YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

I'm an 18 year old aspergian. I feel that that in itself is why I am in the place I am. My social skills are positively awful and have lead to extremes of isolation and depression.

Hello Ancap,

I also am on the Asperger spectrum, and have challenges from depression and social anxiety.

I can only speak from my own biography. I had to work very hard on dating to have a very limited dating experience. I am married now inside of a 9+ year relationship. I am 40 years old now, at 25 years old I had a breakdown from shame and anxiety around never having had a normal dating and relationship experience, among other reasons.

Mentally preparing myself for the most crushing forms of dating rejection was the main way I moved forward - I decided to sacrifice the part of my ego that cared about about such rejection, and thus take every rejection as a step closer to a successful relationship. I also changed my definition of a "successful relationship" to anything that was a growing experience for me that also respected the female - even if it was not socially defined as a "successful relationship". And since I had fantasies about a woman breaking through my social anxiety and seeing what was good in me, I turned that around and made it my responsibility to see beyond the surface into what was good inside about the women I might meet. And I forced myself to trust, and to be vulnerable, and to take risks, and be hurt badly. I stopped hanging around guys who might insult women I would choose to date because those women were not considered attractive by a very narrow social convention - those guys are jerks, nothing lost by dropping them from my life.

Remembering that, in life, you can only trade one set of problems for another, hopefully better, set of problems. Now I have the problems of being married: fighting, negotiating sexy-times in a hectic two-income household, challenges of fatherhood, responsibilities of being a lifelong provider, etc. It is a better set of problems, I would not go back to my old way of being.

Remembering that, I am not defined by the failures of my relationships - no matter what happens, I learn and move forward.

I wouldn't wish the pain and isolation of my years 18-25 on anyone. Please don't waste time like I did - it is much easier to start at age 18 than at age 25. I don't know if what I typed about my biography helped you, but no matter what, please take care, because we are all cheering for you.

Hi Aaron,

Welcome to the forum. I'm not saying I know exactly what it's like to be in your shoes, and I may be missing the point of Asperger, but I do struggle terribly interacting with people. This forum has been good for me because I can slow down my communication and really think about what I'm saying and how it might come across. It's very hard for me to tell when something I say or write is going to offend, or hurt, or anger someone. But I know I have a lot in common with people in this forum and it seems to be a natural way for me to open up. I hope it's the same way for you.

Cheers,
Dan

Ancap Aaron,
Welcome to the forum. I hope you find this to be a safe place to talk about whatever is bothering you. Hang in there.

Paul

I does the best I can. The main problem for me isn't getting connected to people, its really that I never feel truly like I belong no matter where I go largely due to the internalized isolation caused by my Asperger's, but also because I am, as my name implies, an anarchocapitalist. This makes it so that I react to basically any pro-tax, pro-regulation, pro-public solution, pro-restriction (basically all statists, left or right) the same way I would react to anyone who wanted to pay any old hitman to come and steal from me. Maybe this isn't exactly tactful, but when threatened it is very hard to be 'diplomatic'

Ancap Aaron wrote:...but also because I am, as my name implies, an anarchocapitalist.

Marcus Aurelius - Book One wrote:From my governor, to be neither of the green nor of the blue party at the games in the Circus, nor a partizan either of the Parmularius or the Scutarius at the gladiators' fights...

With anything political, I have been working to get rid of my "political news junkie" monkey on my back, and to cool it with partisan or political theory affiliations - it can be an energy and time drain like fanatical rooting for a sports team and introduce needless super-fan aggression and conflict.

I realize that I only have so much time and energy, and I cannot waste even a second, because I have so much work to improve myself to get my desired accomplishments and goals and fulfill my responsibilities. And it is so difficult to change myself, even though I have perfect knowledge and perfect alignment of goals and perfect leverage because I will get all the gains - it is so difficult to change myself, why would I waste time trying to change another, and why would I think I would be able to change another?

I would rather increase my ability to provide value that has demand in the marketplace so I can be well compensated for my energy and time, and by not living extravagantly and keeping my "needs" small, having extra money and extra flexibility so I can make financial and time investments to improve the world to match my morality.

Because my external political extra-curricular activities were more about distracting myself from doing self-improving work that would take me out of my comfort zone so I could increase my comfort zone and capability. And amusing myself as I sank deeper and deeper into a dangerous situation with regards to my mood and my sense of hope. Actually, it is dangerous stuff if you are not correctly judging if it is working for you, or if you are working for it.

Take all this with a grain of salt, because I can only speak from my own experience. All the best, cheers!

While I do see your point. I guess that for me as opposed to any other political philosophy, the state itself is not just evil but completely unnecessary and if you believe in taxation I view it as you essentially want to put a gun to my head and pull the trigger BAM! unless I give you X% of my money.

Forgive me, please indulge me, Aaron. I am writing this not to try to make you wrong, or even to try to change your view. Actually, I will type out this to help myself, because I am struggling with this today.

The context is that arguments could trigger me to defend part of my ego with the same intensity as defending my life or my body. In high school, to my shame, I once got in a fist fight over a debate over evolution! My evil violent temper has made me do so many things I am ashamed of, things escalated because I felt threatened to the utmost degree. I would be lying if I said that time in high school was the last time I acted so shamefully, or that I stopped acting so shamefully once I became a fully functional adult.

I listen to podcasts, and in two instances lately political discussions have inflamed me to the point where I was practicing arguments over and over in my head. What really bothered me was that it was in total violation of decisions I had made in the executive-control part of my brain.

This is the intellectual understanding I currently have. To be effective, you have to divide people into "good/evil" "worthy/unworthy" "right/wrong". But the second you do, you begin to confuse the "identification of good" with actual "goodness", confuse the "identification of evil" with actual "evil", etc. That confusion will only grow, until you will, with good intentions but with terrible consequence, eventually defend repugnant behavior and denigrate enlightened behavior through stupid tribal thinking, and then the contradictions will cause the whole system of distinctions to collapse with great harm.

So you have to do something to be an effective human, and that thing you must do will eventually painfully collapse. So what to do?

The best a human can do to reconcile the contradictions is to go ahead and make the distinctions of "good/evil" "worthy/unworthy" "right/wrong", but look for mitigating factors always, and admit imperfect knowledge, and qualify the statements, as much as you can and still stay effective.

So the people that said things I found politically repugnant and evil, I had to force myself to admit that these were successful intelligent people creating value in the world, and that these people were a blessing to many many people in their lives of all manner of situation not just tribal affiliation, and that my energies were not well spent practicing debates in my head, but working myself to create value in my own life, and my being a blessing to people in my own life in all manner of situation not just tribal affiliation.

My nature makes me fail in doing this again and again, so I have to stay vigilant. This failing of mine really robs me of time and energy that could be used better to improve myself.

Doing this successfully doesn't mean losing the ability to judge "good/evil" "worthy/unworthy" "right/wrong", because losing this ability outright immediately robs you of effectiveness you need to be a moral actor. But then it is well-tempered, and then it work for you, and you do not work for it.

That is simply the unique position I am in. Inside the paradigm of the state there are no universal moralities. But in voluntarism/anarchism/total freedom there is a universal morality that what is considered wrong for one person to do (murder, steal, etc.) it is just as evil for a group to do (the state)

manuel_moe_g wrote:This is the intellectual understanding I currently have. To be effective, you have to divide people into "good/evil" "worthy/unworthy" "right/wrong". But the second you do, you begin to confuse the "identification of good" with actual "goodness", confuse the "identification of evil" with actual "evil", etc. That confusion will only grow, until you will, with good intentions but with terrible consequence, eventually defend repugnant behavior and denigrate enlightened behavior through stupid tribal thinking, and then the contradictions will cause the whole system of distinctions to collapse with great harm.

This seems akin to the idea that there is a difference between evil people and people who do evil things, between stupid people and people who do stupid things, and so forth. I have heard lines like this every now and then throughout my life, but the first time I really gave this idea full consideration was about 6 months ago. There was a nice exercise in a book I was working with where the reader was encouraged to try to define what it means to be a "worthless" or "inferior" person. The logic seems to hold up for any global label that I might try to apply to myself or someone else. If you haven't already come across such an exercise, I would highly recommend it. (Ten Days to Self-Esteem, Burns)

Dan