"Growing up and dealing with it"

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Throughout this absurd, pointless existence of mine, I have met time and again with people that act like I'm the one who needs to grow up and deal with my problem. I find this both amusing and aggravating. I have an exercise for NTs to help understand what it is like to be an aspie:

Go home, fill up a bathtub full of water, dunk your head underneath until you almost drown, come up for a breath, and then dunk again. Repeat for the rest of your life.

Now, NTs have this weird, wacky notion that you need to occupy most of your time with some "job" or "activity". And they do this. We look at them and wonder to ourselves, "What is the point of this?" They respond, "I don't understand your question. When I occupy all of my time like this, I don't really have to worry about anything because my mind is constantly on some menial task. All I care about is myself and being comfortable. Grow up and start doing it."

So, this is what life is supposed to be - majority of time spent with menial task, occasional "fruits of life" moments, death.

Hooray.

Know how you feel.

You should take a philosophy class...

Go and read about entanglement, existence is a lot weirder than you think.

I used to get told I had an 'attitude problem' - pardon me for being an honest person. mea culpa.

Well, once upon a time there was a reason. Your life actually depended on your ability to find or grow or catch food, and on your ability to protect yourself from predators and the elements. Such things work better in groups. There's safety in numbers, and Many hands make light work. Remember "The Little Red Hen?" That story made sense, back when there was real work to be done.

Then the machines took over, and with them came the Age of BS. There's very little real work left, but no one has bothered to update the work ethic. So, you need to find some way to scam the system.

Ideally, you find your passion and a way to make it your job so that you can pay the bills.

Failing that, you need to grow up, accept the corrupt world as it is, sell your soul, and find your scam.

One way or another, you need to justify your existence.

NT's who say you need to "grow up" have their "heads in the clouds" as they would probably put it. Why grow up when if you do that you see everything that is crap on this planet? Find a passion to Release YOUR Soul so you actually feel like their is a reason to be here (right now I'm writing a story that I can't tell if its any good, but I have to get it out of my system)! I think people who see their is no purpose to life are the ones who may be able to actually find a way to give it purpose. Live & let live...

Be happy you can find a way to see what is important

I can relate.
People seem to be content to do things that don't matter and things that are completely useless until the day that they die. It's just like they are trying to fill in their time while they are waiting for death because apparently jobs, clubs and socializing is all that anyone cares about.

I've thought about this a lot and I've come to the conclusion that living, at least for me, really isn't that great.

They don't know what it's like to be us, and we can't comprehend what it's like to be them, it's like cats and dogs so how the heck can we agree to disagree and move the f on.. yeah buddy.. it reminds me of my son (aspie) daughter (isn't) constantly going back and forth about what's fair and what's not fair both wanting things to be exactly the same though it can never be because they both have very different perspectives it's insane, it's life.

I've said this in a similar post and will more than likely repeat it in other similar posts. When a person insults you, they are usually insulting attributes them posess themselves. When people tell you that you need to grow up, they are actually saying "I am immature, i don't take things seriously, i never get things done, i can't be trusted with responsibility, life sucks, i hate myself".

I certainly understand your veiwpoint though, life is harder for us and some understanding would be nice.

It's actually pretty simple...

If everyone decided that "My job is meaningless, I quit", then the production in our society would come to a halt, every single leisure activity that the newly jobless people partake in would come to a halt, and our standard of living would wither and die. People would starve to death, waiting for someone else to take care of them. If someone thought to themselves "Why should I put the effort into finding food? It's just another meaningless activity that someone else should do for me", most people would tell that person to grow up and deal with their hunger in a productive way.

Some people might not spend hours philosophising about the "WHY" but they still understand the basic concept of "S*** needs to get done".

Simple way of looking at things:

1) People like being alive
2) In order to be alive, you must make sure that you don't die
3) In order to not die, you need to secure resources
4) In order to get resources, you need to put some effort into finding those resources
5) For most people, in modern society, that means earning a living
6) There is the option of receiving social assistance, but for obvious reasons, it should be reserved for a small percentage of the population only

I definitely agree with you on this.


Alright, now show me the agreement I signed stating that I wanted to spend 40 hours a week doing BS. Plenty of people in the upper class are content spending all day sipping chardonnay, spending millions a week from their massive reserves on jewelry and SUVs, and laughing at how badly the middle class is being screwed (in the U.S.) Or maybe that just makes me an ungrateful sod who can't appreciate his wondrous, middle-class paradise of lollipops, chocolate cupcakes and rainbow tie-dye T-shirts.

Maybe I'm being a little unfair. Certainly, we have a sort of agreement that we need to put effort into living. But people treat each other like crap. We aren't friends here. Maybe some guy at work is a prick, or the boss gets to take out his stress on me and my coworkers, or my parents treat me like a dog (what's with that, anyway? parents piss me off more than anyone else) etc. That's life? Maybe people should put more effort into being somewhat respectable to one another.

Hey, I think people with aspergers would be perfectly happy to put effort into life, they would just like to know their effort is going into something worth doing.


I like this post. I think you're going in the right direction with this.

Thanks for the responses, I've read them all.

Last edited by CWhite978 on 21 Jun 2009, 8:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I broadly agree with Katie above; I can think, offhand, of two people I know personally who work when they don't need the money. One does it for pocket-money, and the other (I believe) does it because she wants to help others. Everyone else I know works (so far as I know) for the money to live. However:

Work will be a pleasure,
And work will be a sharing,
When the things we make are born,
Out of beauty and of need!
In a world made whole, (he said)
We all can be creators,
Not winners,
And losers,
In a game of grab and greed.

-Leon Rosselson, of William Morris

Work should certainly not be a meaningless activity, and it does not all consist of "keeping us alive" - art is work too, and in an ideal world - at least, my idea of one - the two should be inseparable.

But that aside, I agree with the sentiment. I do not understand - or rather, I understand, but do not get myself - what people get out of a whole range of ordinary activities that we are supposed to find enjoyable. I don't think, though, that people view these activities as deliberately anodyne. There isn't a consensus that "everyone should find something to waste their time on"; it's more like "everyone should find one of the many pastimes that are popular in our society, that they enjoy, and do that" and we are met with confusion if we would prefer to spend our time doing something different, or when we do not find them enjoyable.

You said it better than I could have. My parents say things like that alot (find something to do, blah blah blah), but I have trouble in seeing the point. I gues that's their way of being helpful. And I actually almost drowned once. Not fun.

We are told from birth that we must work hard at school, go to college and get a good job that pays well. If you don't do that you are a "loser".

We are told that we must compete in meaningless team sports to be a "winner".

But it isn't true. There is nothing stopping you from being a "hippie", building your own mud brick house and making leather belts to sell at the local market.

My son who is AS solved his own problems by becoming a Buddhist monk.