If you go somewhere alone, say, a restaurant, that’s an ostensible bad vibe, plus you’re taking up valuable real estate and time, when you could iNvItE your bUdDiEs and make it more worth the restaurant’s while, so ‘fun’-based companies have all been subliminally forcing us for 100+ years to only consume their products with people around us – think the smiling people in those Olive Garden ads.
And I’m not saying it’s not fun to do these things with people, of course it is, I’d agree that it’s even more fun. But it’s not necessarily accessible or practical for everyone all the time. We should be able to enjoy the same pleasures of the world, the same excesses of capitalism, chef-cooked lunch from the Mediterranean for $10 in iowa at 10am, roller coasters, beach resorts, etc, without feeling shitty and weird for not having someone by our side. Same thing with the pressure to start a family as well. Sure, it’s a natural impulse, but it’s been hijacked by the ever-growing greed of capital.
It’s so insidious it’s insane. Marketing is scumwork for scumlords. They create empty spaces of desire we’re magnetized to fill. I’m sure there’s a way to think yourself out of this, but it’s hard and I have no idea where to start on that mountain and I think meditation is sort of bullshit (especially if you have autism [hi]).
I tried to buy season tickets for myself for our local baseball team and the guy was like ‘you can invite a friend if you want as well!’ and like yeah no shit, maybe I want to go alone and relax? Can I simply have that freedom without being nudged to constantly perform my own emotional labor to give them more revenue? Please? God?
Looking at people with their glassy eyes staring at the pretty lights, making small talk. The talk is small and meaningless. The entire point of the conversation is meaningless. The people appear to be performing humanity. They appear to be communicating, but no transfer of information is occurring. It sometimes makes you think that the other people are fundamentally, something. Something seems wrong with it: the ceremony, the pointlessness, the wandering around in circles. The conversations are those of dogs barking through a fence. They carry with them no language and no information. The dogs do bark, though. Why? If there wasn’t any information being transmitted they would be silent. The neurotypical engages in small talk for the same reason that dogs bark. The barking is the noise that carries the emotional state of the barker. People transmit emotional state information through small talk. The rituals are elaborate excuses to convey that state information to others. Emotional state information can be related to danger, food, well-being, whatever. The point is that the information is both very wide band and very dense Therefore, it is very useful. You, as an autistic person, are deaf to this in information and so seem like a color blind person or a stubborn person or a deaf person to allistics. Either way, the information is useless to you. Don’t bother performing. If you want to go alone, you don’t have to explain yourself. There can be pressure, but don’t think about it too much. The information is worthless to you anyways. People might be trying to be helpful, but unless you trust them and can legit unmask, you just have to deal with it. Animals bark, people talk. Whatever. I intentionally take a supremist attitude here to illustrate how engrained allism is in culture.