For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
I’m gonna go meta on this one:
I don’t understand how some people just know that they can do things from the get-go. Like from their early teens on.
It took me until age 50 to understand who is holding me back: me.
There’s very little I don’t think I can grasp now. Anything another human can do, so can I. I could have been a doctor or a musician or a chemical engineer or Michelin starred chef if had believed in myself like other people do.
How??? Why did they know they could do these things???
We didn’t. What could go wrong if we fail? Nothing? Cool. See you at the finish.
We could die? CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, BITCHES!!
Maybe you care too much about your own life. Try having no will to live.
I am joking. Mostly.
I had this realization when I decided to rebuild the carburetor on my old mustang. After taking it apart I was absolutely paralyzed by then realized that some schmuck designed it, so surely I could just put it back together
Socialization.
Autism?
No I think they’ve grasped that part pretty easily
Programming fast.
When I program for my personal projects it takes hours to get very little done.
hmm, I have the same thing. But I do test a LOT and make backups on backups, tbh. Most of my time probably goes into that.
I’m not sure if this answers the question but I feel like the older I get the more I see through “the game of life” and once that illusion gets shattered it’s impossible to unsee. Much of the status seeking, tribal behaviour becomes nearly impossible to partake in once you start seeing what it’s all for.
Go ask a person why their Instagram is filled to the brim with pictures of their face, for example, and you can watch in real time as their world view starts wobbling and they start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic. Try doing that while being fully conscious about the true motivations behind it. You can’t - something has to give.
However, I’m not sure if this is a good thing. Sure you can pat yourself on the back for being above it all but it makes it really difficult for anyone to try and integrate in normal everyday social situations when all of it just feels like a performance.
There is a difference between being narcissistic and craving validation. It’s completely normal to want validation, feel needed, wanted and appreciated.
It’s very sad that every human need has been turned into a subscription based service.
the problem is people twist themselves into knots to get it these days, and it makes the mentally unwell.
And they hate people who don’t ‘go along’ with the ‘game’ they play.
Narcissism is just pathological validation craving. They’re on the same spectrum. However, I’m not one to judge someone for just posting on instagram.
Narcissists don’t crave validation. They don’t think they even need it, because they already feel so self-assured.
You’re confusing narcissism with insecurity, which is practically the opposite of narcissism.
A narcissist doesn’t think they need your approval, and isn’t going to beg for it. They’ll just explode the moment you express disapproval or disagreement, because that clashes with their worldview and self-image, and that’s something they can’t tolerate.
Yeah I also have autism
autism has nothing to do with this.
In this particular case autism has lots to do with it.
Sure, sure
Oh, it does
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With who?
It was middle school when I realized “you can only be cool if you’re not trying to be cool,” which I then said in an effort to sound cool. By high school that had sunk in better and I accidentally ended up popular, I think. That was when I first started looking past what people do to try looking cool.
In college I got into psychedelics, broke through to ego death while listening to Dark Side of the Moon with blindfolds and peaking, and found that the deeper level of existence was that there isn’t one. Most things in life can be as simple or as complex as you want, and I had been trying to make it more complex than it is.
But the thing I keep finding is that for as simple as most things actually are, people are consistently more complex than their surface suggests.
A week ago my cousin was in town and I had a one on one conversation with him for the first time in our adult lives that started with him showing me his relatively popular Instagram photos from the past couple years of him running the rave circuit. But as we got to talking about it, he revealed that he didn’t give a shit about his popularity, his ex-boyfriend was the socials guy who wanted the clout of being with a hot rave guy. He had become disillusioned with pretty much his whole life, but you wouldn’t get that just looking at his socials. And for as shallow as his ex is, if you peeled back the layers of bullshit he’s built around his life, there’s probably some interesting thoughts in there.
I guess I’m not sure what I’m trying to say with all this. When I make an effort to understand, most people I meet drop the facades and spill their guts pretty quick to me. I might be uniquely weird for that ability, but I don’t know that it’s narcissism on their part so much as trying to be cool and grappling with never succeeding because of that trying.
That is always the case when comparing one’s complex internal life to the perceived external lives of others. It’s never an apples to apples comparison. However social media was just one example. This applies to other forms of signaling as well: designer clothes, latest tech, following trends… Basically almost anything people do that they wouldn’t do if there were no one to see it.
and you can watch in real time as their world view starts wobbling and they start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic.
I encounter this when chatting with a family member and she mentions that she “loves animals” and who “couldn’t hurt a fly” while also being an omnivore. She feels sorry for the animals when she thinks of industrial farming, but does her best to never think about it. When this topic comes up, I don’t say anything (we’ve been through the topic in the past), but she sees the impatience with her bullshit on my face, and gets flustered by the fact that someone doesn’t consider this cognitive dissonance normal.
I can somewhat relate with that. Eating meat is one of the few behaviours that I still do despite being unable to morally defend it. It’s not even that I’m trying not to think about it or have to somehow deceive myself believing that it’s good. I know exactly what I’m doing. The convenience of it simply outweighs the moral guilt.
What I think would possibly make me feel different about it is someone handing me a gun and telling me to shoot a cow. If it turns out that I can’t do it, then that really puts into question the outsourcing of the messy part of it in the first place.
Cool. I love animals and I eat meat and I love it.
I see nothing wrong with it. Death is part of life.
Do you ever ask yourself why it is that you need other people to believe and practice what you believe? And do you find when other peole impose their beliefs on you find it offputting and upsetting?
One can be perfectly happy with the concept of beings dying and being eaten, and still feel nothing but disgust about the meat industry.
I tend to eat meat semi-regularly out of convenice and social norms, but I am fully aware of my hypocrisy. Same way as I am typing this on a device that probably contains parts made with essentially slave labour. Doesn’t make it better. But at least I can avoid the treadmill of having to have the newest iPhone, or eating as much supermarket steak as possible.
start making up rationalizations and excuses for behaviour that is utterly narcissistic
Humans are narcissistic and selfish because over the millenia the ones that were selfish outcompeted the ones that weren’t. It’s totally natural to be selfish. Some are just better at hiding it than others.
However there is also a simple social aspect to including yourself in photos. It’s a clear visceral way to say “I was here”. A photo without your face does not have capture the “you” part of that statement. Social interaction is not just an exchanging of ideas, it’s also about building relationships, and for that to happen, the “you” part of the equation is vital.
To be fair I rarely include myself in photos, but for the same reason I am also less integrated into my social circles.
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Add in a psychedelic experience or two, and it becomes impossible not to recognize how ridiculous it all is.
Can be done without them, of course, but psychedelics can blast you right to that position, for better or worse.
I’ve taken the slow route and have been doing mindfulness meditation for a decade which probably plays a role in all this.
I’m at the point where I don’t even try to integrate any more. The only time I leave my flat is against my will because I have to go to work to be able to afford to live.
Dancing. And even something like swaying or tapping one’s foot to a beat is hard for me unless the song makes it super obvious. Most people seem to just intuitively get all of this. Plus I don’t have good coordination or spatial awareness, where I still routinely run into doorways in my home and such. And then add social anxiety on top of all that. A nightclub might as well be a torture chamber.
Have you tried taking a dance class? I recently started one for the first time, it’s nice. You’ll be in a room full of people who also can’t dance, which helped me a lot with my fear of dancing (poorly) in front of people.
How to make friends. It was so easy as kids, but now I can meet people that do things that I do and who want to do them in a group but they never become friends to me anymore. IDK where I’m going wrong, I don’t reek of desperation, I have other friends, but when people say “find your tribe” like, I might be the last of my kind.
I can completely relate. Additionally my specific standards also make it very bad.
I found out that I’m an Autist so for me it at least explains things but is also totally not helping to know.
Nevertheless I do not know for sure if all of this isn’t totally normal, as in the regular human experience. The older you get the more difficult it is to find and hold friends.
It’s normal. Hardly anyone makes friends after college or early 20s.
And folks that do, it’s mostly through their children. Because they become friends with the parents of their kid’s friends… because it’s convenient.
It might be normal but it shouldn’t be normalized.
Sometimes, a handful of friends is not just enough but the upper limit as well. And that’s okay, right? If you have a partner and everything is okay, you will start your own small community regardless. 😅
I basically don’t have any friends of my own anymore. The ones from high school I was never really close enough with to hang out outside school. We were just too different. Almost a decade and a half later and we see each other maybe once a year and don’t talk outside of that.
College was supposed to be a place to meet new people, and I did meet a few, one of which is my current partner. But that also didn’t last past college years, really.
I’m now in a different country, don’t really speak the language well enough and don’t really have energy or time to find new people. Plus, my introversion, social anxiety and health are only making it harder. My partner occasionally comments on me having no friends of my own, but then I look at his friend circle and want to roll my eyes. Most of his friends are from high school years, and he sees them maybe once or twice a year. There are a few he met through work, but it’s easier for him because the field we work in is male-dominated. So for him it’s okay, for me it sucks to be the only woman. But he doesn’t hang out with any of these people on regular basis. Realistically, most people he knows are acquaintances.
I think about this whole situation frequently and it makes me depressed and bitter. I feel like even if I find new friends, I’ll never be the friend, you know? They’ll always have other people they’ve been friends with for longer and I will be either not as important or discarded later. It’s been this way my whole life. Always easily forgotten and replaced.
You aren’t doing anything wrong.
That’s just how life is. Practically nobody makes friends as adults due to the structure of adult life.
As children you have tons of free time and no hangups or social status to maintain. As an adult you have zero free time, lots of hangups, and most adults are obsessed with social status.
Real friends are the ones that stick with you when shit hits the fan. When you’re an adult and you meet new people, you usually want to show yourself from your best side and for everything to go well. She we were kids, shit hitting the fan was somebody kicking a ball into a neighbors window or falling of a bike, minor things as an adult, but as kids that built character. The stakes are so much higher as an adult when things go wrong, so generally you avoid it even though this means that most of your relationships are superficial.
I’m not saying that something horrible must happen in order to get friends as an adult. But sometimes it’s better to simply work against the odds together to form a deeper connection.
that’s true. the stakes are higher and you have way more to lose from a bad friendship.
people forget that there are lots of folks who are happy to exploit, use, and betray you. and when you are a kid that might mean they steal your $20 toy, but as an adult it can be a lot more costly. like your friend can come over, slip your stairs, and they can sue you for damages and take your entire life away. and where i live it’s fairly common for people to threaten lawsuits over the stupidest shit.
Not getting overwhelmed and burned out all the time.
To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics.
That could be part of the problem: time signatures aren’t a property of the notes, they’re a property of the song. The time signature is the rhythm and flow of the music. If you try to do a waltz in 4/4, it’s probably not going to sound like a waltz unless you do some really screwy things.
Plus, knowing the time signature helps you figure out why that guy is waving his stick like that while you’re playing.
I give you those “screwy things”. Somebody stripped the fifth beats from Brubeck’s magnum opus, and made the most waltz sounding 4 I’ve ever heard.
It’s funny how stripping out the fourth beat just sounds like a band who doesn’t quite know how Take 5 goes and they’re just winging it: https://youtu.be/t3u8GwMlJaw
Comment so I can find this later
Wow, this sounded amazing!
Interesting how the 4 is kind of ghosted
Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters is a walz and you can’t convince me otherwise.
I’m pretty sure it is in 6/8.
This. I’m not a musician but have learned many types of dance and the time signature is key for dancing. Maybe it would help OP to do a beginner dance class, to learn time signature in a different context.
You could write in triplets in 4/4.
Anything can be in 4/4 if you count hard enough.
That really bothered me at first! Kept thinking ‘why ever have a different time sig? No need for 13/8 (or whatever) when you can just sprinkle in double dotted 16th notes tied to 8th note (or whatever).’
Over time I slowly realized that it’s not about technically being able to write it, but rather describing what usually happens. (Tho I still don’t really understand, intuit, or hear any of it well.)
So, the original Mission Impossible theme tune is in 5/4. When U2 re-did it for the 1996 Tom Cruise film, the beginning is in 5/4, and then they transition to a slower 4/4. For most of the “Dee da duuuuuuuuuuuh” sections, as far as I can tell it’s just a beat shorter, but the tempo is lower, when they do reprise the Dun! Dun! Da Da! section they use two measures, 8 beats, making it dun dun dun dun da da.
Fun fact: The original dun dun da da was supposed to be “MI” in morse code. --… dash dash dot dot, with a dash being a beat and a half, a dot being one beat, five beats total. U2 turned it into MMI. ----…
Functional programming.
I’m curious if it’s the whole shebang or there are some aspects you do okay with. Immutability, higher-order functions, partial application, recursion, closures, pattern matching, tacitness, etc. I can also recommend not starting with Haskell. It’s a bit much.
I actually spent some time thinking about this. I guess it’s because I was a developer for 17 years before I ever heard about lambda calculus or functional programming, and it was really difficult for me to wrap my brain around it.
I like immutability, and discriminated unions, and I can handle monads, but a lot of the rest of it gets too far into the weeds for me. Writing a function that is just a single return statement that chains together a bunch of map and reduce calls just doesn’t click for me.
“If it compiles, it works.” Yeah, I’ve never found that to be true. And don’t get me started on how you can’t debug chained calls when something inevitably goes sideways.
Once I heard someone say “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors” I was officially out. No thanks. Not for me.
Complex boss fights in video games. Multiple stages with precisely timed keypresses, being able to track multiple things simultaneously while also dealing with random changes, being able to do quick gear changes, etc. I don’t know how the hell people do it.
For me, that kind of thing simply isn’t fun and therefore isn’t worth the effort.
Skateboarding. None of it computes for me. My brother has been a lifelong skater and still rips it up at almost 40, and I see him do shit on the board and I just can’t figure out what the fuck is happening. It breaks physics, it’s like bee flight, none of that crap should be possible.
I watched him go up a very steep incline and do the thing where it’s a kickflip and a pop shove it at the same time, which is enough on its own to break my brain, but he and the board went up and landed at the same angle of the incline like it was flat ground, he and the board went up and down perpendicular to the incline without any vertical drag on the drop and landing. Gravity doesn’t fucking work that way! And how the fuck do their feet and the board just get back together after the board is seizuring mid air and just fucking land and keep going like their are magnets on their feet or something? It’s gods damned wizard shit.
Strapping a snowboard to my feet was pretty intuitive, just keep the downhill edge up. Hard agree, I even wore skater shoes but a basic Ollie was something my brain and limbs just…don’t do that
So funny (and kinda sweet) how many people are trying to explain time signature to OP, instead of answering the question.
I’'ve been told all my life that “it’s not what I say, but how I say it” that’s a problem. Apparently my tone of voice is often aggressive when I don’t mean to be. Also, if I’m frustrated about something, people feel that I’m angry at them.
I was diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago, which explains some of it, but sadly hasn’t helped me resolve the issue 😕
So funny (and kinda sweet) how many people are trying to explain time signature to OP
LOL I was checking the comments for exactly this.
My wife and I have ADHD and have the same issue. Emotional regulation is impaired in many with ADHD, so we tend to run emotionally “hotter” than most. We may get more upset about something than an NT person might, hence why we come across as very upset, but we may not see it as particularly intense because that’s a normal reaction in our experience.
Not necessarily what might be causing it for you, but definitely what does it for me and many others I’ve known. DBT helped a lot.
we may not see it as particularly intense because that’s a normal reaction in our experience
I’d never thought about it that way but that would make a lot of sense, thank you.
many people are trying to explain time signature
I’m glad they did, because I also have a hard time with time sigs, and was hoping to see some explanations. In fact, one comment here finally elucidated that I understood signatures wrong this whole time.
Lying, manipulating, bullshitting, etc.
If you do it, people adore you. If you don’t, they hate you. I notice the most socially popular and adored people are the ones who do this the most.
Everyone says they hate it this type of think, but in behaviour they react very differently. I have even bullshitted and manipulated some folks, and it was terrifying how well it worked. They were like eating out of my hand and believing whatever stupid crap I told them.
Human psychology is terrifying.
As a professional salesperson, I can tell you don’t worry, most other people are also terrible at bullshit and manipulation.
It comes down to this: Most people want to know what you want from them. We’re social animals. Someone who seems self-sufficient reads as a potential threat. The best way to get people to do what you want is to tell them what you want in a way that makes sense to them, because then then can help you out and feel like you’re connected to them.
This is where “lying” comes in, because the reasons you give them for what you want has to their reasons, not your reasons, and, frankly, a lot of people are a little crazy and want crazy things. You can’t tell your alcoholic boss you’re drowsy because you were up all night playing Zelda, you tell her you have a bit of a hangover. Either way, she’ll tell you to drink a cup of coffee and get it together, but the former makes her trust you less and the latter trust you more.
This is a really good explanation. I should tell my kid this to help him with masking. And it’ll be great when he tells the teacher he’s hungover.
You might be autistic
No. It has nothing to do with autism.
This fediverse’s weird obsession with autism (or adhd) being the ‘answer’ for every social issue you face is mind-blowingly ignorant and stupid.
Unless you are professional diagnosed, you don’t have autism. Your online quizzes and self-diagnoses are just excuses for you to justify your off-putting behaviour and interests. Like, wow you’re into FOSS and obsessed with privacy and are a PC gamer… none of those make you autistic… it’s your incessant mentioning of them and your superiority complex about them that turn people off.
Thank you, much better put than myself.
I see the psyop classifying anyone who hates the bullshit and lies corrupting modern society as autistic has fully paid off.
If you classify tactful social behavior as “lies and bullshitting” it probably IS spectrum related.
Not enjoying manipulative behaviours because of their wider negative implications on society is autistic? The Kool-Aid must taste real good.
Like I said, if you are applying the term “manipulative behaviors” (or lies or bullshitting) to generally tactful social behavior, that is consistent with ASD. If you mean lying, deceit, and gaslighting in a malicious way, OP is probably around toxic people because I think EVERYONE would agree that it is awful.
Maybe you ought to make sure you understand people’s positions before you lash out, yeah?
None of what’s OP wrote was alluding to “generally tactful social behaviour”.
Maybe you should learn to read before you get all defensive, yeah?
I can read and understand nuance. Nothing about what OP said indicates what he is talking about ISNT that either. If you think everyone is lying and manipulative you are either surrounded by toxic people, OR you don’t understand social interactions. Everyone who is socially successful is not being a manipulative liar.
Autism spectrum disorder is a condition related to brain development that affects how people see others and socialize with them. This causes problems in communication and getting along with others socially
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/autism-spectrum-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20352928
If you’re having trouble seeing this, talk to your doctor. There is nothing wrong with playing by a different set of social rules unless you don’t understand that you are.
Edit: Or maybe you’re just an asshole. I can relate.
This is so weird to me. I Don’t bullshit people or manipulate them. It would be exhausting, but I seem to make friends and acquaintances easily enough.
I live in a city full of tech bros and biotech bimbos. this is all they know from birth to grave.
they find the concept of someone being genuine and non-bullshitty very upsetting and weird. but if you talk to them in bullshit corpo self-branding speak, they are totally into you.
like I’ve had ‘concerned friends’ lecture me on how to bullshittify the way I talk so it’s more socially acceptable. like using ‘pivot’ and ‘synergize’ when talking about myself, and of course constantly referencing my anxiety about my lack of ‘productivity’. or to constantly reference ‘how expensive’ things in casual conservation to let everyone know I’m wealthy and successful… because if you aren’t wealthy what is the point of even being alive?
also if you have a hobby, you can only talk about it reference to how it builds your career or it’s your side hustle.
I would have no friends if those were the only kind of people I could find to talk to.
Cool. I’d rather have some friends than none. So I work with what’s available.
Math! I’m a software guy and generally find STEM topics highly intuitive. I do fine with the stuff through middle school - PEMDAS, algebra, that kind of stuff. But the higher levels concepts like logarithms and derivatives; no matter how many times they’re explained to me they just don’t quite click. I can plug numbers into formulas and get the answer I need, but I don’t understand what’s happening or why that particular formula is what’s needed.
These things really clicked for me when I actually needed to do what they do in various ways.
It doesn’t help that in math classes all the variables are single letter names. I can tell they never had code reviews on these math books lol
You should look into studying mathematics from a proofs point of view.
Ok good it’s not just me. I really wish I could find a way to understand it better. At this point in my life it’s not really necessary so I guess I’m ok then?
Recognizing people.
I have it the other way around. I recognize the fuck out of people and can never remember their names. I can be like “Oh yeah, that’s the dude that so-and-so introduced me to at that BBQ in the park 10 years ago. It was cold that day for fall, he said he was good at the piano. His name? No fucking idea”
Like I can remember so many details about so many things. Names? In one ear and out the other. You could shake my hand and tell me your name and I wouldn’t remember it after a 3 minute conversation. But I could repeat everything else about the conversation directly back to you.
i had pollinopsia for a short time in low light conditions, by an unknown cause. which also caued by RLS, and peripheral neuropathy. conveninetly happen after just one diphenhydramine pill.
Correct.
