Janissy wrote:
Quote:
* Your social life would suffer. If your obsession started young then you would never learn basic social skills.
No. And here's where obsessed NTs diverge from obsessed AS people (AS meaning anywhere on the autism spectrum, so as not to make this just about Aspies). Obsessed NTs still have the intense NT need for socialization and will attempt to combine their obsession with social experiences. In childhood, this means attempting to convert your friends to the obsession.
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Their voices are never monotonous. If anything, the pitch and cadence varies even more dramatically when they are talking about their obsession.
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You would desperately search out social groups that shared your obsession and when you found them (and you always would), you would be bound to them like glue. You are underestimating the NT need for socialization and thinking it will go away when an obsession comes into place. But it doesn't. Instead, the obsession drives
who you socialize with. An obsessed NT will not rest until they have found others who share that obsession and who they can socialise with.
That is brilliant. Very insightful. You are exactly right. That is the piece of the puzzle that I was missing.
When I was a child and formulated my life's goal - to understand why there is poverty and find a way to fix it - it seemed obvious to me that this could best be achieved alone: it would require a massive feat of concentration and correlation over many years, and a group could not be reliably standardized for that long.
I never understood why nobody else came to the same conclusion. but you have hit the nail on the head. Over the years I have met other people who care about global poverty, but their solution is ALWAYS to join a group. To me this was a fatal flaw: immediately the group becomes concerned with its own survival, and also dumbs down to the lowest common denominator. This group-think mentality is crazy to me. These people all claim to care about global poverty, yet they will never take the obvious first step - go away and become entirely independent, then focus, focus, focus.
I suppose this is why I see aspergers as sometimes morally superior to NT: aspies will focus on the problem, whereas NTs will ALWAYS place socializing pleasures above all other considerations.
Now I finally understand why NTs seem so wrong to me.
Janissy, you are a genius.
Seems to me, that, on the contrary, socializing is absolutely essential to solving the problem of global poverty. Or any problem that requires cooperation of lots of other people to implement the solution. If you have no social connections, there's no one to listen to your brilliant solution, and so it won't ever be more than a theoretical solution. It won't ever be implemented, because no one will have any reason to listen to you.
17 May 2011, 6:59 pm
