For me it’s time signatures in music. I grew up playing instruments, played in several orchestras, etc. But no matter how many times someone tries to explain time signatures to me, it makes no sense. I don’t understand why people place such importance on it. To me, notes have a pitch and a duration, maybe some dynamics. That’s it. I don’t understand why people try to needlessly complicate it. It doesn’t give you anything.
My wife will hear a song and go “Oh neat, it’s in 5/8.” And I’m like “How tf do you know that, and why does it matter?”
Skateboarding. None of it computes for me. My brother has been a lifelong skater and still rips it up at almost 40, and I see him do shit on the board and I just can’t figure out what the fuck is happening. It breaks physics, it’s like bee flight, none of that crap should be possible.
I watched him go up a very steep incline and do the thing where it’s a kickflip and a pop shove it at the same time, which is enough on its own to break my brain, but he and the board went up and landed at the same angle of the incline like it was flat ground, he and the board went up and down perpendicular to the incline without any vertical drag on the drop and landing. Gravity doesn’t fucking work that way! And how the fuck do their feet and the board just get back together after the board is seizuring mid air and just fucking land and keep going like there are magnets on their feet or something? It’s gods damned wizard shit.
piano
Walking
Shopping. Walking around looking for stuff to buy.
This has NEVER made sense to me. I’ve practically never happened upon something I want to buy in a corporate store
Parents are really good at this because it’s their only alooone time
Choreography. Not just dance moves, but any physical activity where I watch someone do a thing and have to repeat it using my own body. Had a hell of a time learning to tie a necktie.
It’s a skill! If you’re interested maybe join a dance class, boxing/MMA class, pottery class, or do some improv!
I cannot, and I mean cannot, flip a map in my mind. North has to be pointing north or my brain just keeps messing up.
There was a test in the back of Scientific American magazine a long time ago with pairs of 3d models (the stick and ball things people use to show molecular structures) and they turned them in different directions and asked “are these identical or mirror images” how many can you answer in 5 minutes.
I stared at it for an hour and couldn’t do even one. Like, I was crying by the end of the hour because I felt so stupid but my mind, it just couldn’t tell.
I’ve never had trouble reading but learned to read very young (barely 3 year old) like a language, sort of before even knowing the alphabet that well - it’s not a dyslexia situation. But I sure couldn’t see those differences in the quiz. At all.
I once dungeon-mastered a DnD campaign. For the map I just took a map of North America and rotated it 90°. Not one person noticed.
Getting up early or ever feeling rested. I don’t think ive ever felt good in the morning. Basically, if I have 5 drinks and sleep, I’d feel identical waking up as if I’d had nothing. I also feel the same with 5 hours of sleep vs 10. No difference. And I do sleep its not insomnia, just doesnt work.
You might be nocturnal. I used to work nights and felt better getting up at 4pm every day, even if I had less sleep than I get now getting up at 8am
Could be. I generally don’t feel tired until 1 or 2 am. So making myself sleep at 10 or 11 is hard.
Could be something like needing a cpap machine. My husband got one and it changed how he slept entirely. Could be a lot of reasons for sleep not being refreshing though!
Responding in a way that isn’t mean or rude.
If being kind isn’t your default then it’s your job. Do your job, were all counting on you.
Discipline/self control. I don’t need to worry so much about the self control in that way, I’m a very chilled guy. I only really give into the intrusive thoughts when I’m cooking food, or saying something I think is funny but turns out to just be offensive.
The discipline I struggle with. I don’t understand how people seem to have enough hours in the day to keep a tidy home, study a course in the evening, do a tiktok channel as an attempt at a side hustle, 40 hours a week at work, cook a full dinner every evening for family etc etc etc.
Sometimes, like once or twice a month, the stars will align and I will be on it, but I can’t just be that guy on demand.
The standard was set by households that had domestic servants. Either actual rich people or southern whites exploiting low wage black women and girls.
It was maintained for a time in the 1950s with drugs. Alcoholism was rampant, and tranquilizers for women. Miltab, mommies little helpers. You can see this in media well into the 90s with vicodin, Lexapro.
Drug yourself into a haze and you can do it. You won’t have time for a social life.
The point is it’s not a realistic standard. Live communaly and it starts to work better. Otherwise give yourself grace.
Love and affection. As someone who’s parents have a bunch of psychological problems, paired with growing up poor as an immigrant. I never in my life have experienced either love or any sort affection for either family nor strangers. For context my mother is a prefect example of a sociopath and I’m 80% sure my dad is autistic. Neither of those conditions exactly scream empathy. I never heard the words ‘I love you’ spoken with the eyes, or any sort of meaning behind them. Listening to daily (and I’m not exaggerating here) screaming matches for 30 years has given me the impression that those words don’t really mean anything to them anyway. Never having had a safe place to develop those feelings and given that I’m not exactly easy on the eyes means that I have somehow managed to become full grown, mentally stable adult with empathy, and a yearning for affection and acceptance without a single fibre of love in my body. Never have I had an interaction other than quid pro quos, “I want something from you, you want something from me.” never “I want you, you want me.” I literally can’t imagine what it’s like waking up next to somebody, feeling emotionally safe or having somebody genuinely wanting to spend time with you. I know that there are currently literally billions of people for whom this the most normal thing in the world but for me that is borderline incomprehensible. I would want to wish that kind of lonelines on my worst enemy.
I’m a dude BTW.
I struggle to write paragraphs covering most topics, even those I am familiar with. I can write a sentence 10 times over, before deleting it all together. My output is extremely jagged and frustrating. Finding the words to introduce ideas or to transition sentences is quite painful and slow.
My handwriting is also extremely laborious. I have to put a lot of time effort into making my writing “neat”, aka legible. Growing up, I was always the slowest kid copying down slides/notes in class.
Perhaps both of these are related to my ADHD, or perhaps I just need more practice lol. I have been making an effort these past few years and I’ve been seeing improvements.
Reading your first couple of paragraphs I was going to ask if you have ADHD, because they’re very relatable and I definitely attribute it largely to that. Practice and having a “system” for writing helps me a lot too
How to make friends. It was so easy as kids, but now I can meet people that do things that I do and who want to do them in a group but they never become friends to me anymore. IDK where I’m going wrong, I don’t reek of desperation, I have other friends, but when people say “find your tribe” like, I might be the last of my kind.
Real friends are the ones that stick with you when shit hits the fan. When you’re an adult and you meet new people, you usually want to show yourself from your best side and for everything to go well. She we were kids, shit hitting the fan was somebody kicking a ball into a neighbors window or falling of a bike, minor things as an adult, but as kids that built character. The stakes are so much higher as an adult when things go wrong, so generally you avoid it even though this means that most of your relationships are superficial.
I’m not saying that something horrible must happen in order to get friends as an adult. But sometimes it’s better to simply work against the odds together to form a deeper connection.
Sometimes, a handful of friends is not just enough but the upper limit as well. And that’s okay, right? If you have a partner and everything is okay, you will start your own small community regardless. 😅
I can completely relate. Additionally my specific standards also make it very bad.
I found out that I’m an Autist so for me it at least explains things but is also totally not helping to know.
Nevertheless I do not know for sure if all of this isn’t totally normal, as in the regular human experience. The older you get the more difficult it is to find and hold friends.
Coding
I was pretty intimidated too until I found Jimmy Vegas’s Unity tutorials
What about it?
Check out ‘Angine de Poitrine’s Math Rhythms Explained’. They use a loop pedal in the context of math-rock with changing time signatures, so they must fit all changes in a track into a fixed length. For those good at time signatures (not me), they also have some misdirections between the loops of different instruments.
that’s fascinating and DIDN’T HELP AT ALL HOLY SHIT.
it’s like saying “oh you don’t understand basic physics? here watch Einstein explain his most complex concepts”
Oh that reminds me of the time my then boyfriend, a mathematician, tried to teach me maths. It was like teaching someone French by reading out a few pages of Sartre’s La nausée, then saying “OK, that’s the basics covered…”
It’s just an example of guys who definitely must count stuff so that it always fits exactly into the loop while also being precisely timed between the guitar tracks and the drums
As for physics, iirc the book series by Feynman is recommended to really dig all the stuff from the basics to the fancy theories, and Feynman was no slouch himself.
Also, Einstein was teaching students in the US later in life.
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Learning a second language. Having a processing disorder and a shit short term memory makes it hard for me to comprehend. I’m accepting advice if anyone succeeded with a stubborn learning disability.
First, screw grammar, I’ve learned 3 languages without ever learning their grammar, including English.
Find a topic that you are very knowledgeable at in your native language and start consuming knowledge on that topic in the language you try to learn. Go back to the basics of that topic, something you know by heart. There will be a reversal where instead of listening to the language and trying to understand what is happening, you will already know what is happening and just listen to the words. You will go from “What did he/she say?” to “Oh, that’s how you say it!”. Its way easier to append connections in you brain that create new ones, so the familiarity of the topic is a stepping stone to learn the language. Of course you will still have to pause and translate constantly but it will be less and less necessary with time.
Try Language Transfer . A natural method of learning a language, the best I’ve ever seen.
It’s also free!
In a nod to the OP, there is also a short course on music theory.
