Edit: A few people have interpreted the title as serious, so I wanna clarify that it was meant as a sarcastic joke about how little sense the neurotypical world makes to me, but it is still legitimately me asking for help understanding said neurotypical world.
Was having a conversation with a friend today about why I seem unapproachable to people online. Apparently it’s for 2 reasons.
One is that I say “K.” all the time, as a short way of saying okay. She pointed out that most people find this rude and offensive. This kinda baffled me, because like why? She explained that like, if somebody were to give a long emotional speech and I just responded “K.” that would be offensive. That confounds me. So it’s rude in one context, and neurotypicals have decided to be offended by it in all contexts? But the reason it’s rude is what confuses me more. Apparently it’s considered lazy because you could have just typed out the word, but like, that applies to all text speech and nobody’s mad about people shortening those words.
But it got more confusing when she explained the second reason, which is that I end all of my sentences with proper punctuation, which she said “makes people feel like I’m done with the conversation and not interested.” But just a second ago improper grammar was rude, and now proper grammar is rude instead.
It baffles me. You can’t just use proper or improper grammar. Use too much improper grammar and you’re lazy and rude. Use too little and you’re also rude. But you can’t just use any improper grammar, you have to use the very specific subset of improper grammar that’s been deemed acceptable and not lazy (even though it’s exactly as lazy as what they do consider lazy.)
To be clear, I’m not bitter, and I’m definitely gonna adjust my behavior to hopefully seem a little less rude to people. I think that’s just a nice thing to do. I just find the neurotypical mind utterly fascinating. I don’t think they even realize how many contradictions exist in the social rules they all so easily accept.
I’m with you on the punctuation. The k bit I think is about showing you are putting effort in to understand and care, so something slightly longer like “k… I understand” or some extra acknowledgement that shows you understand and have taken the time to take it in helps. Personally, I have a big thing about miscommunication, so knowing people have understood me and listened actively is huge to me. “K.” does not express much of anything other than “I saw there was a message”, so I’d want to push to check that I’ve actually been heard.
Hope that makes sense.
The spelling thing bothers me a lot. I don’t want to catch bad habits of writing shitty just because it’s whatever seems trendy at the moment.
People used to give me shit for not using smileys, so I started adding :) everywhere in text messages. Then people told me I seem passive aggressive because I use :) instead of emojis.
Joke’s on them. I could never be arsed to use emojis outside of very specific contexts, and now gen Zs are making fun of them for looking like boomers with their dumb emoji use. Apparently I still come across as passive aggressive though.
I never use emojis either, except specific ones for specific contexts (I.E. the hug emoji when somebody’s having a really bad day.) People have pointed it out, but unlike other things people just view it as an interesting personality quirk of mine instead of off putting.