Introverts won’t be cast as demons, creatures you despise. Except when trolling forums.

Today’s title is of course from the awesome song by Garbage. (Here on YouTube, although I have bought it on Google Music.) I have sometimes wondered if this would not be a good “national anthem” for Aspies (people with Aspergers syndrome, or more generally on the high-functioning part of autism spectrum). It certainly sound like it, although it is probably unintentional – it is hard to imagine Aspies going into the popular music career willingly. Anyway, I am only half Aspie. There is also religion, which I also clearly experience differently from most humans.

As I promised in my previous entry, I am going to say something about the MOOC (online university course) “The Science of Happiness” from Berkeley and the Greater Good Science Center. Ironically the title is the same as a book by Ryuho Okawa, the Japanese author who gradually has begun to think of himself as “God or Buddha”. I guess that is an occupational risk. Anyway, the book was better, at least in the regard that it did not bombastically declare that people need a lot of friends to be happy. Rather the record-breaking author and would-be god from Venus holds the same view that me, that happiness comes from within, or from Heaven, which isn’t really two different things in this regard.

In contrast, let us look at this semi-mandatory quiz that appears in week 2 of the university course. It starts with this “what the hell” inducing question:

When I feel lonely, there are several people offline that I can talk to.
I clicked “Strongly disagree”, but it is more than that. The whole question is off. When I feel lonely? Uhm, yeah, that’s been about 5 minutes, perhaps 10, over the years since I left my birth home at the age of 15, a bit over 40 years ago now. I won’t say categorically that I can’t be lonely if I am without human company (online of offline or simulated). Just that it is not a “when” in my life. To me the question reads approximately like “When I miss having a raccoon in my living room, there are several raccoons outside that I can let in.” Not that there is anything wrong with raccoons, some of my best friends (online) self-identify as raccoons. And there is Rocket Raccoon … but back to our narrative.

The rest of the quiz is not quite as bad, but it certainly seems to presuppose that much of your “self” does not reside in your own head but is distributed across a wide range of other humans, who help you make decisions, solve your problems and influence what you are interested in. Unfortunately this seems to be an apt description of humans. Obviously when you are small, this must necessarily and literally be true. As a toddler you cannot understand yourself. But we aren’t supposed to remain toddlers.

The course goes into the idea that our evolutionary history explains the “hypersocial” nature of humans. The helpless infants and long childhood made it necessary to have strong family ties, close friendships and many connections to the rest of the tribe in order to successfully bring children up to become adults in their own right. We are not like sheep, who only need to eat and hide in the pack in order to grow up and make more sheep who grow up and make more sheep. Making a human is a whole adventure and it takes a village, as socialists like to say. (Conservatives think that it takes a family, which in my experience certainly doesn’t hurt. Well, I suppose if is a really evil family, the village is preferable.)

It is weird how people say the appendix is a relic of our evolutionary past and want to remove it, but when hypersociality (hypersocialism?) is a relic of our evolutionary past, they want to make it mandatory. At least the appendix doesn’t hurt unless it is inflamed. Loneliness hurts day and night, from what I heard. Shouldn’t they funnel research into how to make people more autistic? For now, the only known method is to make the next generation more autistic by having kids with an autist. Not that I am volunteering or anything, I am only half Aspie after all.

But as I said, this is not simply a matter of genes. It would be cool if Aspies are the new breed of man, Homo Superior, which is set to replace the primitive Homo Sapiens the way these replaced their grunting ancestors. A beautiful narrative. But it seems far-fetched that the Buddha, Lao-Tzu, and the innumerable saints and sages of the great world religions were all Aspies. They were filled with happiness even during prolonged solitude, and even in adversity where those around them resisted their message and responded with anger, threats and outright violence. Clearly it was not their friendships and social network that carried them through these times, unless you count their Invisible Friends.

It takes a lot of friends on Earth to substitute for one Friend in Heaven.

So being surrounded by family and friends can make people happy, but being alone can also make people happy. I sometimes say that “Evolutionary Psychology is the science of explaining why whatever is popular in the USA this decade is the natural state of humans and the rest of the world has got it wrong”, or words to that effect. And Americans are extraordinarily extroverted by most measures. It is not a country known for its monasteries, exactly. And not really for its happiness either. I mean, sure, compared to the developing world. But on a “happiness per dollar” scale, they fare very poorly indeed. Perhaps a little more peace and quiet would do them good.

The foe I face is inside of me…

I grew up in the age of the gramophone (also called phonograph, in America perhaps). Kids today may not know exactly what that was, but it was the thing before the audio CD, which I think most people in 2014 remember, even though music is now a download or streaming thing from the Internet. The music cassette also came (and went) during my lifetime, but this too was crushed by the Internet. Everything is crushed by the Internet, is it not? Even television now merges with the Internet the way the lamb merges with the wolf. In the case of television, good riddance. In the case of the gramophone…

There was a vinyl disc with literal physical grooves etched into it in a spiral pattern. A motor made the disc spin at a constant speed. A tiny needle, called a pickup needle, picked up the vibrations from the bottom of the groove which varied marginally in height. These vibrations were basically sound, it only needed to be amplified. (The grooves were made in the reverse process, etching the pattern into a soft master disk with a needle that vibrated with sound.) It was a fairly robust technology, in that it did not really need electronics at all to work, although the sound would be rather weak without an amplifier.

The gramophone was almost exclusively used for music, but only almost. We also had one or two disks with fairy tales for children. (I was not a fan of fairy tales, generally. My mother told me that when I was little, she tried to tell me fairy tales and I looked at her and asked: Is this true? And when she admitted it was not literally true, I asked her to tell me something from her childhood instead. Evidently I was a lot more mature as a toddler than I am now! ^_^) I liked technology, though, so I would listen to the fairy tales on the gramophone. And one in particular, about Snow White.

We kids replayed the Snow White story so often that eventually the cheap plastic disk got a scratch in it. This scratch, as sometimes happened with gramophones, made the needle jump back. Remember that the sound groove followed a spiral pattern inwards, so a strategically placed scratch could let the needle slip back out one or two rounds. As it happened, this took place at the exact spot where the narrator intoned:
“The evil queen thought only of herself”
and the needle then jumped back:
only of herself
only of herself
only of herself
infinitely until we gave the pickup a push to get it past the damaged part.

My earthly father – a much better man than I – had the insight to point out to us kids that this was exactly how it worked in real life as well. Evil people are stuck in the same groove of thinking only of themselves, only of themselves, only of themselves, only of themselves, without limit. That is what makes them evil in the first place.

I still found it hilarious though, and would put on the record just to sit and listen to the evil queen thinking only of herself, only of herself while I laughed my little ass off. Little did I know that I was the same type of person myself.

Decades have passed. I am 55 years now, and looking back on a life where I have, for the most part, been thinking only of myself, only of myself, only of myself, except for the few times when someone or something briefly pushed me through. But I would soon return to concentrating on the one person in my life that I have truly loved: Myself! I love me so much, I cannot imagine a life without me. ^_^

Some day however, that’s what’s going to happen – life will go on without me. The record of my life will grind to a halt, having never been able to tell the story it could have told, because of the scratch that made me stuck in this groove – thinking only of myself
only of myself
only of myself

But I hope there’s someone out there who has been entertained, at least!

“Maybe your finger muscles are just shriveling up because you don’t have anyone to text?” I can do better than that, Yui: My throat is actually shriveled up because I have barely talked for so many years. And it still isn’t enough, it seems:

“Not alone as in single, or alone as in lonely, but alone as if my life in this world is a single-player game” was how I put it in my imaginary diary.

Yes, I have written imaginary diaries about my daydreams with dice. The dice, as long-time readers might have remembered, are supposed to cause a certain level of randomness in the story. By and large, I strive for realism except for the few (sometimes just one) specific change that separates the story in my mind from real life. The current reboot has basically just one change: In it, I have the ability of mental time travel, to send my mind back in time to an earlier point in time. The length of how far back I can go increases with practice. The balancing force is that the past is not really altered: Once the past catches up with the present, it disappears and I find myself in Real Time again, the altered past simply a pocket dimension leaving no trace except in my own mind.

So yeah, I am kind of daydreaming about daydreaming, I guess? Only more elaborately.

Having traveled back in time to late 2009, it is now early 2011 and my imaginary self has mainly been studying Go (the Asian board game). And that is when my imaginary self wakes up one day and asks: “Have you noticed something weird about this story? I am alone. Not alone as in single, or alone as in lonely, but alone as if my life in this world  is a single-player game”.

So I am sitting here alone and daydreaming about being alone all over again, a kind of near unlimited groundhog years. (I refer of course to the movie “Groundhog Day”, which is one of the few movies I can watch repeatedly, although not every day!) If I had unlimited time, it seems I would spend it reading books, playing games, learning new skills. Alone. The more I am freed from my constraints, the more I seek solitude. Year after year of being alone, is what I dream of.

I have a feeling that this is not exactly normal. Or even a good thing, as such. But it is not a suffering. It is, as I just stated, something I daydream about, something that feels relaxing and natural to me. I’ve never heard of anything like this before, but I bet it is more common that I have thought. Perhaps it is just that most who feel that way, eventually disappear from view and live out their lives outside our horizon of attention.

We say that humans are social animals, but perhaps we only see those who are. We are necessarily the children of those who did not prefer to live and die alone. Well, even I would perhaps not go that far. I feel a moral obligation to pay back to humanity or civilization for the benefits that have been given to me. But I’d love to take a few years vacation from people now and then, if that had been possible … but it only is in my dreams.

“Not to brag, but I’ve got a talent for fantasizing.” As a neurotypical human, you probably don’t need meticulous text files, spreadsheets and dice to maintain the integrity of your fantasies. Wait, do human fantasies even have integrity? And why don’t I know for sure?

If I have been failing to update my journal regularly, it is not because I have been lost in prayer, alas, but quite the opposite: Because I have been lost in unusually intricate daydreams.

I have come to understand that a favorite brain activity of neurotypical humans is to daydream of what could have been if they were able to change some event of the past. I am led to believe that this happens spontaneously, or very nearly so. But I am not a purebred neurotypical, I come from a family where autistic genes have run for at least three generations now. Judging from self-observation, I probably have a few of them myself, although I am not a purebred Aspie either. More of a half-breed, I guess. But daydreaming is one of the things that is probably different. I strongly doubt there are many neurotypical humans who use spreadsheets or dice in their daydreaming.

I am told that autists don’t daydream, but I do. Sort of. Lately, I have done a great deal of time traveling in my mind, branching off from various times in my past, creating alternate time lines with various differences from the original. I have written down summaries of a number of these in text files, one file for each major timeline. I have a spreadsheet in which I track a parameter of divergence. I roll three 6-sided dice to simulate randomness in some of the outcomes. That’s just the way I roll! ^_^

In the online superhero comic Mindmistress, my old acquaintance Al Schroeder wrote about a mentally challenged young woman who became super-intelligent through a technology developed by her late mother. After the heroine learned about role-playing games, her super-intellect created an interior world into which she disappeared and almost didn’t escape alive. As a father of two full-scale autistic sons, Schroeder probably had an idea of what he was talking about. One theory of autism is that it is not a lack, but a superabundance of brain activity, amplifying normal stimuli beyond what ordinary people experience. In favor of this theory is the fact that the brains of autistic infants grow faster than those of neurotypicals of the same age.

Luckily, I too survived my immersion in my elaborate daydream, although I was at some risk, and may still be. There are still timelines I would wish to revisit, if I think I can do so safely. And I still have my spreadsheet and my dice at hand. But for now, I write this entry.

I myself, like my sim, is unlikely to do things like this without being clicked on.

On The Hungersite (which does not actually try to promote hunger, but alleviate it) you may sometimes notice the text “Thank you for clicking.” But to me this has a different meaning as well. It is for my guardian angel, or whoever it is who is watching over me.

When I play The Sims 3, my small electronic people have a will of their own, but it is pretty basic. They can keep themselves alive and employed, usually. If they are hungry, they make food and eat it. If they are sleepy, they go to sleep (especially in the night) or take a nap. If they are lonely, they speak to someone in the house. If they don’t have anything else to do, they seek fun. Computer games, musical instruments, books or painting. (If made in my image, usually computer games.)

But by themselves, they don’t achieve their wants, except by accident. Perhaps they wake up with a want to make a meal, and eventually at some time during the day they get hungry and make a meal. But more advanced goals, not to mention their lifetime aspiration, is beyond them. They need me to click on them or on some object they can use to work toward their goals. And often they need me to click on their action queue to cancel something useless they intend to do.

It’s much the same way with me. I have this tendency too, to just live in the moment and do whatever seems pressing at the time. Which may be fine if it is the bladder that seems pressing, but not if I spend the whole day playing The Sims 3. There are other things I want to do with my life while it lasts. So that is where my player clicks on me to remind me to change my plans.

It could be very subtle, just an impulse in my mind. If I am not too absorbed in something, that can be enough. Like a reminder really. I am sure all people have this, they suddenly remember that there was something else they were supposed to do, even without anyone saying it. I have grown used to this, so that I do very little planning and very little to remind myself. To-do lists are alien to me, and even post-it notes are rare and only at work.

But sometimes I need a stronger push. Sometimes a sudden physical sense experience, like a jolt of pain or a moment of dizziness, makes me wake up and reset my action queue. That’s usually if I am playing a game or watching a movie, and there is something else that needs to take priority.

I am sure many people experience something like this, but they don’t frame it in the same way. Because they haven’t played those particular games (Sims 2 and Sims 3), they don’t imagine it as if someone one dimension up is clicking on them. But strangely, this image is not so different from what religious people through the ages have imagined, that a guardian angel or guiding spirit living is keeping watch over us from outside the limited realm where we live, and occasionally nudges us (or pushes us, in an emergency) to lead us to the good stuff.

It may be that it is this ancient imagery that eventually caused Will Wright to create The Sims that way. I am not even sure whether he was aware of that or not, but it is a strange correlation. But in any case, thanks to him there are now millions of people who will be familiar with being on the clicking end, and perhaps at least some of them will recognize this feeling when they are on the receiving end of the click. Or, occasionally, the kick, when needed…