Stop Me If You've Heard This Before

“Just be nice,” “try asking questions,” “be yourself,” “be more charismatic,” “interested people are interesting”… 

While well-intentioned, these phrases are little more than empty platitudes. They provide almost no real insight for someone who doesn’t already know how to do these things.

For anyone trying to climb the mountain of social success, the journey often looks like this:

  1. Realize that, for some reason, no one seems to want to talk to you.
  2. Ask friends, family, teachers, or others how they cultivate friendships.
  3. Hear the same empty platitudes, which offer no real understanding or actionable advice.
  4. Feel frustrated with a world that treats you like an outcast and offers no meaningful help.
  5. Turn to books, guides, courses, or experts who claim to explain social skills.
  6. Spend countless hours discovering that these resources either don’t offer useful knowledge or fail to communicate it effectively.
  7. Start to feel angry. What are they hiding?
  8. Eventually, many people just give up.

The underlying problem is deceptively simple: socially successful people have an internal guidebook for navigating interactions, but they’re usually unaware of it. It’s largely unconscious. I’ve yet to meet a neurotypical person who can confidently articulate the beliefs and understandings that contribute to their success. Sure, they’ll throw out guesses like “be funny,” “be confident,” or the ever-useless “just be yourself.”

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: neurotypical society is built on unspoken rules and collective pretenses. It rarely operates from a purely rational perspective—it works because everyone plays along. No one will outright tell you this because it’s too unsettling. 

Socially successful people lean on societal pretenses in a very specific way, they play along with the widespread cognitive dissonance.

The evidence is everywhere. Take homelessness in the U.S., for example. The public constantly declares, “Someone REALLY needs to do something about this homelessness problem!” Government officials hear this and sometimes attempt solutions, but no matter the approach, they face backlash and fail to solve homelessness.

If this issue were addressed from a purely rational perspective, the steps would be obvious:

  1. Identify the root causes of homelessness.
  2. Develop a plan to fix the root causes.
  3. Solve the problem.

Yet, homelessness persists and worsens. Why? Because people are largely fine with widespread suffering—as long as it doesn’t affect them. Admitting that out loud would make them sound monstrous, so they don’t.

Anyone who takes the time to point this out is met with apathy or anger. There are no successful politicians that run on "solving societal hypocrisy by objectively reducing widespread human suffering using the most rational approach derived from the scientific method". If humans were really objective on any level, and did what they say, this position would be incredibly compelling.

Here’s the point: if you try to process the written and unwritten rules of neurotypical society through a purely rational lens, you’ll drive yourself insane.

But here’s the good news: once you understand the mental framework neurotypical people operate from, interacting with them successfully becomes much easier.

I’m speaking from experience. I’ve gone from being relentlessly bullied in school with no friends to building a wide friend group, marrying a neurotypical woman, raising a family, and holding a well-paying white-collar job (without a college degree).

If you’re reading this, know that you’re not alone. People worldwide struggle with this, and some of us figure it out.

The goal of this project is to create an operating manual for neurodivergent people to navigate the neurotypical world. If I’d had such a resource when I was younger, it would have saved me a decade of anger, frustration, loneliness, depression, and apathy.

My hope is to build a place for people like me that have figured things out to share that knowledge and open the door to a happier future for a long neglected community.

Stay tuned.