Allaying loneliness

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I might use this title, but it’s too simple. Everybody has to allay loneliness. NTs as they are called here have this problem too, and they often cope with it in haphazard ways: a wife and children, relatives, all sort of people in the work place. There is not a deliberate cultivation and maintenance of selective friendships. There is a policy of “anything goes” in a society in which in a sense everyone is a loner. It’s not necessary to lean towards autism to suffer from isolation: “the lonely crowd” as someone called it.
For people who participate in these forums, the problem is much more difficult, even if the strategies are partially the same, with a stronger reliance on relatives, I suppose. Relatives feel some sort of obligation to keep some contact with you even if they don’t understand you at all, they will never be able to relive your experience and your suffering. With them you may reciprocate, more than with others, by “pretending to be normal” the best you can. The obligation they feel towards you is something conventional; so you play the game and you stay conventional. Sometimes they are nice people and it’s not too bad.
Then there are other avenues: movies, books, papers, the web and the microinteractions of everyday life. The baker where you buy your bread may be a beautiful person and you appreciate it even if you can’t and don’t pretend to expand that kind of ties.
Sometimes relatives do not exist at all, or do not exist anymore.
As for me, what I am trying to do is to elaborate a strategy to make the most of the small social space that is possible. To make an “intensive farming”, so to speak of these spaces. This may appear awfully vague for now. I will try to explain better if I have the chance. Here I want only to say that we should avoid compromise a dispersion. This also is vague, but I might find some help in your posts and focus better.

The loneliness of the autistic is unique, but as you have pointed out, modern society does tend to isolate everyone even as we are forced into smaller and tighter living spaces. Being autistic has meant that I have never felt integrated into any group, even my family. Hence, being around people does not alleviate my sense of loneliness. Rather, it accentuates that acute feeling of isolation. Never is it clearer that others will not understand what I am going through then when I am trying to explain to them the problems that I face. This is particularly so for Asperger Syndrome because we show little outward sign of any discernable difference aside from our “bad” behavior.

Practically everyone, even the most understanding and enlightened ones, want to tell me not to do the things that I seem to want to do. Those who are not so friendly find other ways of letting me know that they do not appreciate my idiosyncrasies, as I am certain members of this forum are aware of.

Do you really believe that NTs are any more capable of escaping the solitude of mind than we are? I tend to think that they are simply more able to convince themselves that there is a connection between them and others. It is quite possible that the genuine affection which Jane Austen wrote about has never existed amongst men. Austen, who was autistic, would be someone who longed for that true bond. And it took someone like her to write about it and explain to the world what it is they ought to be looking for. The appeal of Austen’s books only goes to illustrate just how much of a hole exists in all our hearts. When they understand what it is, NTs are just as liable to say “I am alone”.

Pardon my digression, but I have to ask this: Jane Austen was autistic? I've never heard that before. Who says so, and how did he/she reach that conclusion? I would never have thought that based on her writing or what I know of her life, which admittedly is not a tremendous amount. But then, I wouldn't have tagged Jefferson, either, but if what I've read in "Diagnosing Jefferson" is correct, I'm inclined to think he was. So I'm open-minded, but curious.

As for loneliness, that's a major issue for me and one I'm trying very hard to come to terms with. I'll wait to read more comments before adding anything, though, because I'm still feeling my way.

Maximizing the utility and significance of whatever is available seems as sensible an approach as any. I feel there is little I can contribute; I have given up, never having found anything I could do or any perspective I can hold that made any difference at all. I only wait for the end of my days to bring whatever comes next. Unfortunately I have been cursed with good health, so it may be a long wait.
I'll be interested to hear if you find anything that works at all in your own life.

Try Googling Austen and autism, a long list will pop up. Like with the many famous and dead personalities, proving that Jane Austen is autistic is impossible; but the evidence seems to suggest that she was.

I brought her up because she wrote most poignantly about loneliness. Her words “genuine affection” captures the sense of truth that we all seek in our relations with other people. There can be no meeting of minds unless both parties are truthful to one another. Where minds do not meet, you are essentially alone even when you are physically with someone else.

I would argue that the sense of loneliness that “afflicts” the autistic is different from the kind of loneliness experienced by NTs. Autistics experience loneliness as a symptom of their autism, whereas NTs experience loneliness as a sort of sensory deprivation. NTs are used to the constant stimulation human beings naturally provide to one another. When that is missing, they start to feel lonely. Since autistics are “immune” from such social interactions, we view loneliness from the analytical point of view gained from watching the casual pleasure of people stimulating one another. But the sort of low level, bilateral stimulation that most NTs undertake is not the “genuine affection” that Jane Austen was writing about. The problem is that we tend to take it to mean that it is.

Are Jane Austen’s standards achievable? It’s probably a matter of luck than ability. And even then, we can all observe that it does not always last; assuming that we get our assumptions right and the two people we are observing are really in love. What we have as autistic is the power of our mind. The capacity and the need to think through the presuppositions imposed on us by an all powerful media and all pervasive culture. Is it that bad to be lonely? I do not think so. Is that not the essential condition of all men?

A parenthesis about Jane Austen, because it struck a very sensitive chord in me. Austen has always been one of my favourite authors, before I knew of AS and of being Austen AS. I have read three times Mansfield Park, took notes and wanted to write something about this novel.I will take it up again and reread in this perspective. Last time I read was more than a decade ago.
I remember that Fanny, who is adopted, and has no status in the new family, is subject to all sorts of attacks and slights from the people around her. Her policy is one of freezing and playing dead (in an ethological sense) and observe all the weak points of the group of people she leves in (and there are many) to make some moves (like in a chess game) when others are unaware of her being in the game more than anybody else. In the environment of half demented or absent people she lives in, she comes out triumphant as "the queen". Her weapon has been a silent understanding and cold determination. All the novels of J.A. are like chess games. J.A. is tough minded as no other author, also in the fact that she succeds in presenting her novels as sentimental stories, while they are a very different stuff.
I apologize for having talked of J.A. I will take later the other problems.
As for AS and Italy and France: in Italy there has been a long censure about psychoanalysis because of fascism and the jewishness of psychoanalysis. When the regime fell in 43-45 psychoanalysis came out with a revenge on occupied a disproportionate space. As for cognitivists they arrived late in a situation of backwardness and sloppyness. There are some good scholars but they are generally isolated and have no grip on the officialdom of psychiatry and medicine. Moreover Italy has been the country where for a certain time (the 70s) madness was proclaimed as an invention of the rulers to emarginate disturbing people, which may have some truth in it but is certainly not the whole truth. In France there is this absurd domination of lacanism.

Chain of thoughts.
To avoid the tormenting noise of a drill over my ceiling, I went today to see a movie, which I knew was bad (“Miami vice”), but I couldn’t stand the noise. So it was this action film. I never see action films but I stayed for a while. The only thought it provoked in me was this: people do all these things (drive dangerously fast cars and motor boats, bargain with drug dealers, DEA agents, FBI operatives, gang chiefs, seduce wives and friend girls of mobsters) for what? To get money and buy costly houses and live there in high style consumption. To put up such strenuous and risky efforts requires a sane ego. I don’t have doubts that these people may have enough of them (sane egos). It is not effort and risk that need sane egos; it’s consumption that requires sane egos, at least when it is more conspicuous than necessary. Somewhere in a letter Kafka, who was terribly ascetic, cited the legend of Diogenes who, living in a barrel, and being visited by Alexander the Great, only asked him to move over a bit, not to cover the sun. Well, Kafka said, Diogenes and me are the sick men, who cannot appreciate the visit of such a great man, and whose only desire is to warm ourselves in the sun. Kafka was literally starved to death, because of inflation and famine in Berlin where he lived the last period of his life. One of his last stories is “The hunger artist”. The man is employed by an impresario as a performer in fasting. Later, as the public interest in this art declines he ends up performing in a circus and being replaced in his cage by a panther that was all too eager to eat and “its joy of living came with such strong passion from its throat”. Kafka envied crass consumers of food and other goods, but he “couldn’t find a food |he| enjoyed”.
If you like you can find “The hunger artist” in http://www.lundwood.u-net.com/ahunga.htm . But caution: it’s not a fairy tale. Kafka is considered a blatant case of As. In his "Letter to Father" he attributed his inability to live his father's overbearing sway in his life. But this very questionable. Kafka was also a vegetarian most of his life, but often said he envied meat eaters, as also appears in the "Hunger artist" story.