Just wanna go home

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Okay so I work as a deckhand at a ferry company. It is a great job and relatively easy money. The weather can be a pain sometimes-heat, wind, rain, cold, snow, etc but otherwise it is good work. It also sucks when it is busy because that stresses me out. Of course, having Asperger's syndrome, a real probelm is, of course, people and that means both customers and co-workers. Getting the people's fares is not too bad unless we get someone that has a real problem with the prices or something else (and there are quite a few miserable commuters where I work). Yet please understand that this is the type of job where one person can get stuck doing most of if not all the work when other co-workers get to talk and/or goof around. I very often get stuck getting most of the fares since I just want to do my job and not talk to people yet every time I try to voice my opinion I always get yelled at and it ruins my mood for the rest of the day and I can't even sleep when I go home. I will admit that because of who I am I cannot stand up for myself and people have taken advantage of me many times in my life. It has come to the point where I just have to accept this just to stay "safe". As a 31 year old male I still live with my mother and help her out. And although I'd love to move out and start a life of my own, I really don't think I will ever be able to. But I love my life at home and am happiest there, it just seems that almost everyday at work there is something to remind me that things will never change for me. I have never had a girlfriend and pretty much no longer beleive in pairing up or taking any kind of risks at all. I just have to force myself to beleieve that my life is okay and that I should just enjoy the few interests I have for myself. I always know things could be a lot worse but all I really want to say is home=good, work=bad.

You are getting yelled at because you have placed yourself in a submissive position. You must remember that humans are primates and primates have strong social hierarchy tendencies. In lower primates, we see this practices on a far more explicit level. Take monkeys for example. From a low ranking monkey, a higher ranking monkey can take food with little to no resistance. They will literally open the other monkey's mouth and take food out of it. If that monkey were to resist, because the monkey is already low ranking, it will be met with hostility. A monkey ends up as a low ranking money, either by being born to a low ranking monkey or letting another monkey dominate them.

Humans do not express this quite so explicitly. When you do not speak up for yourself from the beginning though, you actually let others dominate you. You make yourself submissive, and when you try to deviate from that situation, humans respond with hostility because that underlying evolutionary circuitry that makes high ranking monkeys hostile to low ranking monkeys, exists in humans.



You are as much in control of change in your life as anyone else is in theirs. Some things about your life you can change, and some things about your life you can't change. You will always have AS, for example, but you can still speak up for yourself a little more. You've simply decided that the risk of doing that outweighs the benefits right now, and maybe that's true and maybe it isn't, depending on the situation you do or don't speak up in.



You are taking no more risks than an NT man on the subject of women, to be quite honest. NT's frequently have relationship problems in the romantic sector, but the potential pay out is worth the risk for most of them. Most NT's are in a few unsuccessful relationships before they find someone who they are compatible with.



If you are happy at home, that's great. But if there are some changes you want to make to your life, I don't think think you should completely write them off.

so if humans are just so many glorified primates, what is the use of associating with them unless one wants to be more like them? just one more reason for me to keep on being a hermit. i reject forced conformity with bullying primates. homelessness would be better than buying in to such a stifling social regime.

Because, really-- what's the alternative?

We are glorified primates. Shakespeare was one, too-- so was Einstein.

We autists are very specialized primates. Our brains are, in fact, the result of a society that increasingly values specialization. We can function best as finely-honed cogs in a vast social machine.

Birdsandbugs, there's a lot of truth in what Chronos says. I think you should goof off more at work. If you don't want to do more than your share of the work, become a bigger part of of the social group. That way, you can also use your work time to develop social skills. Think of the Wrong Planet idea-- we are often alien anthropologists. Figure out what everybody else is doing, and then figure out which of those things you wouldn't mind doing in order to make your life easier. Don't try to do a better job than everyone else-- try to be part of a team where everyone is doing the same job.

Or accept that you would rather just do the work than work on being social. That's a good choice, too. But accept that you are making a choice.

Personally I wish we weren't primates at all, in fact, not even animals. I have many fantasies concerning the fact that maybe DNA was put here by some evil power and maybe we were never suppposed to be organic at all. Maybe we used to be an immortal and powerful race that got cursed or infected with DNA. Before that, we reveled in solitude and our own desires but are now forced to subscribe to a social primate agenda where we are controlled to beleive that grouping together and pairing off is the only key to happiness. Maybe we aspies are "awakening" to some kind of truth that the rest of humanity isn't aware of. Maybe we are the remnants of a great race of superbeings. These are some of the things I often think of when I want to "escape". Oh well, I guess I'll just have to make the best of being human for now. Only time will tell what the future holds...

Possibly, possibly. It does sound like a difficult situation where you are viewed as the low-person on the totem pole.

'I'm just here to do my job.'

That kind of statement is extremely hard to argue with.

'Okay. However, you want to look at it.'

You're not letting them bait you into an argument.

That combined with getting there 5 to 8 minutes early, and being a steady eddie, you're not trying to be a superstar. A woman who worked at a Chrysler plant in the early 1970s told me, "Everyone was high except the Christians and the Communists," and that's the way many people approach their jobs. If they're not drunk, high, stoned, hungover, whatever, they might just as well be, for what little effort they're putting into the job (then when I talk about philosophic things, or things that could obviously improve the job often just to get it off my chest, that often goes over like a lead balloon; people don't like even implied criticism, anything that can be viewed as even criticism)

'hey, just doing my job'

Keep it very simple and straightforward.

Okay, please keep in mind that there is 10% unemployment and the standard advice that it's easier to find a job with a job. On the plus side, experience is the coin of the realm. Look for a job that's a step up, that's more interesting and that pays more, no guarantees, but you might be pleasantly surprised.

Actually social interaction is quite crucial in survival of a species; since each humans brain capacity is so much larger than any other animals, our abilities are greatly amplified through social interaction and collaboration. For example otters work together to fight off common enemies and ants work with each other to build their vast underground networks as well as hunt and kill their food....but when humans work together we create towns, economies, armies, social structures etc. Human talents are amplified 100 fold because each human being is so much more capable than say a dog or otter. Those animals seem to be just social enough to survive, not to make any advancements. some primates have yet another jump in brain capacity from otters and such to where they can make tools to help each individual animal to excel- they do not however have the brain capacity to use that knowledge to make complex defensive or offensive weapons or tactics or plan out the future. they still exist in the moment with no ambitons of saving up wood they find to maybe build a home or gather rocks for a wall.

Social collaboration is in fact probably the very thing that allowed our species to dominate the planet in the first place- we could never hunt down saber tooth tigers and mammoths on our own, the hunter gather's had to form hunting parties most likey to bring home their dinner as well as form foraging parties for their veggies. Sure an individual could choose to go out foraging on his or her own but if 30 people fanned out in all directions the chances of finding more is multiplied just by the sheer number of foragers moving about in a grid fashion. Imagine that social animals like gorillas have the value of 1 each and that humans have the value of say 5 (because we can think abstractly, plan things, mediate without violence etc adding to each humans value). Ten gorillas could work together and find enough food for 10 days because 10x1 = 10. If Ten humans worked together they could potentially find 50 days worth of food because 10x5 = 50. Obviously the humans wouldnt find an abundance of food everytime but the chances of it are much higher because humans can figure out patterns at which animals migrate or when certain plants are in season. With the ability to gather more food comes an increased population, which in turn obviously increases control over more things...now humans are able to control the weather and leave the planet. A trillion gorillas would never be able to do that.