Why Do I Have To Put In All This Work And STILL Not Be Happy?

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes

I’ve been reading advice after advice, letter after letter. And your advice boils down to “tough it up”. I have autism and none of this has been helpful.

Your confidence article in particular read utterly backwards to me. How the hell is confidence based on imaginary self-ego boosting nothing but arrogant bull? When I see people doing that around me, I go out of my way to remind them of *objective reality*. Subjective human thought can NEVER be more important than objective reality. Being happy or confident without objective reason to be is just self-delusion. An ostrich with its head in the sand. People don’t DESERVE to feel good unless they have objective value, which 99.9% of people *don’t*. Including me, sadly…

If human opinion could grant value, MY opinions would have value. But they clearly freaking don’t, so what I’m I supposed to conclude? That something’s wrong with JUST ME?

The subject point is that like… why do I have to jump through all these hoops just to be happy. I’ve read the lines to “learn to be happy single” etc etc, and its all bull. How can I be happy when nobody likes me but me? And being likeable is impossible. I can’t read people, and I can’t STAND unfounded opinions, which is apparently some kind of cardinal social sin. God forbid people should be informed before opening their mouths? This idea that every stupid thought that comes to every idiot’s head is equal to Einstein is sickening.

And before you go “oh there’s your problem”, I spent an entire year talking with actually very smart ladies whose opinions I greatly respected at like a dozen convention after-parties. Did all the advice. Focused on just talking to them as people. Didn’t bulldoze the “date me” stuff. Listened to their opinions (since they turned out to be worthwhile, and no I didn’t say anything of the sort like “finally a SMART person”, I’m not stupid). Just tried to be friendly.

STILL nothing. So I don’t know. I did all the stupid hoops ANYWAY, DESPITE thinking they’re stupid, for a whole year. Nothing. If a YEAR isn’t enough, I don’t freaking know how the human race is intact.

I’m sorry for being heated at any point… I just… am so freaking tired of putting in all this effort (being social is HARD as an autistic person) for nothing…

The Only Sane Man

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “be kind, everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about”, OSM. Well, I think your letter provides a new twist on it: some people are fighting battles they absolutely don’t need to be fighting. Like, at all.

I mean, you come out swinging from jump street with an astounding misinterpretation of the advice I give. First, the phrase you’re looking for is “toughen up”, and second, that’s not even close to what any of it says, including the articles about confidence. So right off the bat, you’re coming in with unnecessary and unneeded aggression while also being incredibly wrong about it.

And hey… there’s your problem.

Now, I know that replies where I bring out The Chair Leg of Truth are popular; they’re entertaining to read and they’re easy to write. But I didn’t pick your letter because I just wanted a letter full of softballs and low and slow pitches to swing at, and I’m going to try to be as gentle as is reasonably possible considering what you’ve given me to work with. But you may as well sit back and get ready for your introduction to the Chair Leg, because it is wise and terrible and it does not lie.

I’ll be honest OSM, I think the reason why you’re so tired from trying to be social has less to do with your being autistic and everything to do with the fact that you’re carrying around a chip on your shoulder that’s so large and so dense that it’s collapsed into a singularity and it’s currently sucking your brain out through your ear. To be perfectly blunt, your letter and the way you describe yourself makes it sound like you go out of your way to be as unpleasant a person to be around as is humanly possible. I’m entirely unsurprised that your efforts are going for naught because, even using the most generous possible interpretation of what you’re saying, your entire demeanor is alternating between the most aggressive “um, actually…” ever and stewing in silent-but-hardly-unnoticed resentment. But that’s not necessarily what’s going to drive people away. No, that is going to be the thing that I’m not even sure you’re aware that you’re doing, but you sure as hell are doing it anyway.

Now take a second and sit back because I’m about to drop what sounds like a digression at first.

Recently, I’ve been listening to an incredibly tedious livestream relationship discussion “show” that features a male host and a rotating cast of women – most, but not all of whom tend to be either OnlyFans models, influencers or folks whose job entails being sexy or attractive.

(The things I do for this job, 

Every episode entails – at least in part, these stupid things go longer than an average episode of Critical Role – the host (and occasionally some of his guests) grilling the women, asking intrusive questions and either insulting them, denigrating them, or encouraging his audience to pay absurd amounts of money to hear their comments read out loud to them. This often culminates with the host asking the women to rate their looks from 1 to 10 and then get on a scale.

The obvious point of the show, besides trying to slide retrograde ideas about dating under the radar, is to make women sit there and listen to the howls of resentment from an audience that sees them as the avatar for Jenny who wouldn’t go to the prom with them.

But one of the things I clocked right away was the many ways – from “ooooh, you thought that was subtle” to overt – the host and his fellow travelers play frame control games. Any answer given, whether it’s an opinion or otherwise, is challenged by the host and he demands an explanation. Every time, regardless of the words used, the underlying message of the host’s behavior is ”justify your opinion to me.” The point, of course, is to set a frame that says “I am the arbitrator of what is valid and invalid; you must convince me, or else your opinion is objectively wrong”. He wants to set himself up as an authority to whom the women are expected to both appeal to but also whose judgement they will accept. When someone doesn’t accept his judgement as being correct or treat him as the arbitrator of what is or isn’t valid, he gets almost comedically upset.

I bring this up simply because you’re doing this yourself. The only difference is that he’s monetized playing to shitheads who get upset that women are allowed to think that they’re sexy without a guy’s sign-off and who think that a watered-down, Dollar Store brand Jerry Springer knock off is the height of sophistication and class. And they’re willing to pay literally hundreds of dollars to chant “JERRY! JERRY! JERRY!”.

You, on the other hand, are doing it for free, and the only thing you get out of it is bile and loneliness.  

We can start with this: “How the hell is confidence based on imaginary self-ego boosting nothing but arrogant bull? When I see people doing that around me, I go out of my way to remind them of *objective reality*.”

Here’s a question for you: why? Why do you feel the need to go out of your way to “remind” people of “objective” reality? We’ll leave aside my incredibly high level of skepticism that you perceive anything objectively; what is it about someone having an opinion or belief bothers you so much that you choose to go out of your way to “correct” them? Why do you think that not only do they need to be “reminded”, but that they need to hear from you in the first place?

Do you think they’re going to thank you when you do this? Do you just get bothered so much that other people have an inner life that you don’t share and doesn’t match yours that it just gets under your skin like an itch you can’t scratch? Or is it just that you just resent other people being happy when you’re not?

Considering that you follow this up with “Being happy or confident without objective reason to be is just self-delusion. […] People don’t DESERVE to feel good unless they have objective value,” it certainly seems to me that your issue is that you’re miserable, they aren’t and that you feel like they shouldn’t be and so you feel like you’re called to “bring them back down to Earth”.

This, like I said, isn’t different from the host of that dumbass show I mentioned asking women to rate themselves and then peppering them with “oh, you really think you deserve to call yourself an 8? Huh? Huh? Get on this scale, tell me if you’re still an 8”. It’s just you being upset that someone else gets to decide how they want to feel without your approval.

Case in point: “[…]I can’t STAND unfounded opinions, which is apparently some kind of cardinal social sin. God forbid people should be informed before opening their mouths? This idea that every stupid thought that comes to every idiot’s head is equal to Einstein is sickening.”

So, how’s that been working out for you?

This is a “you” problem, chief. Making “you have a right to your INFORMED opinion” your entire personality was your choice, and that means you get to reap the consequences of it.

Under different circumstances – ones where you weren’t coming in looking for a fight – I would be more sympathetic. But considering the sum totality of your letter and your attitude the entire way through… this has all been a misery of your own creation.

There’re certainly times when people are interested in discussion and debate, but there’s discussion and then there’s “I’m not going to let this go until you tell me I’m right and you’re wrong and then I’m going to make you do it again the next time you say literally anything”. So, since you seem to not get this, I’ll make it clear for you: the social sin here is that you’re the one making this a problem. You’re making a production where most people will either have a mild disagreement before moving on, agree to disagree, or just overlook it because they know when and how to pick their battles. You, on the other hand, are determined to pick every fight possible. That’s too many battles; put most of them back.  

If you don’t like people having opinions which don’t meet your definition of scientific rigor, you’re welcome to find like-minded people to argue with. Losing your shit at other folks about it mostly just makes you look like an under-socialized asshole who thinks he’s the only person who can “see the Matrix” and mistakes aggression for being correct.

And considering how under-informed and subjective your opinions in this letter alone have proven to be, that’s pretty goddamn ironic.

Doubly so, considering that you say this: “…what I’m I supposed to conclude? That something’s wrong with JUST ME?”

In this case, yes. This is the very definition of a “you” problem. If you meet one person who calls you a horse, you met a crazy person. You meet two people who call you a horse, there’s a lot of weirdos out there. If three people call you a horse, it’s time to consider getting fitted for a saddle.

You’re the one who decided that people who don’t have “objective” value don’t get to be happy, while everyone else disagrees with you. You’re certainly welcome to keep insisting that you’re correct and everyone else is wrong like the world’s saddest Principal Skinner meme, but if you’re the lone voice insisting the world is crazy, perhaps it’s time to consider that you’re the person who’s wrong here.

You view things like “not being an asshole” and “refraining from saying insulting things” like the labors of Hercules, and something that should be rewarded. You’re supposedly someone who’s the smartest man in the room, the only person who can perceive and value objective reality, and then say “I did all the stupid hoops ANYWAY, DESPITE thinking they’re stupid, for a whole year,” and then complain that you got nothing for it. As though everyone around you couldn’t tell that you were sitting there stewing in toxic resentment and waiting for people to give you some sort of prize for Not Being The Worst, This Time.

Doubly so, considering that women aren’t dumb and can tell the difference between someone who actually respects their opinion and someone who’s going through the motions in hopes that this may mean that they get to see their bra at some point.

Even if I grant you as much grace as I can and assume you’re being weirdly and unnecessarily hyperbolic, I find it hard to believe that you act like this and then wonder why people don’t like you.

But why should they, when you don’t like you? Because that’s what this comes down to. All of this is just you hating yourself and thinking that you have no value and projecting on others like your name was IMAX. The reason why “OBJECTIVE REALITY” is so important to you is that if you were to stop and accept that maybe you’re not in the least bit objective, you’d have to accept that you’re in a mess of your own making. It’s easier to choose to believe that your misery comes from How The World Works, rather than to accept that this is the consequences of your choices.

You’re not struggling to be happy, you’re struggling with the fact that people don’t like you because of the way that you behave, and you behave like an asshole. You may struggle with some social cues because you’re autistic, but playing stupid frame control games and demanding that people justify themselves to someone they neither know, nor like or even respect isn’t a symptom or condition of being autistic. You insist on trying to position yourself as An Authority, get pissy when people won’t respect your authoretah, treat basic conversation like ritual combat and apparently go out of your way to try to shit on someone else’s parade because you don’t like the floats.

And it sure as hell isn’t helping when you claim to be the arbiter of objectivity when you base your entire everything on the most subjective shit imaginable: your wild-ass misinterpretation of just about everything.

Do you want to be happier? Do you want to maybe, some day, have friends? Or at least have people vaguely like you? Then the first thing you’re going to have to do is go get that chip on your shoulder surgically removed and start accepting that not only are you wrong, but that the reason why other people don’t value your opinion is that you’ve done nothing to demonstrate why it should be valued. We value the opinions of others because of our relationships with them, our understanding of their perspective and how their perspective is colored by their education, their upbringing and their lived experiences.

You know, those things that bring subjectivity into the mix.

We value other people because they bring value into our lives – and to be quite clear, that value is in the form of “we enjoy their company”, “they make us feel good” and “our lives are better with them in it than without them”. But we also have to find value in ourselves, that exists without the approval of others, because otherwise we don’t actually have value. We just have what other people are willing to give us, and that can be taken away or demolished at any time by random people for any reason or even no reason at all.

That’s the game that shitbirds like the podcast host I mentioned play, and it’s nakedly transparent when they do it and the why of it is even more so: because they need to “bring these sluts back to objective reality” and shrink their supposed swelled heads. It’s shitty dudes getting pissed off that women think highly of themselves while also not being willing to touch these loser’s penises. It’s about them wanting to be able to not just decide who gets to be “hot” or feel good about themselves, but also to make them pay for not agreeing to let those dudes control their reality.

You’re playing the same game and you’re not even playing it as well as they do. You can’t accept other people might value themselves when you can’t value yourself, try to force your opinion on them, complain about doing not even the bare minimum, and then you wonder why people don’t want to spend time with you.

If you’re determined to soak in your own misery like the world’s shittiest hot tub, that’s your choice. Trying to force other people into the tub with you is just going to convince other people that you’re alone for a reason and it’s probably better to leave it that way.

Start trying to like yourself, and you won’t feel compelled to try to convince other people that they shouldn’t like themselves either. Once you get to that point, then maybe you’ll start the first step of actually making some friends. Your call.

But like I said… how’s that working out for you so far?