I've been interacting a lot in this forum over the past few weeks, and I keep running into the same thing: the same problems, the same themes, coming up again and again. It's struck me how consistently they repeat across so many different people.

We feel shut out. Or — let me speak in my own words — I sit there during conversations, lost, and even though I consider myself pretty intelligent, I often have no idea what's actually going on. I'd genuinely like to take part, but I don't understand the principle behind it. And I'll admit I often put it polemically: to me the whole thing looks like a waste of breath and life-time. I don't get the point of it — and yet I'd still like to join in.

Others describe it differently: that they get excluded, talked over, that people don't engage with them, or react with hostility.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this lately — reading, researching, testing things on myself — and I wanted to share where I've landed. Not to lecture, and not to worry anyone. Just a few impressions that finally made some of this make sense to me.

I'll build it up in steps, because each piece depends on the one before it.

1. The frustration — and the wish underneath it

The first thing is communication itself, and above all small talk. This is where it gets hardest for me, and where a tension I live with is sharpest.

On one side, there's a real pull toward resignation, even anger. I'd like to take part in these conversations, but I often simply can't find the point of them. And I'll be blunt about the reaction that surfaces first: part of me wants to say it's nonsense — what are these people even doing? It looks pointless, because I'm oriented toward exchanging information, toward substance. The lunch-table small talk, the back-and-forth that doesn't seem to carry any content — that's exactly the thing I keep failing at.

And the frustration isn't laziness. I've worked on this for years. I can be a genuinely good rhetorician when the terms are clear. I prepare, I think it through, I read, I train myself. And still — despite the greatest effort — I notice myself drifting away from people over time rather than closer to them. It costs me an enormous amount of energy, and the return on that energy keeps disappointing me.

But that's only one side of it. Because underneath the frustration there's the other thing, and it doesn't go away: I want to be socially included. If it were truly meaningless to me, I could just walk away and feel nothing. The fact that it stings — that I keep coming back and trying again — is the tell. The dismissiveness and the wish sit right next to each other, and I've stopped pretending they don't.

2. We're running on different codes

Here's the first thing that reframed it for me: a lot of neurotypical communication isn't primarily about the information at all.

Its main job is social — subtle status-negotiation, avoiding conflict, signalling "I belong here," keeping a relationship warm. The content is often almost a carrier wave for something else running underneath.

And crucially, most of that happens automatically, without effort and without conscious thought. It runs on several channels at once: the words, yes — but also facial expression, gesture, posture, and things like tone, rhythm, and the way two people's speech patterns quietly fall into sync when a conversation is going well. It's a fast, multi-layered process for them, and they're not "deciding" to do any of it. It just runs.

I work differently — and I think this is typical for Asperger's. I'm strongly information-oriented. I basically talk about what interests me, or to exchange information, and getting things true and accurate is close to the highest value for me in that. I try to describe things as precisely as I can, because the model in my head depends on it: I'm building a kind of map of reality, and for that map it matters enormously to use the right words, add the missing context, and correct what's imprecise. For me, language is a tool for modelling the world — not a social lubricant.

So we end up talking past each other in a very specific way. And here's the part that took me longest to see: neurotypical people don't just miss my meaning — they often misread it, because they expect the social layer to be there. When I speak in pure content, they interpret it as if a neurotypical had said it. And if a neurotypical talked the way I do — that flat, that direct, that heavy on context and correction — it usually would mean something extra: a power move, a challenge, coldness, an agenda. So they read those intentions into me, even though they simply aren't there. My precision gets received as strategy.

This isn't only my private impression. There's a research idea called the double empathy problem (Milton, 2012) that describes exactly this: the breakdown between autistic and non-autistic people is mutual — a two-way failure of understanding, not a defect located only in the autistic person. And there's experimental support: in studies by Crompton and colleagues (2020), autistic people passed information along just as reliably as non-autistic people when they were talking with other autistic people. It was in the mixed groups that communication broke down much more often.

The takeaway isn't that one side is broken. It's that a specific kind of interaction — running my code through their expectations, live and in real time — is where the signal falls apart.

3. It doesn't stop at misunderstanding — it can turn into hostility

This is the part I found hardest to sit with, but it explained a lot.

There's a well-established model in social psychology: the Stereotype Content Model (Fiske, Cuddy & Glick, 2002) and its follow-up, the BIAS Map (Cuddy, Fiske & Glick, 2007). The core idea is that we size people up on two basic dimensions:

• Warmth — are you friendly, trustworthy, on my side?
• Competence — are you capable, effective?

The combinations produce different behaviours toward a person — roughly, whether people help you or harm you, actively or passively.

The relevant corner for us is high competence, low warmth — capable, but cold. That's the combination the research links to the most active hostility, not just quiet exclusion. To be clear, this is a statistical tendency, not a rule about individuals, and most interactions never go there. But as a pattern — especially under stress or perceived threat — it's the one that can flip from "we tolerate you because you're useful" to something sharper.

Here's why it matters for us: many of us tend to land in that corner — not because we actually lack warmth, but because the warmth signals (that automatic, nonverbal, tone-and-rhythm layer from section 2) don't transmit. So what reaches the other person is "capable but cold," which is exactly the reading that, at worst, invites hostility rather than just distance.

I want to be careful with this: it's a worst case, not the usual case, and it isn't a claim that people are out to get us. But it explains the sharp, disproportionate reactions — the ones that seem to come out of nowhere — better than "they just didn't understand me" does. It's the same mechanism the research describes, applied to a group whose warmth cues don't show up on the channel the other side is reading.

4. Why "just train warmth" doesn't fix it

If the problem is "capable but cold," there seem to be only two levers: raise warmth, or lower competence.

Lowering competence means deliberately playing dumb — hiding what you see, softening what you know. Some people do it. But it costs something real: it means suppressing exactly the precision and honesty that, for a lot of us, isn't a tactic but a way of being. It takes constant effort and it grates against the self.

Raising warmth sounds better, but it's harder than it looks — and this is the key point. You can train the rhetorical layer: word choice, framing, the deliberate parts you have conscious access to. But the warmth that actually lands isn't carried there. It rides on the automatic, sub-verbal apparatus from section 2 — the micro-timing, the tone, the rhythm, the quiet syncing-up between two people. That whole channel runs underneath conscious speech, and it's the part that signals "warm, safe, one of us."

My honest suspicion — and it's a sobering one — is that this layer isn't really trainable. You can operate the verbal channel on purpose. But the syncing channel works precisely because it's automatic; the moment you have to produce it deliberately, it stops being the thing it was. Trained warmth doesn't just risk coming across as fake — when it reads as fake, it can make things worse, because now you look "cold and calculating."

So the "raise warmth" lever may be weaker than it first appears. It's not that I haven't practised enough. It's that the sub-channel doing the real work is, at best, very hard to reach on purpose — expensive to fake, and easy to get wrong — not a missing skill so much as a kind of connection that doesn't switch on deliberately. And if that's true, then a lot of the effort I keep pouring into "getting better at people" has been aimed at a layer that was never the bottleneck.

One thing to flag before the next part, because it looks like a contradiction: I'm about to recommend small verbal moves, even though I've just said the layer that matters is barely trainable. Those moves don't create the missing warmth. They just stop me losing additionally on the one channel I do control. Lowering the cost of a failure isn't the same as fixing it — but it's not nothing.

5. What this actually feels like in the moment

Let me make it concrete, because this is where all of the above bites.

What I often do in conversations is watch. I track what's happening and think — for a long time — about where I could contribute. Where's the opening? I weigh it carefully. I try to find something that lets me take part but isn't self-promoting, isn't know-it-all, doesn't correct anyone or talk over them. I genuinely try to thread that needle: say something that includes me without stepping on anyone.

And then I finally offer it — and it still doesn't work. The strangest things happen. People don't register me at all. I get passed over, skipped, talked around. Or the reaction is just off in a way I can't parse.

That's what leaves me most at a loss. It would be one thing if I'd blundered in carelessly and got a predictable result. But I didn't. I did the observing, the preparing, the self-editing, the careful calibration against the exact mistakes I know I'm prone to — and the outcome is still something I can't explain.

And I think it connects straight back to section 4: if the thing that actually lets you into an exchange is the automatic warmth-and-timing layer — the one that isn't carried by the content I so carefully prepared — then no amount of preparing the content will buy me in. I'm optimising the one channel I have access to. The gate is on the channel I don't.

Which raises the obvious question: if the content isn't the way in, what is? That's what finally shifted for me.

6. Maybe I've been solving the wrong problem

Here's the idea that reframed it most for me: the possibility that language grew out of grooming.

Robin Dunbar's theory (Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, 1996) goes like this. Primates bond by grooming each other — picking through each other's fur. It works, but it doesn't scale, because you can only groom one individual at a time. Dunbar argues that humans evolved a cheap, efficient replacement — a kind of "vocal grooming" — that lets you tend several relationships at once, and that this vocal grooming slowly turned into language, starting as gossip.

It's a contested theory — nobody can prove how language started, and Dunbar has his critics. But I'm not leaning on it as settled fact. I'm using it the way it's useful: as a lens. Because even if the evolutionary story is only half right, the everyday observation it points at is hard to deny.

If that's even roughly right, it changes what small talk is. The content is almost beside the point. Nobody actually cares about the literal information being exchanged — the activity itself is the point: producing belonging, signalling "we're okay, we're connected." It's social grooming wearing the costume of an information exchange.

And that's exactly what I keep getting wrong. I walk in treating it as an information channel and ask what substantial thing I can contribute. Which may be the whole error. Two problems with it, specifically:

First, timing. If I stop to weigh and prepare and calibrate, the window has usually already closed by the time I'm ready. Grooming-talk moves fast and lives on immediacy. A thoughtful, delayed contribution arrives after the moment it was for. The deliberation that feels responsible is precisely what locks me out.

Second, the wrong target. I'm optimising for substance in a game that isn't scored on substance. The move that actually fits is to minimise the content and just do the bonding — small, low-stakes, low-effort contributions whose job is connection, not information:

• short reactions that show you're with the speaker ("mm," "right," "oh no — really?")
• brief agreement
• small, open questions that hand the floor back to the other person instead of taking it

In conversation-analysis terms (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson's work on how people take turns), these are low-risk moves: they don't compete for the floor, they support whoever's currently talking, and they read as engaged rather than as a bid to take over.

There's one subtlety I've had to learn the hard way. Even a short, well-meant question can be a misstep if it cuts across the order of the conversation — if it interrupts whoever currently "has the floor," or jumps a queue I didn't notice was there. So part of the skill isn't just shrinking my contribution. It's watching the sequence: who's mid-turn, who's likely next, where the natural hand-off points are — and slotting in at those seams, instead of at the moment I happen to have thought of something.

There's one honest objection to all of this, and I'd rather name it than pretend it isn't there: aren't these small moves just a lighter form of masking? In a sense, yes. They're a form of accommodation — cheaper than crafting content, but still work, still me adjusting to a channel that isn't native to me. I don't have a clean resolution for that. I've just decided that a small, cheap adjustment I can actually sustain beats an exhausting performance I can't — and beats withdrawing entirely. Where each person draws that line is their own call.

Where this leaves me

I won't pretend this solves it. The deeper channel from sections 2 and 4 — the automatic syncing I probably can't produce — is still missing, and a well-placed "oh, really?" doesn't manufacture it.

But two things did change for me:

1. It lowers the cost of taking part. A small open question is far cheaper than a crafted contribution — so I can actually do it in real time, before the window shuts.
2. It stops me making the specific mistake I kept making: bringing an information-move to a grooming-game.

If I can't win on the channel that controls belonging, I can at least stop losing on the one I do have access to.

That's the reframe I wanted to share. Not a cure — just a clearer picture of what the game actually is, which for me is worth a lot on its own. If any of this matches your experience, or if you've found something that works differently, I'd like to hear it.

Sources, if you want to read further

• Milton, D. (2012). "On the ontological status of autism: the 'double empathy problem.'" Disability & Society.
• Crompton, C. J., et al. (2020). "Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective." Autism.
• Fiske, S., Cuddy, A., & Glick, P. (2002). Stereotype Content Model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Cuddy, A., Fiske, S., & Glick, P. (2007). "The BIAS Map: Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Dunbar, R. (1996). Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. Harvard University Press.
• Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1974). "A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation." Language.

You read the same texts for years, return to them, and at some point one lays itself over the other without your having looked for it. That is how it went for me with Nietzsche and the Gospel of Thomas. Two readings that have nothing to do with each other — one a philosophical work from the end of the nineteenth century, the other a collection of sayings from the earliest days of Christianity — and yet, if you carry both around with you long enough, a series of contacts emerges that can no longer be shaken off. I don't want to make a thesis of it or prove anything; I simply find the constellation too intriguing to keep to myself, and I lay it out here to see what shows itself when one follows it.

The appeal lies in a peculiar symmetry. The one text pushes off, in the earliest period of Christianity, from an image that the other seeks to dissolve at the end of a two-thousand-year history of effect. An early strand that does not yet know a certain structure, and a later thinker who tries with all his force to break down that very structure — both aimed against the same canonical Christianity, from opposite ends.

The point is not to make the two coincide. They do not say the same thing, and their metaphysical grounds are incompatible — one rests on a divine spark in the human being, the other clears away any such ground. What shows itself is weaker, and for that reason more interesting, than an equation: contacts along particular axes. Three of them can be followed — the placing of what is essential into the here rather than into a beyond, individuation as the condition for a single one to step forth at all, and a speech that addresses itself not to the many but to the one able to bear it. First, though, it is enough to locate the two texts briefly.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche's attack does not begin with individual moral propositions but one level deeper: with the claim that the great metaphysical systems — Christianity foremost — do not win their supposed truth from an insight into the world, but from an already presupposed morality. First something is valued, then what is valued is declared the structure of being. Morality comes first; the metaphysics is supplied afterward. And this morality has an origin for him: ressentiment. Whoever cannot prevail declares his own powerlessness a virtue and the other's strength an evil; out of this reversal grows slave morality, and with it the decisive movement — the devaluation of this world in favor of a beyond, into which the center of gravity of life is displaced. Not life counts, but an afterward.

The fatal thing is that this very Christianity raised an unconditional will to truth that in the end turns against its own root: the same will to truthfulness that demanded God finally sees through God as a human positing. That is the "death of God" — not the claim that there never was one, but the diagnosis that the metaphysical foundation has collapsed through its own consequence. What remains is nihilism: the beyond has fallen away, but this world is still devalued — the devaluation outlives its ground. The human being stands there with a contempt for life whose justification has vanished.

Nietzsche's answer is the positing of values, but under a sharp condition, and here lies the point that is easily missed. To posit new values does not mean to replace the old content with a new one and go on acting as though one stood on firm ground. It means to posit in full awareness that there is no ground — that every valuation is without metaphysical cover. The overman is the one who bears this groundlessness instead of hiding it from himself: who creates without the fiction that what is created was found. Whoever misses this and merely sets up a new tablet has fallen back into the very movement Nietzsche took apart — he has once again made a truth out of a hidden morality. The real difficulty is not to find new values, but to hold them without lying to oneself about their origin.

The Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of Thomas is not a narrative gospel but a collection of some 114 sayings — "secret words" that Jesus is said to have spoken, strung together without passion, without resurrection, without miracle stories, without the whole narrative frame that carries the canonical gospels. It was found in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, in a Coptic manuscript from the fourth century; but Greek fragments attest to a considerably older text whose core layers part of scholarship dates very early, in places close to or before the canonical gospels. What matters is less the exact date than the fact that this strand ran alongside the canonical line and remained untouched by its process of editing and selection — it was sorted out, not reworked, and then forgotten for a millennium and a half. What one finds is therefore a relatively unfiltered snapshot of an early current that no longer exists in this form within the canon.

And this current strikes off in a strikingly different direction. The kingdom of God here is no future place and no beyond, but present: spread out over the earth without people seeing it, at once inside and outside. Salvation is not a deferral to an afterward but a recognizing of what is already there — a matter of perception, not of the future. With that, precisely the structure of a beyond is missing that the canonical Christianity would later make its foundation. Added to this is a thoroughly esoteric bent: the words are hidden, they address themselves to the one who knows how to interpret, not to all — and several sayings demand a detachment from natural bonds, from father and mother, from the crowd, so that the single one, the "solitary," can step forth at all.

This distinguishes the text at exactly these points, essentially, from the New Testament picture: no displaced future salvation, no message for the crowd, but presence, knowledge, and individuation. That it nonetheless has its own metaphysical ground — the divine spark in the human being, which wants to be recognized again — stays in view; but the thrust that concerns us is thereby outlined.

The Contact

When one lays Nietzsche and the Gospel of Thomas side by side, a peculiar figure emerges. Nietzsche stands at the end of two thousand years of Christian effect and fights his way back to a this-world that Christianity buried. The Gospel of Thomas stands at the beginning of the same history — before the burial, in a strand that has not yet built in the structure of a beyond. What Nietzsche laboriously wants to regain is, in this early text, in some places still unbuilt-over, there. Not the same doctrine, but the same corridor, in stretches, entered from two sides. Three places at which they touch.

The first is the un-beyonding. In Thomas the kingdom lies not in an afterward but spread out in the here, unseen. Salvation is perception, not deferral. And this is exactly the structure whose reversal Nietzsche calls the crime of Christianity — displacing the center of gravity of life out of life and into a beyond. At this one point, what Nietzsche hates about canonical Christianity is precisely what is absent in Thomas. The text does not devalue this world; it displaces nothing. The convergence here is not one of answers but of an absent presupposition: both operate without the hinterworld.

The second is individuation. The sword instead of peace, the father and the mother one must leave, the solitary who steps forth — in Thomas the detachment from natural bonds is the condition for a single one to come into being at all. Not conflict as an end in itself, but separation as a passage. This is, structurally, Zarathustra's path: the going-away from the herd, the mistrust of what is pressed together, solitude as the place where what is not possible for the crowd first takes shape. Both treat the collective not as a home but as that from which one detaches oneself.

The third is the finest: the type the text addresses itself to at all. Thomas is esoteric from its first line — secret words, for the one who knows how to interpret, not for all. Zarathustra speaks first to the marketplace, is laughed at, and draws the consequence: from then on he speaks to companions, not to the crowd. In both texts there is a sorting, a built-in selection — the message is not for the many but for the one who can bear it. That is more than the individuation of the one addressed; it is a selection within the speaking itself.

And here, where the nearness grows densest, the boundary must stand — not to slow things down, but because it is what makes the parallel precise. Both work with the same basic figure: something original is buried and is to be regained. But the regaining means opposite things. In Thomas what one finds is already there intact — the spark, the origin, the true self that need only be recognized again. Return as unveiling. In Nietzsche there is no true self at one's back to which one would return; that would only be a hinterworld displaced inward. What counts is first made — return, if at all, as new creation, which does not restore the original state but brings it forth again at a higher stage. Unveiling versus generation. Precisely at this seam the two movements, having taken the same corridor, run out of it in opposite directions.

The Hidden Backward Movement

Unveiling versus generation — that is clean, so long as one takes Nietzsche's "forward" at its word. But the arrow is more double-bottomed than it looks. For what it points to is a human being who would again be immediate: no longer estranged by morality, herd instinct, fear of death, by the consolation of a beyond. And this immediacy was once already there — before the taming. The arrow points forward, but the state it aims at lies, in time, before domestication. The "forward" carries a backward movement within it.

This is not merely a possible reading; it stands in Nietzsche himself. The "blond beast" of the Genealogy, the beast of prey before bad conscience, is exactly this pre-moral, immediate being — held fast in acting, without the aggression bent inward that first arises when the animal is locked into society and peace and can no longer discharge its force outward. Bad conscience is for him expressly a product of the taming: the human being becomes a problem to itself because it has been domesticated. This is a narrative of estrangement, and its vanishing point lies before the human being we know.

But here Nietzsche parts from mere nostalgia: he does not want the beast of prey back. The relapse would be, for him, contemptible. What he wants is the force and the innocence of the beast of prey, but passed through the taming that first gave the human being memory, depth, self-disposal. The same Genealogy that tells of domestication as loss also lets it bring forth the "sovereign individual" — the being that at the end of the breeding can dispose over itself. Domestication as loss and as passage, in one text. Not to stand still before the taming, but through it and beyond it. That Nietzsche's language here — breeding, race, nobility — sounds physiological should not deceive: what is meant, in substance, is a rank order of capacity, not of biology — whoever disposes over himself, whoever bears the tension instead of dissolving it into ressentiment, not a result of back-breeding.

The image for this stands at the beginning of Zarathustra, in the three metamorphoses. The child that comes at the end is not the infant before the lion. It comes after the camel that bears the load and after the lion that shatters the "thou shalt" — it is innocence regained, not innocence untouched. A new beginning that has all it has passed through within it. This is exactly the form of Nietzsche's "forward": a return that restores nothing, but brings the earlier forth again at a stage it could never have reached without the whole detour of the taming.

And with that the boundary to Thomas moves to its exact place. It is not that one looks backward and the other forward — both work with the burial and regaining of a more original state. The difference lies in what regaining means. In Thomas the original has remained intact; it lay beneath the whole time and need only be recognized again — domestication covered it over, did not alter it. In Nietzsche domestication has really transformed its object; there is no intact beneath to which one would return, only the material for a new creation that must pass through the taming in order to get beyond it. Unveiling of an intact thing versus generation out of the transformed. The two movements run closer together than it first seemed — both are regaining — and yet part precisely where it matters: whether beneath the burial something whole waits, or only stuff for something that never was in this form.

Coda

What remains is less a result than a constellation. At one end of the Christian history of effect stands a text that does not yet know the structure of a beyond — the kingdom is present, spread out and unseen, and what is essential lies not in an afterward but here. At the other end, two thousand years later, stands a thinker who devotes his work to dissolving the very structure that settled in, in the meantime, as a foundation — and who fights his way, in doing so, back to a this-world that at that beginning was once already there, unbuilt-over. The aim of the movement lies, strangely enough, before its point of departure.

That is the figure that intrigues: not that Thomas and Nietzsche say the same thing — they do not — but that the direction in which Nietzsche laboriously pushes forward is prefigured in a strand lying before the misdevelopment he fights. As though the history of effect had described an arc, at whose far end someone reaches for something that was laid aside at its beginning. No proof of influence, no hidden line from there to here — the two know nothing of each other, and their metaphysical grounds are incompatible. Only two points that touch, across the whole distance, along the same axes: no displaced salvation, no speaking for the crowd, individuation as passage.

And there, where the nearness grows densest, it parts most sharply. Both harbor the same basic figure — something original is buried and is to be regained — but the one lifts into the light something intact that lay beneath the whole time, and the other makes, out of the transformed, something that never was in this form. Unveiling versus generation. Precisely at this seam, where one would most like to draw the shortest inference from the one to the other, they run apart. Perhaps that is the most interesting point: that the greatest nearness and the deepest difference lie at the same place, and that one cannot have the one without the other.

In case anyone runs into the same weird problem, here's what worked for me:

Symptoms:

• AltGr+Q (@) and AltGr+E (€) worked fine in Windows Search and File Explorer
• But not in Word, Edge, Chrome, or other apps
• Instead the keys triggered odd actions (e.g. AltGr+E opened a Bing search, AltGr+Q opened an assistant window)
• Ctrl+Alt+Q/E worked fine and produced the characters
• Problem happened with any connected keyboard
• In Safe Mode everything worked normally

What fixed it:
Disabling a background service called MaonoAiServices (came with software for a Maono microphone). I can't say for certain why it caused this, but it was the standout candidate when going through my services, and disabling it made the problem go away.

How to do it:

1. Win + R → msconfig → Enter
2. Go to the "Services" tab → check "Hide all Microsoft services"
3. Find MaonoAiServices and uncheck it
4. Apply → Restart

After that AltGr worked normally again. If you use the Maono software, you could also try disabling any hotkeys in its settings instead of the whole service.

Hope this helps someone avoid the hours of troubleshooting.