try again with a different loop, try a different data structure. You don't need to avoid 'if' loops in the future because they didn't work once. You don't need to keep trying to use an 'if' loop because its 'normal to use an if loop'. Excuse the terrible metaphor.

gruseom 14y ago
I agree with your first paragraph. We're really not very different from one another, but a craving for identity causes us to seek or invent distinguishing features, which have a way of turning into traps. The pattern seems to be that one spends adolescence and early adulthood acquiring this "wardrobe", then later the task becomes to shed it. That is not easy, because by when you get to shedding-time you've lost the ability to distinguish between your wardrobe and yourself. It's counterintuitive and devilish, but the most enticing material for identity-building seems to be one's suffering. It took me many years to learn about that, and boy was that process slow.
- runT1ME 14y ago
  fascinating. Are there studies done on this, or is this a well known developmental phenomenon?
  - gruseom 14y ago
    Empirical studies? I run across the occasional one that seems tangentially relevant, but haven't kept a list. I feel somewhat skeptical about the possibility of studying that level of experience in a formal experimental way. What I'm saying comes from personal experience, discussion with others, and assorted reading.
- mrtron 14y ago
  Is this why travel is so important? It forces you to have a barebones "wardrobe" and it helps you down the identity-building path?
  - gruseom 14y ago
    In my view, that can go either way. Sometimes we expect a change in external scenery to change us and, after the novelty wears off, find ourselves in the same state as before. Emerson said that travel narrows the mind; I suspect he was talking about something like that.
    - mrtron 14y ago
      I have always thought travel is more than a change of external scenery. Travel forces you outside of your comfort zone, away from people/places/things that are known.
  - vellum 14y ago
    It depends where you go. Travel makes you pay attention to your surroundings. It also forces you to let go of certain things, and concentrate on a whole new set of issues, like "how to get from point A to point B", or "where am I going next."
unconed 14y ago
I identify with huge portions of this post. And if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that I don't think like most other people. I don't mean "my ideas are better" or "I have superior reasoning skills". I mean "the tools that I use to reason about the world are not the same that most people appear to use". It's the only logical explanation for the fact that several popular ways in which humans communicate ideas (e.g. lectures/podcasts or poetry/lyrics) seem meaningless and like an inefficient use of time to me. I'm a visual thinker, visual communicator, and I convert all the important ideas in my life into mental pictures and animations. Mnemonics seem like the most idiotic thing ever to me, like remembering a person's phone number instead of what they're like. Here's another one: I don't have a voice in my head. When I learnt from reddit discussions that most people experience their inner thoughts as an inner monologue, I was flabbergasted. If I heard a voice, I would think I was going insane. To me, thought is a completely parallel process of association, words are simply not necessary, they only serve to unnecessarily clamp you down into linear trains of thought early on. For years, I assumed that "learning to think in another language" was simply a metaphor for a certain level of proficiency in constructing sentences on the fly. Apparently it's not. There is a lot more variation in how our brains work than people are generally aware of. It's certainly not acknowledged in culture or education. I think this is where a lot of the sentiment of 'not being normal' comes from, and telling people to stop worrying about it is not productive. It's something they will continue to be faced with their entire lives, even as all the 'neurotypical' folks insist nothing's different about you and you just need to get out more.
- crntaylor 14y ago
  I don't have a voice in my head. When I learnt from reddit discussions that most people experience their inner thoughts as an inner monologue, I was flabbergasted. If I heard a voice, I would think I was going insane. I think that's pretty normal. A quick poll of the other three people in the room reveals that none of us experience an 'inner voice'. It's more like a stream of associations, some of which might involve vocalised words, others might involve images, sounds, or recalled emotions. Sometimes the associations are sequential, sometimes they are parallel. Steven Pinker refers to this as 'mentalese'. Edit: also, this: http://xkcd.com/610/ http://xkcd.com/610/
LilValleyBigEgo 14y ago
The problem with not trying to fit in with society comes when you lose your job and you need a place to live for a while, or you have a stroke, or you are fighting an addiction to drugs or alcohol. You can't be a loaner your entire life and then suddenly need someone. If you don't care about people and you don't bother to have friends there's no one to answer the phone when you pick it up to call for help. I have struggled with this balance all my life. It's the balance between being exhausted from managing relationships and being alone with no one to call when you need help.
gcb0 14y ago
> teachers are forcing children every day to go out and play. until eventually they don't have to. I don't think they ever managed to quit doing it for the OP.

by RyanZAG 14y ago

gruseom 14y ago

I agree with your first paragraph. We're really not very different from one another, but a craving for identity causes us to seek or invent distinguishing features, which have a way of turning into traps. The pattern seems to be that one spends adolescence and early adulthood acquiring this "wardrobe", then later the task becomes to shed it. That is not easy, because by when you get to shedding-time you've lost the ability to distinguish between your wardrobe and yourself. It's counterintuitive and devilish, but the most enticing material for identity-building seems to be one's suffering. It took me many years to learn about that, and boy was that process slow.

runT1ME 14y ago
fascinating. Are there studies done on this, or is this a well known developmental phenomenon?
- gruseom 14y ago
  Empirical studies? I run across the occasional one that seems tangentially relevant, but haven't kept a list. I feel somewhat skeptical about the possibility of studying that level of experience in a formal experimental way. What I'm saying comes from personal experience, discussion with others, and assorted reading.
mrtron 14y ago
Is this why travel is so important? It forces you to have a barebones "wardrobe" and it helps you down the identity-building path?
- gruseom 14y ago
  In my view, that can go either way. Sometimes we expect a change in external scenery to change us and, after the novelty wears off, find ourselves in the same state as before. Emerson said that travel narrows the mind; I suspect he was talking about something like that.
  - mrtron 14y ago
    I have always thought travel is more than a change of external scenery. Travel forces you outside of your comfort zone, away from people/places/things that are known.
- vellum 14y ago
  It depends where you go. Travel makes you pay attention to your surroundings. It also forces you to let go of certain things, and concentrate on a whole new set of issues, like "how to get from point A to point B", or "where am I going next."

unconed 14y ago

I identify with huge portions of this post. And if there's one thing I've learned over the years, it's that I don't think like most other people. I don't mean "my ideas are better" or "I have superior reasoning skills". I mean "the tools that I use to reason about the world are not the same that most people appear to use". It's the only logical explanation for the fact that several popular ways in which humans communicate ideas (e.g. lectures/podcasts or poetry/lyrics) seem meaningless and like an inefficient use of time to me. I'm a visual thinker, visual communicator, and I convert all the important ideas in my life into mental pictures and animations. Mnemonics seem like the most idiotic thing ever to me, like remembering a person's phone number instead of what they're like. Here's another one: I don't have a voice in my head. When I learnt from reddit discussions that most people experience their inner thoughts as an inner monologue, I was flabbergasted. If I heard a voice, I would think I was going insane. To me, thought is a completely parallel process of association, words are simply not necessary, they only serve to unnecessarily clamp you down into linear trains of thought early on. For years, I assumed that "learning to think in another language" was simply a metaphor for a certain level of proficiency in constructing sentences on the fly. Apparently it's not. There is a lot more variation in how our brains work than people are generally aware of. It's certainly not acknowledged in culture or education. I think this is where a lot of the sentiment of 'not being normal' comes from, and telling people to stop worrying about it is not productive. It's something they will continue to be faced with their entire lives, even as all the 'neurotypical' folks insist nothing's different about you and you just need to get out more.

crntaylor 14y ago
I don't have a voice in my head. When I learnt from reddit discussions that most people experience their inner thoughts as an inner monologue, I was flabbergasted. If I heard a voice, I would think I was going insane. I think that's pretty normal. A quick poll of the other three people in the room reveals that none of us experience an 'inner voice'. It's more like a stream of associations, some of which might involve vocalised words, others might involve images, sounds, or recalled emotions. Sometimes the associations are sequential, sometimes they are parallel. Steven Pinker refers to this as 'mentalese'. Edit: also, this: http://xkcd.com/610/ http://xkcd.com/610/

LilValleyBigEgo 14y ago

The problem with not trying to fit in with society comes when you lose your job and you need a place to live for a while, or you have a stroke, or you are fighting an addiction to drugs or alcohol. You can't be a loaner your entire life and then suddenly need someone. If you don't care about people and you don't bother to have friends there's no one to answer the phone when you pick it up to call for help. I have struggled with this balance all my life. It's the balance between being exhausted from managing relationships and being alone with no one to call when you need help.

gcb0 14y ago

> teachers are forcing children every day to go out and play. until eventually they don't have to. I don't think they ever managed to quit doing it for the OP.