⛧ First Church of Hypocrisy, Blasphemy, and Self-Righteousness ⛧

I find it very amusing that you think autistic people are noisy, when I’m autistic and yet offline I am very quiet and I personally find neurotypicals and other allistic (“normal”) people to be irritatingly loud all the blessed time.

Seriously, neurotypicals/allistics:

1. Apparently love pointless conversations. Seem to be so much in need of hearing their own voice or the voices of others that they will engage literally anyone in pointless “small talk” when there’s been silence for more than about a minute, regardless of how obvious it is that the person they’re trying to talk to doesn’t want to socialize.

Aside from my bafflement at why anyone would want to socialize with a complete stranger in the first place, the fact is this “small talk” has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and is just so much noise pollution in my opinion. (“What’s the weather like?” Why don’t you look out a window? “How bout them Broncos?” Sports are some of the most pointless human activities on the planet, utter wastes of time, money, resources, and effort; talk about something interesting why don’t you?)

And the fact that I can be reading a book with headphones and dark sunglasses on and still get accosted by NTs with their incessant need to pollute the air with small talk just makes me wonder why you think it’s us being noisy.

2. Apparently love music to fill every single moment when they’re out in public place like grocery stores. This has always bothered me. Ideally, I would go grocery shopping in complete silence, it would be perfect. Maybe the occasional understandable announcement over the loudspeakers, but it drives me mad how there’s almost nowhere you can go in public these days without the incessant noise of music or TVs or talk radio everywhere. What is with NTs and their love of noise?

3. Apparently love noisy cars. Pretty sure if autistic people were the norm, that cars would either all be quiet electric cars by now, or there’d be soundproofing put around car engines because honestly the number of autistic people I’ve met who, like myself, cannot tolerate traffic noise, is quite high.

And I know for a fact that nobody autistic would ever have invented noisy motorcycles. Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone can tolerate riding such horrible noisy things, I can barely stand to be 10 blocks away from the blessed things. Even at that distance I have to cover my ears!

4. Apparently love talking on the phone all the time. The best thing to be invented, IMHO, is electronic text-based communication. Me and my friends do talk with one another on occasion, but usually we communicate via texts, emails, or instant messaging, even when we’re in the same room, and I adore it! I get so angry and frustrated whenever I’m forced outside, all the people on the bus talking so loudly I have to put sound-blocking headsets on to hear myself think.

Or worse, talking on the bloody phone in public! If it wasn’t for the fact that the voice part of the phone is sometimes necessary, I would just get a text-messaging-only phone. Fully 99% of my cell phone communication is text messages. More often than not, people’s voices just grate on my nerves.

5. Apparently love talking so much they’ll engage fellow employees in pointless conversations at work. It has always been so extremely frustrating for me trying to tolerate NT/allistic-designed workplaces in the first place, without having to also tolerate forced conversations with people I neither know nor care to know prattling on filling the air with conversational noise pollution. It always made working so much harder to do because it messes with my concentration and the sheer level of irritation it fills me with is emotionally draining. An 8 hour shift on my own in a job that didn’t have any required social aspect to it (like manufacturing jobs) would fly by, but put other people in the area with me and they would insist on talking just to talk, which would make an 8 hour shift feel more like a 16 hour shift.

6. Apparently love to talk with their neighbors for some reason. Something else I’ve never understood. I have never gotten to know my neighbors, and neither have my parents. I’ve lived in this apartment building for several years now, and I know the names of exactly two people out of the dozen or so people who live here (not counting my roommate), and both of those were already friends with me before I lived here. I don’t know the names of anyone else in this place, I don’t even remember most of their faces, and yet so many of them seem to think I ought to know their names and faces by now. I actually even had a conversation the other day where one of the people whose faces I know asked me if I knew her name, and I had to admit that I didn’t.

I cannot stand to socialize with someone just because they’re close at hand. Most NTs/allistics I’ve met in my life are so supremely boring that having any conversation with them that is longer than 30 seconds makes me want to scream. Honestly, I completely ignore most allistics, especially neighbors, and in my mind I designate them NPCs (Non-Player Characters), except that they’re nowhere near that interesting or important in my opinion.

The two people whose names and faces I know in this place? Yeah, one of them is autistic and I’m pretty sure the other one isn’t NT either, but she and I have been friends for over a decade now, so I know she’s interesting.

7. Apparently love forcing children to socialize with people they hate in school. Two words: group projects. UGH! It was bad enough when they assigned me to people who were just your standard Boring Normal, but on several occasions they put me in groups with people who were bullying me, and were thus The Enemy. Kids should not have to be subjected to that kind of torture, and neither should adults in the workplace.

Of course, the entire school system is a nightmare for people like me to begin with. Forced socialization, nothing is ever done about bullying, rampant ableism, and there’s boring and stupid teachers who don’t even properly know their subjects to the point that it was a regular occurrence for me as early as about fourth or fifth grade for me to know more about some subjects than the teachers did. And how the heck does anyone manage to learn anything when you’re too busy being bored to tears?

Honestly, there’s a reason play is how animals including humans learn things. Sitting in neat little rows facing the front, being quiet, and listening to a lecture is something that is universally boring even into adulthood, and is anathema to learning. That kind of thing is why I frequently tell people that school is where learning goes to die. Seriously. A friend of mine goes to an elementary school during the school year to read to the kids there, and I told her I thought I knew why she went there. What I said was “You go there and read to them because for those kids, it’s the one bright spot in a day full of boredom and soul-crushing authoritarianism.” She did not disagree. But I digress.

But yes, forcing kids to socialize with people they don’t want to socialize with is idiotic cruelty. Especially when some of those people may be bullies.

Meanwhile, I haven’t yet met a single autistic person who was noisy like NTs/allistics are. Sure, Lily laughs loudly at times, but I’m usually laughing with her when she does. My fellow autistic friends and I, our social get-togethers are basically just hanging out in the same room doing our own thing, often all of us on our computers, occasionally sending each other interesting links or pictures. Even my roommate, who is an extroverted autistic girl who talks entirely too much for my liking, still knows how to do the “hanging out silently, sending each other interesting stuff” thing and manages it most of the time.
So yeah, when you ask why autistic people are noisy, I have no blessed idea what you’re talking about, because I’ve never in 34 years of life met a noisy autistic person before. Whereas at least 80% of NTs/allistics are noisy all the blessed time!

~ ~ ~

The above was part of my attempt to make my Quora answers more in line with that obnoxious "be nice, be a sniveling dick-weasel respectful" policy of theirs. Whadda ya think? Original question can be found here (link).