Autism

ask people questions about their aesthetical decisions in a way that expresses interest. example:

"I like your shirt, where did you get it?" "What kind of book are you reading?" "How old were you when you started (x hobby)?"

basically, be curious. and avoid people who hate curiosity. curiosity is your best framework for interacting with a world that is usually uninterested in understanding you. be cautious about using "why" questions, NT's interpret those as interrogation and feel like they're being made to justify themselves.

board game cafes

I stumbled into it by accident. A game I played was running a Twitch promotion so I started watching this random furry vtuber; she was hilarious so I ended up coming back for more streams and eventually joined her Discord server. Now it's 4 years later and I have a ton of autistic gay animal friends (several irl), a much healthier outlook on life, and a prescription for estradiol. It's great.

If you want more general advice, I suggest figuring out what flavor of autism you have and then looking for ways to interact with people who share that interest. It seems you don't have the gaming autism but maybe there's a way to connect with people who like the things that you are into.

Join a meetup group if they have them in your area. Or just join any local club, recreational sport teams, ya di ya di. Eventually you find some people and get along. Helps to be around people with similar interests.

Thought this was Ask Lemmy for a second. Autism? That's harder. I haven't had much luck myself. But where I have:

1. At work, be good at what you do. If you lean into learning/collecting information, you should be able to turn that into expertise, and while you may not be the best at expressing or teaching that knowledge, you can use it to help others, and that will get you respect from the right ones. I've made a couple friends at work just by being willing to share what I know and help others. Unfortunately some of the wrong ones will see it as weakness, and you know more often than not it's the wrong ones in positions of power.

2. Outside of work, find something you enjoy and join a club for it. A good one is D&D. While previous editions involved a lot of math and/or plastic figurines that can get expensive, the current, fifth edition is strictly pen, paper, and dice. You can get character sheet apps and dice rolling apps, and despite the "three core rule books" being $50 each, firstly a player only "needs" the Player's Handbook; secondly, the books are more like $20 on Amazon (the publisher sells them for about $15-20 but the MSRP is $50 to allow game stores to make more money — Amazon doesn't care about that, they just apply their traditional rate to what they pay); thirdly, you don't even need the PHB, the free standard rules are fine, they just include fewer options; fourth, PDFs of all the books are not hard to find online (or you can just ask to look at someone else's; they're nice but D&D people tend to share). For dice rolling apps, some are free and some are paid, or you can just ask Google or Siri to give you a number between 1 and 20. Or 1 and whatever. It's the same thing, just less satisfying than throwing a dice. Anyway, friends tend to get made at D&D groups.

Disclaimer: I've never been diagnosed with ASD. My generation, they just told us to go outside and play. Younger generations who have been diagnosed, I've had several family members tell me I was the same way. I don't know if I'm on the spectrum or not, but "it's likely I am." Should a guy in his mid 40s pursue a diagnosis? If so, for what? If I'm on the spectrum, I'm on the edge of it.