No political posturing.
Being assertive
Empathy. Some people just have a brain for math and understand numbers in ways other people just never will. Others, like myself, have brains that are really good at understanding others, and we perceive and understand others with a facility some other people just can’t. It sounds pompous to say, because all human beings are at least somewhat skilled in this area, due to our species being highly social, but it’s still a cognitive speciality and some of us are innately better at it than others.
It can be frustrating too, because when other people don’t understand what you see in someone else, they question your decisions about them, and it can be hard to see why other people don’t see what you find obvious sometimes. It’s a bit of an extreme example, but I know people who can’t see that Donald Trump is a highly transparent narcissist. Even ones who didn’t vote for him and hate him for all the obvious reasons can’t see the personality disorder in him, and I find it so glaringly obvious that I sometimes just can’t fathom how anyone could miss it. But, if I really think about it, and I imagine what it might be like for a person who doesn’t have a natural talent for empathy, I can see how they just might not connect the dots and just see a bombastic, arrogant asshole, rather than the much more complex pattern of malignant narcissism that underlies that comparatively superficial persona.
Spatial awareness/reasoning. How far things are, where are we relative to this landmark, which direction are we headed, how to account for the moving shadows when choosing a place to settle down at the beach, and so on and so forth. It seems like people around me are utterly lost in space
Doing basic research on the people I vote for.
Situational awareness.
Math is the big one, and logic by extension. Everyone around me seems to have difficulty breaking problems or logical arguments down into relevant incremental steps. They either get distracted by irrelevant things, or can’t figure out how the output of one step provides the input for the next.
Reading an article before offering an option.
Building stuff out of a pile of scrap.
Assembling flat pack furniture, bbqs, bicycles, snow blowers, cement mixers. Pretty easy to do but customers will pay a fee to the store to have the assembly done.
Actually getting annoyed by ads to the point I do what I can to block them. I work with IT and yet a good number of my coworkers don’t use any adblock at fucking all
I use them at home, at work its my employers time I am wasting.
Being open to learning new things which may contradict previously held beliefs. I enjoy becoming more informed and having my ignorance diminished, but I find for the bulk of humanity most people do not want to know things - they want to be continually assured the things they hold true are true, regardless of the validity.
Executive function.
I don’t know but it seems like a lot of people around me are just in a haze. Probably some of it is ADHD.
a lot of people never develop it because they don’t have to. they survive by mooching off others their entire lives who do all the execution function for them. parents, friends, partners.
such people really struggle with being alone or independent.
Sounds like you know some borderline individuals
Not being on my phone at work.
Cold turkeying stuff. It’s not a superpower level but I can quit most stuff then and there without thinking about it again.
A lot of math things. It hasn’t been nearly as lucrative as people assume.
I can stop hiccups the moment I notice I have them, usually after the second hiccup. It started as a conscious effort to change the breathing rhythm through diaphragmatic breathing, now is almost like a reflex action.
whew, nice. I can’t do this. I can stop the sneezing reflex though
That one is hard! For me it’s the same level as a yawn.
It’s so frequent that I guess it was inevitable for me to learn how to quell it
I do the same thing.
My wife and I joke that we found my mundane superpower. When she gets hiccups, if I go embrace her, they stop almost immediately. Otherwise, they’ll persist for fifteen minutes.
Being isolated. It’s always confused me how much people complain about loneliness. I genuinely don’t think I have ever felt that emotion before.
There is a tv show called 60 days in. It’s about sending people into these US shithole prisions without anyone knowing that they don’t belong. The idea is to figure out what goes wrong and where drugs come from and so on. Anyway, they always talk about solidarity confinement and how bad it is. Like the biggest and baddest dude is worried about getting into “the hole” Then there was this one guy who was on the show who got into solitary confinement and enjoyed the shit out of it. He would get in trouble again and not do anything to get out of the hole.
I always felt like this guy.
i feel it when I’m in a group of people who I find alienating and miserable to be around. or after breakups briefly.
i recently had to quit a group i’d been a part of for years… because the new members were really petty and vindictive people and being around such people is awful. they’d sit around after activities and just talk shit and mock people, it was disgusting.
Holy shit that was kind of my old friend group. Every time we hung out it was just shitting on people that weren’t there. At some point i realised that they shit on me too when i’m not there and felt less and less the desire to hang out with them.
With age, I have become more introverted also. I guess i havent met that many amazing people. But ive been working in offices a lot, so probably why.
