Right, and thinking something is delicious includes an impulse to eat rather than avoid, but lots of people still avoid food they think is delicious in order to diet. When empathy becomes too strong then it starts hurting you as a person a lot every time you see someone who has problems, so you learn to predict and avoid those situations, or you might even learn to fear them since the empathy creates too much agony in you. Empathy is just a feeling, your rational part can still work around it.
Neurotypical psychology is deep, complex, and fascinating. They devote significant brainpower to constantly evaluating and testing other people's behavior against a constantly evolving set of rules in order to ascertain whether they are a member of the neurotypical's tribe or ingroup. The rules have to change and evolve because ingroup members will be able to predict how they will change, and so catch any outgroupers who have heretofore successfully infiltrated the ingroup. It's like you have a monster CPU with a lot of cores, and then devote half (or more!) of those cores to the world's most elaborate DRM scheme. We benefit because much of that CPU power is in us freed to do other exciting things, like programming or particle physics; but we also suffer because most of the people around us cannot attest that we are legitimate humans running a legitimate copy of the human OS.
Relatedly, I love Japan and I love the Japanese people but... Japanese society has one of the most elaborate, impenetrable set of social rules in the world. If you want to know why hikikomori are such a thing there, it's simple, really: so many more people are frustrated with their failure to conform to the elaborate ruleset it takes to simply be Japanese and tired of being flagged as impostors in that game of Among Us that they simply give up and withdraw into whatever brings them comfort.
I would have thought the main performance bottle neck to social calibration would be the unspoken mind-reading requirement that seems to be prevalent in American society.
Perhaps I'm wrong, but from what I know of Japanese society is that it's pretty blunt in its expectations. So there isn't this "mental searching tax" to make the "right" social choice that seems to be de riguer in the States. Everyday behavior in Japanese society has explicit procedures that don't change all that much.
As I understand it, social failure in Japan is result of one of two things: The inability/lack of interest to follow these procedures (e.g. hikikomori, non-conformists, etc.), or following these procedures but with mistaken assumptions as to how the consequences would turn out (e.g. "herbivore" salarymen who have done everything right, but are unable to find wives like their fathers could)
Japanese society is not really safe harbor for Japanese on the spectrum. It is, however, quite gracious to foreigners. As a foreigner no one will say anything to you, for instance, if you use the wrong honorific or something; most will be impressed that you can speak the language at all.
Once you've been living and working in Japan for some time and have started to assimilate, though, you are on and you've got to perform the appropriate rituals or people will start to think you're being aggressively rude.
So as a Japanese person you are tasked with not only following the rituals, but also sussing out from the vaguest of cues what your friends, family, potential mate, etc. are thinking because they're following the rituals too instead of engaging in explicit communication.
Regrettably, I had to learn a lot of this by reading; I don't have a lot of personal experience with this because I'm a Westerner. The Japanese are generally more willing to be open with foreigners because of the relative lack of social repercussions for honesty with foreigners than with Japanese. They don't have to be "on", they don't have to actively be Japanese in front of us and that makes for some interesting and refreshing barside conversation, lol.
[0] Earlier negative stereotypes of Japanese as being "sneaky" and untrustworthy are partially rooted in this sort of thing. They mask their true intentions to avoid embarrassment, but to Americans it looks like they're trying to trick or defraud us. And they see us as loud, pushy bulls in china shops who are unable to handle delicate affairs with any nuance, even if we're well-meaning.
This is not a fact. It’s a now discredited stereotype.
There seems to be a great bundling going on, where people with a wide range of various problems gets bundled under large umbrella terms like "ADHD" or "Autism". Before Autism and Asperger was different, now they are the same etc. and some even argue that ADHD and Autism are the same thing.
Edit: Btw, there was one stereotype that was never true, that Autists didn't have empathy. Autists always felt empathy. What they were said to lack was the ability to read people, not feel empathy for people. Not being able to read people can be said to reduce "a person's ability to relate emotionally and socially to themselves and others", so that statement wasn't wrong with the old definition/understanding.
That’s not a fact. It’s a now discredited stereotype.
Highly logical, no breaking down in a fit of misery, less susceptible to loneliness, very useful for times when you're stuck in a survival situation.
My main trigger is light — too bright, bad color, too much flicker, all of which can cause me to get “irrationally” angry in a conversation about any mundane topic. I’m not really that passionate about most of the things I get overwhelmed by, so my heightened emotional state because of some sensory stimulus is not useful.
All my anger/sadness tells me is that it’s bright and I need to either put on some sunglasses or turn off the lights. I have learned over time not to blow up at other people about it because it’s not their fault, and they’ll think that I think it is if I have a meltdown in front of them.
Maybe it's like smell, where there are many bad scents and even if it didn't impact my survival I wouldn't want to live without the sense, and I should indulge more. The only concrete thing I've learned is that significantly reducing my caffeine intake helps but also distracts.