Neurotypical People Confuse Me

Autism has been in the air lately. I know it’s not just me who’s noticed a lot more people openly identifying themselves as autistic, with or without a diagnosis. I don’t really care about whether that sort of thing is ethical or problematic, as most psychiatric diagnoses are kinda fake anyway. 


What interests me is the proliferation of guides that lay out what are supposedly symptoms of autism, which many have criticized as being common human experiences. You prefer being on your own? Autism. Have a hard time making friends? Autism. There are even more absurd examples on TikTok but I’m writing this at work so I can’t look them up right now. Hopefully the reader is in the same corners of the internet I am and gets the picture.


What these guides really make me curious about though, is who the fuck are these supposed neurotypical people? Are there really people out there who have an innate understanding of social rules that they did not have to be taught through either trial and error or by explicit direction? Is that not what the process of childhood is for, to learn social rules? I also think of old stories like Dickens’ Great Expectations or Shaw’s Pygmalion where young people are taught the social rules of a culture they did not grow up in. I feel like we have always needed to be taught how to act and it is anything but natural to seamlessly flow through social situations.


Once you start to notice autism, you start to see it everywhere in everyone. I’m at the point where I’m not 100% sure neurotypical people even exist. If they do, they have left a shockingly minimal impact on world history and literature. I would wager that many of the western canon’s most famous figures could fit the wider diagnosis criteria that is now in fashion (Socrates, Melville, and Schopenhauer immediately come to mind). If I think about where I might meet a neurotypical person, it would be in a crowd for a concert or sports event, but after that meeting it’s like they vanish into the ether. Do they write? Create? Is the neurotypical person, to use the internetpilled vulgar english, an NPC? A sheep?


The way that neurotypical people are talked about, it sounds like they don’t have interests. To the extent that they do, it’s only because other people are interested in it. I have always felt that the best way to meet like-minded people is to go to gatherings where there are other people interested in the same thing you are. I like alternative music and Super Smash Bros, so I attend concerts and tournaments and know that the people there will probably match my vibe. I think of the crowds of people who are supposedly buying tickets to Marvel movies and Tate McRae concerts, and I wonder if it is the art or the crowd that draws them.


This is starting to feel a bit mean, but that’s why I said it’s confusing in the title. I have a hard time aligning my personal views of how a “normal” person acts, and what the neurodivergent community insists is neurotypical behavior. If the internet is to be believed, I don’t know if I’ve ever met a neurotypical person. Either I’ve been very good at avoiding them, or neurotypicality is not as common as we might think.

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